by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad
I was in a planning meeting last week with my friend Jasmine Syedullah when she offered this way forward: “I’m practicing with what it means to be part of a planet that has lava at its core.” And I thought: that’s it.
Beneath the surface, Mother Earth contains molten rock. And we mirror her.
Evoking the lava at the center of Mother Earth is such a significant metaphor, one that Audre Lorde too brought forth in her essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.”
Lorde wrote: “My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage … How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life.”
What Audre Lorde — and Jasmine — are saying is that this lava at the core of the earth is part of us. Rather than repress it, we can practice with it. We can train it.
Such commitment starts with attuning to depth and breadth of the lava, giving it attention, allowing it to breathe. In my own life, Buddhism has offered a path, a way of attuning to and training just fire that erupts in response to great injustices.
Training anger with accuracy is especially poignant in this period of expansive, unchecked violence. Our fierce anger compels us to resist Trump and his threat to annihilate Iran, Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, occupation of Palestine, and ongoing genocide in the West Bank, and the treatment of immigrants and their families by ICE agents on our own shores. Our rage tells us that perpetrators of these injustices must be stopped and held accountable. And we are the ones who will do it, through collective, vigilant action.
We must be deliberate, thoughtful.
Too often our fire can spiral out against ourselves and those in closest proximity to us. Yet if we can train our anger with accuracy, we can be like Mother Earth, protective as rock, capable of enacting volcanoes.