ANGER
at its heart, is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the
world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all
our ideals, all vulnerable and all,
possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent
reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame
of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect
and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call
anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost
surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits
of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the
incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our
outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous
enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with
the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer
response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to
such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper
outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call
anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our
fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the
depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of
simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Our anger
breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something
profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too
often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our
inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the
way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in
all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land
or a colleague. Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind
refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for
all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by
those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who
have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to
be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner
rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s
vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the
very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of
control.
But anger truly felt at its center is the essential
living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be
followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to
finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making
the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the
body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the
surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a
complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.
©2014 David Whyte
Excerpted from ‘ANGER’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning in Everyday Words
Photo © David Whyte
Persian Ceramic
Detail : From Yusef and Zuleika
Asmolean Museum, Oxford. July 2014
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