Sometimes you feel so much so big it's just something else entirely...

The past few days have been weird...just big feelings...Mercury in Retrograde....longing....sadness....happiness all swinging from a pendulum that makes me laugh as quick as I cry.

When I lived in Estonia on the island of Kuressaare, there were weekends I would go for entire 48 hour periods without talking to anyone and my loneliness was big and the journey of my thoughts was miles deep.  One of those weekends, I walked to the school where I worked and on my three-mile walk home it began to rain.  That cold, wet, February rain...and by the time I got to my apartment I was soaked to the skin and freezing. My too-long pants were full of stones and when I unfolded them they dumped all over the hallway of my tiny dark apartment and I collapsed in a heap and cried so hard that you would have thought the biggest tragedy of life had befallen me.

After a while I realized that was how hard I was crying and just over a bit of homesickness and freezy wet weather... and suddenly I was laughing so hard and so hysterically.... I stood and saw my face in the hallway mirror and almost pointed in mockery and laughed some more.

Going from laughing hard to crying hard is one really inexpensive and natural way of feeling ALIVE.

Yesterday I cried all day long.  Today I feel joyful.  I love strong feelings whether they be horrid or wonderful because I love to feel wide awake and alive.

I decided I wanted to learn this Regina Spektor song on my ukulele.  But this song makes me cry big tears every time I listen to it and sure enough...every time I sing it. So there I was again, trying to learn this song and crying as soon as I got to this part:

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

And there I was again crying and then laughing immediately after, at myself trying to sing a song wholeheartedly that was making me cry...all alone in my house while my kids played next door with the neighbors.

Give this song a listen. And cry. Or laugh. Or both.  Or just hear it and know your own heart is pumping blood and you are alive.