whyte on anger
from David Whyte‘s consolations:
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anger
anger ness
anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another/world/self/life/body/family/ideals.. all vulnerable and all, possibility 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 with 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 we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when ti touches the limit 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/mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being
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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..
wow
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 w whom we live
our anger breaks to the surface most often thru our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, thru our incoherence and thru 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 thru love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house a family, ..
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, or 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
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but anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it si a quality to be followed to its source,.. to be prized/tended.. and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world thru making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it..
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what we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror – opposite of its true internal essence..
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maria popova on above passage [https://x.com/brainpicker/status/1795206343583776804]:
Such a reconsideration renders Whyte not an apologist for anger but a peacemaker in our eternal war with its underlying vulnerability, which is essentially an eternal war with ourselves — for at its source lies our tenderest, timidest humanity. In a sentiment that calls to mind Brené Brown’s masterful and culturally necessary manifesto for vulnerability — “Vulnerability,” she wrote, “is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.”
One need only think of Van Gogh — “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do,” he wrote in a letter as he tussled with mental illness — to appreciate Whyte’s expedition beyond anger’s surface tumults and into its innermost core: profound frustration swelling with a sense of personal failure. (Hannah Arendt captured another facet of this in her brilliant essay on how bureaucracy breeds violence — for what is bureaucracy if not the supreme institutionalization of helplessness?)..t
In a related meditation, Whyte considers the nature of forgiveness:
notes on that here: whyte on forgiveness
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be you. 