I was raised to see anger as the enemy.
The destroyer.
Like a virus to be avoided at all costs - one sneeze of it would bring the destruction of plague-like proportions down on the carefully engineered lives we lived.

Of course, anger as a force of life still snuck in.  Cloaked in sighs and eye rolls, snide comments and meanesses suffixed by "Can't you take a joke, jeez."  Anger smirked its way into our house poking shards in the tenderest of places which although painful their unseeness meant that the signals were confused.

"No.  I am not angry."  said through pursed lips and hunched shoulders gave me the impression of anger and the gut response to it but the message that, yet again, in yet another way i was wrong.

Lately i have been doing a lot, A LOT, of shadow work.  Anger is of course the Dowager Aunt of the Shadow realm, imperious, controlling, she raps her cane and demands attention as soon as the door is open,.

I have been edging my way nearer to her.  Learning her ways.  Learning the manners i need to use with her in order to have her on my side instead of using her cane to dismissively trip me up.

She is hard but fair.

That she is fair is something i never knew about anger.  I thought anger = evil.  I thought anger made me bad and unworthy, even without acting on it, just entertaining and angry thought immediately made me a bad person.

Just how it came about that my lineage believed that i don't know.  A confluence of protestant ethics, deprivation, a culture of self abnegation, martyrdom and clench-bummed bitterness.  But it is cell deep in me to run away from anger.

Over the last week i have been dancing with anger and one of the side effects of our societies' strictures against anger.

I have a loyalty and deep love for my country that has lead me to extol her virtues and few of her faults.  This week the National Government (for whom i am in no way responsible for) voted to allow drilling for oil and gas in the marine sanctuary for Maui's dolphins.  There are 55 of these beautiful small cetaceans left on this planet and under my watch, via this right-wing smiling assassin government, we are writing a death warrant, an extinction policy for them.

I feel angry about this.

I took the step of posting about this on my facebook page.  I felt disloyal to my country.  But i realised it was loyalty to my country - to Aotearoa and not the current government - that made me speak up.  And anger gave me the power.  

My friend Juanita commented and said she wanted to rant and swear about this situation and she felt like she shouldn't. 

I realised the only sane response to this kind of idiocy by the Government was to swear and rant.

We emailed two MPs from our local constituency.  One a conservative and one a hot head.  Guess who replied with a plan of action?  The hot head.  His anger, which is often denigrated as extremism, was alive to the injustice.  Days later and still no word from Mr Conservative.  The situation obviously doesn't register as important for him.  I find it hard to see how you can get yourself into a situation in your life where you can be numb to something like this.

Then i had another discussion with Gwen and Sandra about intentional blindness and numbing and the use of overwhelm as a smokescreen.  How would a loving mother like force tend to the woundedness and the threat to her beloved.  She would rise up of course.

And as the stewards of this planet, in our role as loving guardians we are required to rise up.

I heard Russell Brand the other day talking about how they want us to think about things like Kim and Kanye and what happened in that lift rather than what is happening in Fukushima and with the Maui's dolphins.  OK those are my examples but what he was saying is that our collective obsession with celebrity is part of the force of our numbing to the world's woes.

We need to stop being numb. 

We need to FEEL this injustice.  FEEL our response to it.  FEEL our anger. 

We need to get real.  To get angry.  To let anger move.

I see now how anger can lead us to drive things through.  How it fuels the fire and leads to ignition rather than having the elements for change and none of the combustion to really get the transformation.

The anger i was feeling, i realised after reading the above quote by Blanche Howard was supporting me to take back the control of feeling horrified at what was being perpetrated on my beautiful land by this government and DO SOMETHING.

The dowager aunt of anger reaches over and pats me twice on the shoulder.  and i stand a little straighter.

last night i made a mistake

a mistake with potentially far reaching consequences.

o.k., so i didn't push the button on a nuclear detonator, or decide to strip mine a tract of forest...

i put $40 of petrol in our new diesel car.

which could completely stuff the motor.

as i realised i went into a slight panic - nothing i could do but stop the petrol and start the process of asking for help.  A process that is still ongoing - we haven't heard yet about what the mechanics are doing or have found.

and as much as last night i wanted to run to kind people like you and ask for comfort that is not really what this is about...

what it is about was the battle with myself over my internal dialogue, the route my self talk took, how i tried to make ammends.

My first instinct was to batter myself.  To talk about how stupid i was.  What an idiotic mistake, how imbecilic.  How even finding reasons for it happening beyond me being a moron were unacceptable.


Then when i heard that and felt the way it made my body tighten and shake i tried to get out of that ancient groove and try self care.


But there was something about how i felt like the self abasement was required.  Like in the equation of how the Universe works when I make a mistake it is mandatory for me to be small and crumbly for reparation to occur.


Self kindness felt like a grating of a cog out of alignment.  Like the mistake would get bigger if i was anything less than self flagellating.

I wondered about how that starts - how as children we learn to be abject if we are wrong.

And in the middle of my sleepless night i realised that we all make mistakes.  Some of them are terrible, like split second misjudgment while driving, some of them are pretty bloody shitty, like putting petrol in a diesel car and some of them are not too bad, like buying the wrong kind of crackers (even though my daughter feels like that is a catastrophe).  But when we treat ourselves with the sandpaper to the soul that words like "stupid" and "how could you"create we serve no one.  Mistakes become something we avoid (keeping ourselves small in order to avoid doing something that we might get wrong) or that lead us to hide from fear of enduring a reaction that is like acid.


How many mistakes do we hide from the world, and sometimes from ourselves, that lead us down a much darker path?

I want to face the way i handle mistakes more consciously now.  I believe in a benevolent world, one where the default dial needs to be set on self care. I want to practice so that my self talk is around tenderness and awareness (i have been constantly climbing out of the groove of self meanness today and towards the what can I learn which i would not have reached if i was still whipping myself).

Is it something we can do together?

today i hang my first ever solo exhibition

i have been up for hours.  

listening to the the stories about how i have no qualifications to do this.  I have little skill.  I don't know what i am doing.

i feel scared

i mean my work is going up on the wall to be judged by all who wander in there.

Sure the opening i have delineated - inviting only people who will celebrate with me.  But after that...

Little pieces of my heart are up there on the wall.  There i am saying "this is the best i have"  No fall back position, no excuse.

It is terrifying.

And yet, in the words of Colin McCahon... "I am scared.  I STAND UP."

I may be shitting myself and the voice of the "who do you think you are?" chorus is raised in shrill cacophony.

I may be a bit shaky and yet to tie final strings on the back of works and put prices on things (oh yes i hear how those few words raise the volume of the chorus).

I may be wondering why the hell i said yes to this chance.

And yet i know.

I stand up because i get only one go at this life.
I stand up because i have an obligation to speak what i know to be true in the world.  For myself and for those who need to hear so that they too can stand up.
I stand up because i am given gifts of loving insight from somewhere both inside and outside myself and and i am disrespectful if i hide that here in my little room

I am scared

I stand up.

wish me luck.

i am going in.