back to the bardo

Jena Strong‘s post quoting Audre Lord brings me wisdom today:

“I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt. Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning.”

And yet the easier path, this path of no resistance where I breathe anger like my cells breathe fire to live, is not the path with the least struggle.

“And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.”

I am so tired of hating my circumstances, of hating the pain and damage that wracks my body and sucks energy and time away from the more interesting pursuit of making a life, of making love, of making fun and fun of whatever tickles me.