Thursday April 30, 2026 Spring Subscribe
Do you sense, in some part of your existence, that there are many things wrong with this world? It’s not necessarily a dark feeling, but an energy pushing up against the surface, desperately waiting to be released, and you discover one day that this is rage. You use the word rage because it’s stronger than anger, and so you decide to learn more about this rage and its source, you decide you need to go to old places inside of you and that you deserve to learn about your old wounds, and the journey brings you across the World, magically speaking, and finally home, again, to your Backyard, where you were first born, and everything old becomes new again.
Rage, or anger, you discover, is not wrong or bad. It simply directs you to what needs to change. You discover that your alcoholic mum is not wrong or bad - she is simply an unhappy circumstance. She is the confluence of factors, planets and energies that got all mixed up with each other, and now hopelessly entangled. She is the meeting point of all her karmas and all your karmas. She is infinite darkness and she is infinite light, pure energy now manifested as a human being, complex and interesting and really, really hard to fix or help while she’s on earth. You are angry with her because this situation - the bleakness in her life, the unrelenting sadness and pain - needs to be transformed, and not because she is wrong or bad.
It is the same with this world. People rage about capitalism. You rage about capitalism. But you are only half angry with the world. The truth is you are half angry with yourself, who is a hypocrite, a participant in all kinds of capitalistic activities. You have benefitted from the system and you’re particularly privileged in the grand scheme of things, but your anger feels like a point of pride.
But you discover that capitalism is not wrong or bad. It is a word given to a way of being that has proven itself as being quite compatible so far with our human compulsions and drives. Capitalism evolved in response to what we needed in order to create this particular society we live in. And anything that exists - capitalism, murderers, dreamers - is not wrong or bad or any kind of value judgement you can give it. Anything that exists wouldn’t exist if it didn’t need to exist. Even psychopaths are natural products of existence.
So our rage makes us form worldviews. They make us fight, go on flotillas, stand in front of type 59 tanks. They fill us with anger against our alcoholic mothers, our failing governments, our factories, our condo developers, our billionaires. Oh there is so much to be angry about. But none of these people or institutions are wrong or bad. They exist to manifest their purposes: To grow shareholder value, cut down trees to build condos, build technology to steal our data and our time and our minds. The humans who do these think this is their purpose because in their own way they are looking for meaning, joy, and a reason to be loved, however misguided we think they might be. In the end what we think of as evil might actually be love-seeking behavior. Acts of desperation poorly enacted. Sometimes people just don’t know any better or haven’t learned the cosmic lessons they need to learn.
The more you journey across the World trying to understand the source of the rage, the more the rage transforms. At a particular temperature point this energy inside of you takes the form of boiling hot rage. At another point it becomes other things - maybe we can call it a kind of understanding, sympathy (as opposed to empathy), acceptance. But it is still energy, and it makes you want to do things, change things, and this becomes motivation, which is something we shall write about in another essay.
You discover that what’s wrong with this world is not that things are wrong or bad, it’s that some things are missing. Or that we have too little of them: Connection with nature. Communion with self and Universe. Love and respect for animals, our fellow travelers. A warm regard towards leisure. A warm disregard for time and clocks and numbers. A similarly warm disregard for endless profit. A love for unproductive things. A conviction that endless growth is unnecessary and unhealthy. Etc etc.
What do these have in common? You don’t know. No one can say. But maybe on earth there might not be wrong or bad things, but there surely are Good Things, like libraries and warm baths and cats of all colors and stripes and good speakers and a tight hug and mountains and blue skies and beautiful tables and trees and chocolate.
Suddenly you understand that your rage is simply love for the world. You love the world and its Good Things, and you are angry that they are missing, that there are not enough of them. But even the drama and the pain of this world, even the wrong and bad things, even your alcoholic mother, you love. With your broken, wide-open heart.
Maybe. Just maybe.
Consider this a mystery partially solved.
I end with this gift to you, one of my favorite poems in the world:
