permaculture

[Jack Rowe <jackrowe@compuserve.com>]

Some thoughts on anger:

Perhaps as part of learning a healthy level of assertiveness, we learn to
[re]act constructively with healing action before we've actually reached
the point of anger in many instances... 

Anger can supply the energy needed to move us through the difficult places
of discouragement we naturally and cyclically encounter when we try to
change the status quo... IF the anger is directed through constructive
circuits in our psyches. We are given few enough constructive circuits, and
anger is a powerful enough energy, that I think it is easy for anger to
spill out of the postive modes we can creatively direct it into... then it
can become actively negative or passively dissipative. 

Anger is so often keyed to something WITHIN us that we don't like... so
often the disdained external is pressed into service as something of a
smoke screen. Anger can be an excuse or a way to distance ourselves when
there exists less actual distance than we are comfortable with. It seems
that often when we can love and forgive OURSELVES sufficiently (which can
be surprisingly difficult) we find that a lot of our anger is 'transmuted'
(hi, Vicki!) into compassion. We are so little trained in being loving that
it's fairly speculative on my part, but I think love and compassion are
more powerful working places than anger, in terms or effecting positive
changes.

Back to work,

Jack