This evening I began reading Oriah Mountain Dreamer's The Call, which I haven't read in several years, and the last time I did, I simply skimmed the content and the meditations. This time my intent is to read and to do the book. It has come at an appropriate time for me. The past couple of weeks I have been aware that I am angry. I haven't been sure about what to do with that anger. It's been simmering in the pot on the back of the stove for a long time, but the heat has been recently turned up, so it's been boiling.
We are not comfortable with our own or with other peoples' anger. Too often anger intensifies into rage and hatred. It is the stuff from which wars begin. It is how someone can build a bomb that kills innocent bystanders. Anger, if not dealt with appropriately, can turn deadly.
So most of us, simply push our anger down; pretend it isn't there; and in the meantime it grows more formidable.
Despite all of that however, anger in and of itself is simply an emotion. It is not a bad or a good thing. It simply exists. What we do with our anger is what matters. And sometimes it is what we don't do with our anger which matters. Ignoring it can allow it to grow.
In the meditation after Chapter One in The Call, the author asks us to consider the things which we work so hard at. How would we like to stop "doing." Thinking and struggling with is doing as well as working.
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