Rage rises through my belly and hisses through my teeth.
And it builds to a primordial scream leaving my lungs as heat.
I claw at the dirt. The air. Won’t let this anger live inside me.
Trembling and tear soaked I cup warm hands to my cheeks.
And all I can hear is the moon, she says keep dancing with this grief.
I move my body and I remember I am not unlike the women that came before me.
They too were flowers bloodied by war and empire, they too know this reckoning.
And it both saddens me and comforts me that these bodies have been shaped to survive dominant culture’s sick way of being.
Because although cycles of intergenerational trauma have brought us to this moment- in some fucked up and miraculous way it’s our inherited trauma that has also prepared our bodies to meet this pain. If there’s anything our shared histories can teach us it’s that our bodies know how to survive unspeakable conditions of suffering and violence.
But our bodies also know that we shouldn’t have to. Our bodies know that we deserve dignity and freedom and connection just as nature intended for us. This truth is mirrored back to us in every bird’s flight, every mountain’s stature, every colorful bloom and every glowing seed.
So it is in our bodies that I place my trust. My faith. My heart.
I believe in our bodies to transform this pain that has been spilling out and over for far too long, asking to be healed. We are the generation that gets to say no.
No more.
No more violence. No more greed. No more exploitation. No more extraction. No more genocide. No more ecocide. No more.
I’m giving thanks to my body. For being open to the (what feels like impossible) task of holding the weight of our collective grief. I’m giving thanks to the anger and the heartbreak and the exhaustion. These challenging emotions have wisdom for me.
They are my embodied “no.” My body’s way of speaking boundaries.
I will not hold back my anger at the expense of my freedom and your freedom and our freedom. I’ve already buried respectability politics and my nice girl identity. I’ve lost jobs and watched sisters lose jobs over speaking to our rage. And I will risk more. We will risk more.
I’m reminded of Sophie Strand’s words, “we must risk new shapes.”
So I will risk this shape of anger though it is taboo for a woman inside of patriarchy.
And even more taboo, it seems, inside of wellness and spirituality.
But you can keep the spiritual practice that doesn’t honor my full humanity.
Because my spirit knows… this anger… it doesn’t really belong to me.
I am not the creator of this energy.
So I spit it back out to the systems that do not love me and my community.
And I channel it into service and love and magic and beauty.
And I dance with it. And I dance with all the ancestors whose bodies were also intimate with this grief.
And I’m giving thanks for its gifts of clarity and of hope and of dreams.
Giving thanks for my conviction of the transformation of our species. For our healing.
I’m giving thanks for anger. Because I know… it is really love in my belly.
Love at the center of me.
I love y’all. Keep feeling your feelings. And honoring your humanity. Keep getting curious about what you can channel from this rage and grief. I would bet it all on your body’s ability to generate more love in these times.
🌻 Josie
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"So I will risk this shape of anger though it is taboo for a woman inside of patriarchy.
And even more taboo, it seems, inside of wellness and spirituality.
But you can keep the spiritual practice that doesn’t honor my full humanity."
I so relate to all that you said! Sacred rage is a beauty to behold. Thank you for letting me see your expression of it!
So deeply resonate with your words Josie. Thank you for having the courage to share them. I too, have been finding it difficult to hold the intensity of my own emotions let alone hold the grief, anger, a d sadness for the collective consciousness. I recently wrote a letter to humanity that I feel would resonate with you: https://open.substack.com/pub/soulwisdom/p/letter-to-humanity-2?r=a9uns&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post