Anger | MOONSIDE

How Trump Showed Me I was Behind Bars

A letter to my dear friend…

Hi Anjali,

Don’t know how you are doing but I am out of control. Tears and anger. Never thought I was a feminist but now I feel like raging against the white male political establishment just as I always raged against the white male medical establishment. Trying not to take this out on Tom but he has treated me like a defective person at times, too. A neighbor was raging against Trump today and I got all riled up again. But he listened to Tom, not to me although I said the very same things. The more I think about this the more I think women are dumped on as much as, or perhaps even more so, than blacks. I am furious that the FBI investigator Comey got away with what he did though I think Hillary will make a case against him. I am furious that no one listened to Obama. That rural white women listened to their husbands and obeyed them. I kept the word “obey” out of the marriage vows with Tom. We wrote our own ceremony. I am furious at my uncle asked me who I was voting for and furious at myself for telling him though I knew he was voting for Trump. I am furious for him calling my candidate “crooked Hillary”. I am furious that my friend John, with whom I thought shared the same values called the Clintons crooks, and that he, as a Columbia educated white male whom I helped through medical school, should be for the evil that is Trump. I am furious that our male Latino super thinks he is playing me as a fool and treats me as a nice half wit.

I am mad as hell!! Sorry for the rant but I am a fool. I didn’t know I was a feminist. Now feminism is raging inside me. Trump treated Hillary so badly. It should be vindicated. And instead it is cheered on by the red necks, the majority of white rural males. Yes, even the police and the fire fighters, as courageous as they are, feed into the culture of male dominance.

Can you relate to any of this? Are you feeling sad, mad, sick?

Excuse the very long rant. I feel like I may explode.

Hope you are relaxing with John and not in the state I am in.

Ellen

November 13, 2016 | Categories: Reflections, Uncategorized | Tags: 2016 U.S. Election, Anger, Feminism, Hillary and feminism, Hillary Clinton, Male supremacy, Prejudice against women, Sexual Predators, Tears and Anger, Treatment of Minorities, Treatment of Women, Trump and Feminism, Trump and Hate, Trump and Sexism, United States Politics | 9 Comments

Eckhart Tolle on Anger

July 30, 2014 | Categories: Spirituality, Uncategorized, Videos | Tags: Anger, Anger and enlightenment, Anger and spirituality, Anger management, Eckhart Tolle, Purpose of anger, Spirituality, Videos | 6 Comments

Beyond the Stars

Sitting in the sun, acclimating to the gentle June heat, swatting away an annoysome fly who keeps returning over and over, I know this swatting is definitely wrong—a stirring of the killer instinct. I remember naturalist artist and writer and turtle man, David M. Carroll, keeping his hand steady, while being bitten by hordes of mosquitoes, so as not to scare away the turtles as he paints them . Clearly he is a superior soul in his patient endurance of being bitten and as his, almost spiritual, beautifully poetic, writings and drawings reveal. I remember, too, the words of Pema Chodron, Buddhist teacher and nun, who teaches and preaches practicing compassion on little things, learning not to “bite the hook” of anger.

So I let the fly alight on my ankle and he seemingly happily stays on my leg and does not bite. I begin to try to image feeling kinship with this fly who likes my leg, fighting the idea that he is laying eggs in my skin. Pema Chodron has clearly inspired a city girl, afeared of bugs, to make friends with a fly as I watch the universe of insects beneath my feet. A Daddy Long legs crawls on my camera bag, hitches a ride to our bed when I go inside the house. I bring him back to his home outside.

This compassion things feels right, start small and grow big. As if to reinforce this point a butterfly lands on my chest when I return to my contemplation spot in our back yard. But all is not sweetness and light. Later the same fly (I swear it is) who landed on my leg now activates karma for my earlier murderous impulses towards him. He lands on my toe and bites me. A cautionary tale against getting too carried away with being virtuous. Still worse, later as I walk in the coolness of early evening, a bug lands on my arm and attempts a vigorous bite. In an instant, a reflexive smack smooches him dead.

So it would seem I have to start even smaller with my acts of compassion. How much smaller can one start? I wonder with daunting discouragement about the many, many more lives I will have to live to learn lessons of compassion and no anger. I contemplate the prospect of how many, many more films I will have to view in this movie house of Maya we call life. When, oh when, will I learn all my lessons? When, oh, when, will the sun set for good for me on this circle of life so I can exit the orbit and rest beyond the stars??