November 1, 2020

Sugar and spice
and everything nice.
That’s what little girls
are made of.

Is there a woman in our culture for whom this was not a cornerstone of cultural conditioning? The seeds were planted early and the roots are deep. And then layers got added.

We were told that nice has no place for anger. And we believed it. Even when we choose a spiritual life journey we are told that somehow we are supposed to rise above this most basic and intrinsic human emotion. Just breathe and smile and meditate.

So it’s really no surprise that anger, and indeed rage, is currently a huge issue for so many of my spiritual sisters. Within this time of conflict and polarization, we believe we are not supposed to be angry, let alone enraged. Yet in these times, how could we not be?

In my Crone book, I wrote about this. I was writing for my elder sisters, but it applies to all of us.

It’s easy and certainly most comfortable to consider those times when we are filled with the energies of love, joy, peace, generosity, courage, determination, and compassion. But there is as much power in the energies of anger, fear, pain, and even grief. For within our lives and life experiences these energies forged a strength in us and they are essential warp threads for weaving wisdom. 

Anger. Our anger becomes an expression of moral outrage directed at injustice. We find the courage to reclaim our moral authority and we trust our intuition to be a discerning guide in expressing our rage. In our anger we become outraged and outrageous.

We are awash in injustice. Our rage is not only totally appropriate, it is essential. It is time to be outraged and outrageous. It is time to claim our moral authority.

A friend asked me what the ancestors say about rage. An excellent question. Of course the only requisite for being an ancestor is being dead. And there are many who inflicted injustice and harm on others. Those are not the ancestors I work with. But from those I do work with there is wise counsel.

Rage. The most important thing is not that we have rage but what we do with it. And what we do with it, how we express it, must be rooted in service to the greater good. We are but one strand in the great web of life, a part of the great harmony of all life. And our actions must reflect that spiritual knowing and grounding. Yes. Our ancestors had rage. But they worked with their rage as a tool for mending rents in the web and resolving discord in the harmony. In this, their rage was a source of power. Their counsel? To embrace our rage as empowerment. Sacred empowerment.

Rage is a natural and needed response to much of what is unfolding in our nation and around the world. It is for us to pick up the tools to mend the hoop. It is for us to step into our sacred empowerment. It is time to rage on.

Beannacht,
Judith – judith@stonefires.com