Anger--Week 2 Pagan Blog Project 2014

Pagan Blog Project 2014

Week 2—Anger

It was hard to come up with a topic for this week. I considered Altars, Agnostic, Animism, Afterlife, and even After-Image. Honestly, I was reading another participant's post about anger and realized I could spend pages and pages talking about that. Choice made, here I am. 

Now, how to write a post about anger that ties in with my faith and my path choices? That might be tougher. Although I could argue that my anger forced or at least brought about some of my choices in life and therefore helped put my feet on the path that led me here.

I grew up in the house of a violently unhappy woman, literally violent sometimes, and I had no idea that her rage was contagious. She infected all of us in one way or another. I’ve lost touch with everyone that lived in that house (thankfully) but I have carried that rage in my heart for decades now. I manage to keep it buried down deep most of the time, but sometimes it has come spewing out like scalding water and burned the ones I love most.  I’ve broken furniture and put a hole in a wall, but fortunately that was just once, and it scared me so badly I’ve never lost my temper like that again. I felt her there with me, laughing at what she had shaped me into, and I got mad again, but this time at myself for still letting her manipulate me after all these years. 

For me, awareness was the first step (oh hey, another A I could have gone with). I can’t say I’ve never felt anger since then that wasn’t starting to turn black around the edges, but I’ve made big efforts to let it go. Instead of swallowing it down and feeling like my head was going to blow off if I didn’t hurt something or scream until my throat burned, I’m learning to just...let it go. 

Learning to let go of being angry (among other things) is an ongoing process for me, but my path has helped. Somewhere along the way I started picturing all the seeds she planted as exactly that...seeds. When I visualize them inside of me, they look like glossy black watermelon seeds in tidy little pockets of flesh. Like shoes in a hanging rack. They don’t sprout into anything, they just sit in their little pouches and glitter malevolently.  I think that’s plenty. 

I started the laborious process of removing them some time ago, but I believe that things you visualize have power, a life, of their own, so I worried about having them laying about somewhere hell-bent on infecting someone else or even getting lodged in another part of me and festering into a physical manifestation of something awful. I didn’t know what to do with these seeds once I had removed them and it was (and is) important to me to know where I’m sending toxic waste to. I finally settled on sending them to the sky in pretty bubbles so that they could be purified by the sun.  I send the bubbles up with a prayer for the energy to be purified and reused where ever it’s needed.

It works for me. And that has to be enough.

I do not want to post this. I don’t. It’s personal. It’s revealing. And frankly, saying aloud the stuff that goes on in one’s own head sounds completely ridiculous. But this is the year of being brave. So here goes. 

Brave sucks.Which probably means I'm on the right track.  Dammit.