The last month has been fabulous for my writing practice as I’ve taken part in participating and leading the Sacred Writing Challenge. There have been many new discoveries for me even as a seasoned writer.

Like Creative Anger.

Creative Anger is not something I hear many people talk about.

In fact growing up I always got the sense of being afraid of anger, and that having anger was a scary, dangerous thing that could definitely lead to hurting other people’s feelings.

Maybe I felt it inevitable that anger from others always hurt me. It made me feel misunderstood, because I always have the best of intentions, and hooked into past feelings of being alone, unwanted, uncared for and ultimately unprotected from the chaos of the universe threatening to annihilate me. So when some one was angry, I felt all of that come up.

I don’t like to make people feel things I don’t like to feel.

I told my friend today about how my new understanding of my fear of being unwanted (which I discovered and name during this round of the Sacred Writing Challenge) it connected to something I used to do as a child.

As a kid I never really got into stuffed animals. I would get so many as gifts. I think kids are hard to buy for at a certain age and so people just give them gifts. I think I may have received many when my mother died, too, or from people who felt sadness around me, so it wasn’t a “clean” gift energetically, it might have reminded me of those things, too.

Anyway, I would round up all the bears and bunnies in a circle so they could all face each other. Later in Americorps we would have all our meetings in circles because it equalizes everyone and gives them honor. But after a little bit I would be at a loss of what to do with the bears–interacting with them as a group was difficult, there was no back and forth no matter what the performance. As individuals, the bears confounded me because if I paid too much attention to one favorite bear or even a few, then the others might feel left out and that’s no good.

I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any bears.

Ultimately, I didn’t want any of my stuffed animals to feel unwanted. I knew how that felt and that felt bad.

The sheer number of these bears and my own young age made this an impossible task for me to keep up, so I squirreled all of them away in my closet, never to be played with again. At some age in middle school where it’s totally appropriate to let go of old such toys, I send them all to Goodwill and was finally released from the curse of too many stuffed animals.

I share this example because I’ve been continuing to explore the feelings of being unwanted and how this has played out many ways in my life. In my business, too, I admit I don’t want any Sacred Writing bears to feel left out and I definitely felt bad when I got busy with grad school and couldn’t give individual comments to everyone’s responses for a few days last week.

But anger is the same way.

I think anger gets a bad wrap ultimately because so many of us have been hurt by anger growing up or in some other area of life. That’s why it is so dangerous–it will hurt people and then we will be the awful perpetrators of that anger. We will now have something in common with the very people who made us feel that way hurt. And so it is better to be the victim, not harming anyone else, even if we never get beyond a certain point.

I say this from my own experience and lense so if this offends you please know I don’t mean it to.

But what I really want to explore about anger is it’s power to create.

The ancient goddess Pele is a goddess of the volcano. Volcanic eruptions brew under the surface for some time and then they explode all over the place– they go berserk, spewing forth hot magma and dust so that for miles the air is hardly breathable to anyone. The magma burns to the touch and can consume whole cities, no matter how intellectual or advanced they are, they can all be lost seemingly in moments.

But it takes a while to get to that point, and when all is said and done, when the fires have cooled, when the land returns to the sounds of the birds and the waves and the ocean tides…there is new creation.

It comes in the destruction, it comes with a cost but there is a newness and an openness that allows for possibilities to come to fruition that never would have before. There is an opportunity and a power to create that comes with anger. There is a beauty and a richness to exploring the new in a way that will shatter the past beyond all recognition. It is an awakening. It is a gasp of fresh life, it is an inhalation that comes out of an exhalation, and then there is a scream of exhilaration. The creative process is beautiful and it has long threatened the powers that be. Because it can and will change everything.

There comes a time, a moment, a process, an eternity where we begin to reap the energetic harvest of creative anger.

When we push against the face and forms of the past as if to say, “No more. No longer, I am born here and I will not rest until this is over and I stand victorious, over the shell of what was, creating anew in my honor. This is me. This is life. You are wrong.”

There is a fierceness in creation that serves us when we feel downtrodden or stuck or aimless, unsure, so many things.

Because our mind will always try to tell us we were wrong. The island doesn’t exist until the volcano blows. The island is not predictable, how will the magma land, how will the water shape it’s cooling? I don’t know until I see it, until it happens.

The volcano doesn’t have a mind to say, “Well, if you don’t know what it looks like, don’t bother, maybe you should think a little bit about this first, I dunno, it looks risky, could be a load of crap. Just saying (to help you),” right?

It’s laughable, and there is laughter in creative anger. It’s happy. It’s happy to be focused, and aggressive and it’s tired of waiting for it to all fall into place. 

It’s ready to MAKE it. MAKE it Happen NOW.

The other day as I was doing prompt number 17 of the SWC I felt this shift into creative anger and I got in touch with a force that is powerful beyond knowing. I wanted to bring this up with you to give you permission to tap into that power.

Give Yourself Permission to Dip into Your Creative Anger.

This challenge is like a live wire, and getting any where near it is sure to spark something–wether you just heard of it, or you are doing it, or a friend is, those sparks are FLYING.

You can catch it if you want just by interacting with MY words now: you are a spark, you are a volcano.

Are you ready to blow?

What will you create? Who cares, why are you doing it? Do you feel it in your heart and belly? Do you feel the fire calling you to participate, to dance in it’s flames? Are you ready to run forward and take a stab at it? Let yourself. Let yourself go.

Create.