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How Does Stillness Sit With Rage?
Can quiet stand beside the noise? Does an in-breath always follow out?
In my attempts to find calm in this current crisis, it seems I had disconnected. It’s as if my emotional capacity had run out of bandwidth. It wasn’t anger or rage that hit me this time, but grief and despair, right in the centre of my chest. Glimpsing the fury burning through my social media feed, my instinct was to retreat, to reflect. Beyond a quick reaction — an angry-face emoji, a comment, a meme, what could I do that was true to the depth of feeling?
Our world is overcome by pain, and people are clamouring to shout into the noise. My fear is that this cacophony blazes over the ground covering but doesn’t really reach deep into the soil, or the system.
Stepping away for a moment I came to think about love. Action, taken on the premise of love. Love of ourselves and crucially a willingness to see, accept, honour and to love one another. It is in this that we can find true freedom.
Bell Hooks teaches us in All About Love, that “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change”(Hooks, 2000, p.87).
