Pele and Honest Anger

The Hawaiian goddess of the volcano. A respectful note about the closed tradition, and what her presence in the world teaches anyone trying to learn what honest anger looks like.

A clear note first, because this is important. Pele — Pelehonuamea, the goddess of Hawaiian volcanism — belongs to a living, specific, and closed religious tradition. She is worshipped by the Native Hawaiian people, in specific ceremonial relationships, with specific protocols, and her practice is not available for borrowing by outside practitioners. The increasingly common online treatment of her as a generic goddess of feminine rage available for any practitioner's anger work is appropriative and harmful to the living tradition. This post is not that. This post is a witness, from outside, of what her presence in the world teaches.

What she teaches, observably, without being borrowed, is what honest anger looks like at scale.

What the volcano demonstrates

The volcano is the most patient and most honest force on the planet. The volcano does not pretend not to be angry. The volcano does not perform calm. The volcano does not suppress the pressure. The volcano holds pressure for centuries, sometimes millennia, and when the pressure resolves, the resolution is honest. The resolution makes new land. The new land is fertile. The new land is the basis for everything that grows on it for the next several hundred thousand years.

This is not a metaphor for the practitioner's anger. The practitioner is not a volcano. The practitioner cannot, in any responsible way, behave like one. The practitioner is a human being living in a household with other human beings, and the consequences of unstructured human rage on a household are usually destructive rather than fertile.

What the volcano demonstrates, instead, is the principle: anger that is acknowledged, named, and given honest structural release produces something. Anger that is suppressed, denied, or performed as calm does not. The traditions around Pele — in their proper Hawaiian context, taught by Native practitioners — know this. The outside practitioner can witness it without claiming it.

What honest anger looks like in a human practitioner

The traditions that the practitioner does belong to — whatever they are — generally agree on a few things about anger.

One: anger has information. The information is usually about a boundary that has been crossed. The information is the practitioner's job to receive and interpret. Trying to bypass anger to get to the information faster usually loses the information.

Two: anger is not action. The information arrives as a feeling. The action, if action is required, is a separate decision made after the information has been processed. The practitioner who acts on every feeling of anger as if the feeling were the instruction has not yet learned the working version. The practitioner who refuses to feel anger because feeling it might lead to action has also not learned the working version. The middle path is to feel without acting, process the information, and then choose the action.

Three: anger that is never expressed becomes something else. The body holds it. The relationships go quietly strange. The household becomes unaccountably tense. The honest release — in a journal, in a hard conversation with a real person, in a tearful walk, in a structured fight that does not break what matters — is part of the practice. It is, in the long run, what keeps a practitioner from becoming the calm passive-aggressive person whose whole household lives in tension and does not know why.

The small honest practice

For the practitioner who has noticed they have been holding anger for a long time: a small structured weekly working.

Once a week, the practitioner writes for fifteen minutes about what they are angry about. Not what they wish they were not angry about. What they are. Specifically. By name when possible.

At the end of the fifteen minutes, the practitioner does one of three things with the writing: keeps it (in a folder for the journal), burns it (with the small bay-leaf method), or, if it is the kind of anger that can become a real conversation, sets aside time later that week to have the conversation with the actual person involved.

This is the practice. Done weekly for a year, it produces a practitioner whose household is less mysteriously tense than it was at the start. The anger has been received, processed, and released honestly. The fertile new land grows accordingly.