I thought I’d start off by talking about the event that got me going on this journey of mine. I’m not making it a secret that my older brother pissed me off, and when I get truly pissed off I tend to start moving diagonally across boards. But I have to get to that level of angry first. It takes a lot to get me there…. people will often mistake someone being frustrated as anger, and there are a great many times I’ve been accused of being angry when I was simply emotionally excited in some way. Anger is something else.

There are degrees to it. You have the hot fire of anger; the part where I (and some of you) will shout or overreact. It can be pyroclastic. That anger will turn to ashes and fade away. A year later you might not remember what you were angry about.

Mix that anger with other feelings like betrayal or some other hurt and/or trauma, and you’re probably going to get a different kind of fire. This is the kind of fire you want in a kiln: even, burning hot, tempering, and won’t go away. The embers linger. It doesn’t gobble up it’s fuel in a rage of flash lava. It’s slow, strong, and even the best reasoning about it may not make it go away. It runs deep.

Let me tell you something about emotions, and this is something I noticed on my own. My father never taught me this, but I’d often seen him use the theory of it. In all things you must balance, and this includes your heart and mind. Your mind is the recipe book for all the things you do; a road map, a list of instructions. It guides you. But it’s your heart that fuels everything. Without your heart you have no ambition, and that career you worked your entire life for becomes meaningless. Your heart is the house of your soul, and your emotions help keep your blood pumping.

Emotions are good. All of them. They teach us right from wrong. They warn us when we’re in danger. There’s been this push since I was in my teens to drive anger out of our emotional spectrum as if it were something unnatural and allow only love, but I’m here to tell you from experience that love can get you into just as much trouble if not more than anger.

There’s also been a push lately to get rid of the “reptilian mind” and go only for the heart, because the heart knows! Let’s reintroduce the 1960’s, early 70’s I suppose… So we either gut our emotions and make ourselves somehow less than whole, or we gut our mind and once again somehow stand less than whole. There’s no balance in either approach. In fact, both of these approaches make us weaker. If we were horses, and these items were our legs, we’d be left with only three legs. You can walk, but not as well. Running from predators would be a real bitch.

So you learn to keep your emotions in check enough that they don’t tell your mind what to think while you keep your mind in check enough not to tell your heart how to feel. I’m not saying I’m very good at it, but I give it a good try.

So when my brother backstabbed me – this was after a long line of other mistreatments on the part of both him and his husband – my anger got the upper hand at first. I did make a gigantic attempt to use my brain and be fair, but he’s even worse at that than I am… and will often have “PTSD” episodes when things aren’t going his way. Let me sideways to that a second: my husband has PTSD. I have problems. One of my best friends has it… another friend has it. Nearly all of us are military. We don’t appreciate his approach whether or not it’s real for him. There are a *lot* of other things that have happened besides that, of which I’m not sure I should talk about here just now, and the answer is no.

I managed to get my feelings in control and tried to work things out, but my brother wasn’t having that and ended up flipping out on me again. At the time he was getting caught in some lies, and I guess the pressure of it was too much for him or something. He emailed me with accusations. I’m still smarting over how I was treated when my parents died two years ago. So I did the unthinkable. I told my brother off. In caps. With nasty commentary. I’d never done it before. I must be getting old.

I should thank my brother for finally pushing me into this kind of anger. I was a lump before that, and now I’m lit by a fire that I pray won’t go away. I’m using this fire to fuel me as I open books and make time for things I didn’t think I could make time for before.

This is how magic works the world over, you see. Love can be pretty potent as well – love spells are popular for reasons. They say it can move mountains. The redheaded stepchild anger can move mountains too. It can also shake them and melt them down.

To touch on alien UFO lore, some people claim that anger protected them to some degree. It’s just hard to maintain it, especially when you’re taught not to feel the emotion in the first place.

Anger is VERY powerful.

It’s also hard to control. It takes a lot.  But somehow I managed.

The event also made me sad. My brother, I tell myself, isn’t all bad. He tried to include me in his backstab project, but I didn’t want to deal with the conflict. He’s given me trinkets in the past. Was helpful on occasion. So I get sad when I think about how I’d finally been pushed into standing up for myself because I had to, and the cost of that was losing the last tie to my past I had.

I’ll repost what I wrote on another blog here, because it’s a good example of where my family comes from. It’s a memory of when I was about five years old. Summer.

In my head there’s a sunny day. We’re on Dad’s boat at the mouth of the river where the ocean spans around us. He’s shrimping. He pulls up all these squid and flounders in his net — one like future nets I’d become lightning fast at repairing.

I liked the flounders. They were funny looking.

Dad gave me and my brother the squids and we threw them to the seagulls that followed us like loud kites on the wind.

Mom oiled herself and lay out to tan near the front of the boat.

It was a perfect day. The kind of day I wanted again and again. The boat. The ocean spray. The smells. My daddy.