DW's Blog

Tears Of Truth

by DW Green — September 3, 2026

“On the Water That Tells You What Is Real.”

I cry easily, and I have decided, at seventy-five, to stop apologizing for it. The tears come at Christmas and at funerals, at a great play by my team and at a poignant line in a book, at the sight of an old friend and at the writing of nearly every one of these pages. For most of my life I half-believed this was a flaw to be managed. I have come to believe it is the opposite. The tears are not a malfunction. They are an instrument, and it is finely tuned, and it has never once lied to me.

I have a name for what it measures. I call them tears of truth.

A LIFE MEASURED IN SALT WATER

Let me tell you where they have come, because the list turns out to be a map of everything I have ever loved.

I remember Christmases as a boy and as a young man when I would simply burst into tears of joy and love for my family on that one bright day. I would watch my mother receive her gifts — a fur coat, a bowling ball, a new wig, a piece of fine jewelry — and my mother would cry, every time, the whole range of it: appreciation, gratitude, happiness, a sincere heart brimming right over. And watching her receive, I would go too. Years later, when my parents had retired to Tucson and I would visit for the holidays, the crying came right back to my eyes at the door, the moment I felt again the love and the generosity of two incredible people. It did not fade with age. If anything it deepened, because I understood better each year what I was looking at.

The tears have kept their appointments faithfully ever since. When I first saw my ailing brother in May of this year, my very first response, before a single word, was tears — and there were many more across those four days. A thought of an old friend brings them. A poignant story, true or invented, brings them. A team I love makes a great play, and there they are again, unbidden, in the middle of a football game. I have stopped being surprised. I have started paying attention instead.

WHAT THE WATER IS FOR

Here is what I have noticed, and it is the whole of the matter. The tears do not come after I have decided something is meaningful. They come first. They arrive ahead of the thought, before my mind has caught up and ratified anything. My eyes know before I know.

Which means the tears are not a reaction to the truth. They are the truth arriving — the inner thing surfacing, breaking the surface of me, releasing and acknowledging itself on its way up. Something real rises from the heart and the mind, and the steady flow is simply how it announces that it has reached the air. I do not cry because I have concluded that a thing matters. I cry, and then I understand that it did. The water is the messenger, and it runs ahead of the message.

This is why I trust it more than I trust my own arguments. A man can talk himself into almost anything; the mind is a clever lawyer and will argue whatever it is paid to argue. But the tears cannot be reasoned into coming, and they cannot be reasoned away once they do. They will not be faked into standing higher than they are, and they will not be talked down from where they truly stand. They are the most honest water I own.

EVERYTHING TRUE IS A CONDUIT

I have come to believe that all meaningful experiences and relationships are conduits for tears. That is not a poetic flourish. I mean it as plainly as I mean anything. The tears are how meaning travels. Where love is real, the water finds a channel and comes through.

And notice what they are always about. Not one of the moments on my list was about nothing. Every single one was about someone, or something, that I loved — my mother receiving, my brother ailing, a friend recalled, a story that told the truth, even a game I had given my heart to. You do not weep over what you do not love. Which makes the tears a kind of accounting, the truest I have ever kept: they are the exact measure of the love. They tell me, in a currency that cannot be counterfeited, precisely how much a thing weighs in me. I have learned more about what I love from where I have cried than from anything I have ever managed to say out loud.

JOY AND GRIEF, ONE WELL

The strangest and truest part is that the same water serves both joy and grief, and does not seem to distinguish between them. I cried at my mother opening a gift, and I cried at my brother in a hospital bed. The Christmas tears and the funeral tears are drawn from one well. That used to confuse me. It does not anymore. Both are simply the truth of a bond, surfacing — the joy is love arriving, and the grief is love with nowhere left to go, and both are love, and love is what the water is for.

Just yesterday I lost one of the dearest friends of my life, and the first thing my body did, before any thought, was weep — and when I told my sister, her face was wet in the same instant as mine, the two of us saying the same true thing without a single word between us. That is the whole teaching in one moment. The tears carried across the space between us what no sentence could have carried. The truth passed from her soul to mine on the water. That is what it is for. That is what it has always been for.

A GIFT, AND ITS NAME

So I no longer think of these tears as a weakness that leaks out of me at the wrong times. I think of them as a gift, and I think the gift comes from below the mind entirely — from the soul, from the Source, from God, from wherever it is that the deepest true things are kept. The body has its own holy water, and it is kept in the eyes, and it is poured out, unbidden and unearned, exactly when something real passes by. It seeks the low places in a person the way all water seeks the low ground, and it arrives like grace, because that is precisely what it is: grace, made visible, running down a face.

I have written a whole essay about the blessing of water — how it is the visible behavior of the invisible things. I did not realize until now that I had left out the nearest example. The tear is the most intimate water there is. It does not fall from a cloud or run in a river. It rises from inside a person and comes out through the eyes, which are the one place the soul is said to be visible. It is the inner ocean, sending up a single drop to say: this is true, and I felt it, and I am alive.

CALL ME DW

The world has names for a man like me. Silly. Sentimental. Crybaby. I have heard them, and I used to flinch.

I do not flinch anymore. Call me silly. Call me a crybaby. Call me soft. I will accept every one of them, because each is only pointing at the same thing, which is that I have stayed open, and I have kept feeling, and the truth still moves through me freely enough to reach my eyes. If that is what those words mean, I will wear them like a warm coat. Or you can skip the insults and simply call me by my name, which turns out to mean the very same thing. Call me DW. It is a man who cries at what is true, and is no longer sorry.

The tears will keep coming. I hope they never stop. As long as they do, I will know that something in me is still awake, still soft, still able to be reached — and that the truth, whenever it rises, still has a clear channel out. Let it flow. It is only the deepest part of me, telling me what is real, in the oldest language there is.

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A tear is the inner ocean sending up one drop to say: this is true, and I felt it, and I am alive.

Meet me in the field. The water is warm — and some of it is running down our cheeks, exactly as it should.

— DW

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