Dear Becoming Ones,
This Monday, I want to invite you to sit with your rage. Yes, that low hum in the gut, that flash behind the eyes, that sudden tightening in your chest when the world reveals — again — its casual cruelties.
Rage is honest. It is the pulse that says something is not right. Lama Rod Owens, in his fierce tenderness, reminds us that our anger is a wise teacher if we are willing to listen. In Love and Rage, he writes:
“Rage is wise. Rage carries the knowledge of what has been broken.”
I’ve been thinking about how we carry our rage, how it simmers, unspoken, sometimes leaking out sideways — or worse, turning inward against the tenderest parts of ourselves.
So much of what I write in our Friday Care Packages is about tending — tending grief, tending wounds, tending wonder. But care is not only soft. Care can be compost. Rage can be compost.
This week, I am wondering: What if we learned to compost our rage? Not to discard it. Not to weaponize it. But to break it down, feed it to the soil of our becoming, so that it nourishes something more alive than our bitterness alone.
Contemplation can be the spade. Breath can be the slow turning of the soil. When I sit with my rage, I ask it: Where did you come from? What do you want me to protect? I breathe. I listen. I let my rage be a signpost pointing me back to love — the fierce kind that builds boundaries, the holy kind that says no more harm.
This is our ongoing work of care: to refuse to let rage rot us from the inside out, but instead to let it be transformed by our attention and our breath. We do this not only for ourselves, but for each other, and for the fragile shoots of justice we’re trying to grow in the cracked concrete of this world.
So today, if your rage is close to the surface, you are not alone. Rage is part of our collective becoming. Rage is part of our care. May you compost it well.
A blessing for you this Monday:
May your rage be honest.
May your rage be held.
May your rage be transformed
into the nutrient-rich soil
of a wilder, freer world.
With you in the compost pile,
— RCE+