Anger

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 call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing.

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.

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.

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.

Anger truly felt at its centre 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 find 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.

‘Anger’ is excerpted from a larger work by Irish Poet and Philosopher David Whyte in CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, 2014.

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