Rage Weeding

Anger can feel good because it is often associated with a sense of empowerment, strength and control, especially when it is a response to a perceived injustice or a threat. It can also provide a feeling of energy and motivation, and act as a distraction from other more vulnerable emotions like sadness and fear.

Mr. Google when asked “why does anger feel so good?”

I'm getting old. I must be. I like to go to bed early. I can no longer do my stupid human tricks (impressively bendy yoga moves) at cocktail parties and I have a pair of binoculars in my kitchen so that I can birdwatch. But more than anything it is my obsessive love of gardening which came out of nowhere that makes me feel like I must be getting on. Gone are the days when all I wanted to do was party in Manhattan nightclubs with supermodels, their agents, and other assorted fashionistas - stumbling home at daybreak after breakfast at Florent reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. Now my greatest thrill is watching a bluebird eat a worm, or better yet, watching anything I have planted in my garden flourish. Believe it or not this is exciting to me. And this new-found gardening fervor of mine just keeps gaining speed. It's all I want to do. 

The first indicator that the gardening season is upon us is when the lilac and lupine that grow wild on my property start to bloom. I assume the lilac was planted by someone at some point but now it has taken over. The early spring heady-sweet scent of lilac is my alarm bell that it is time to get out of my house and back into my garden. And that’s where you’ll find me on summer weekends, planting, digging, pruning, clipping. I get lost in it. I have grown to love the smell of dark rich loamy earth and the creatures that wriggle their way through it. I don't even mind having that dirt under my fingernails or in my hair.

I also enjoy weeding. In fact last week while weeding I learned a lesson that I will not soon forget. The lesson is that anger can be a very powerful and effective drug. 

We have blueberry bushes on my property which produce thousands of berries. Every year my husband and I promise each other that we will fence them in before all the birds, chipmunks and squirrels can strip those bushes clean...and the same thing always happens. Year after year after year. Around July 4th I'll notice that the berries are getting nice and ripe. The jade greens, pale blues, blushing pinks and purples as the fruit ripens make them look like edible jewels. Nature's Cartier.

Around this time, every single year, my husband and I will examine the bushes and talk about protecting them. Then we get distracted with some other “more urgent” homeowner task and forget about the berries. A few weeks later, while doing some other job around the yard, I will see that every single solitary blueberry has been taken. Just gone, the blueberry bush stripped bare, its skeletal branches cowering, defeated, naked and ashamed.

“We should have protected them,” I will admonish my husband. But of course that is my responsibility as much as it is his. Last week I found another large blueberry bush. One that has been covered up and hidden by the highly invasive mugwort that also thrives on our property. This newly discovered hidden treasure is huge, larger than all the other bushes. And it’s absolutely laden with fruit, its thin arms bending as if to say “mercy” under the weight of all its bounty. “Alright,” I told my husband, “now is our chance!” We had given ourselves three hours to figure out the blueberries’ salvation this year and this was our morning to get it done. “Let's weed all around the bush and then protect it with netting,” I told my husband as we surveyed the tools in the garage. And then we got into a fight. About God only knows what. It was a week ago and I can't even remember what the hell started it. But he was mad. And I was mad. And the more we argued about whatever nonsense we were going on about the more enraged we both got. Like most fights it just escalated and escalated until both of us were almost speechless with rage.

Finally I simply marched away. “Fuck it,” I snapped over my shoulder. “I'll do it alone.”

At that I stormed away from the garage, away from my husband and his “unreasonableness” and toward the blueberries. I threw on my hat and my elbow-length gloves and started weeding. And weeding. And weeding. The anger coursed through me like a force so I took it and ran. “He's impossible,” I assured myself. Yank! “Immature.” Yank! “A big old man-baby.” Yank yank yank yank yank!

After about 45 minutes of this my husband came over to see if we could “resolve our issues.”

“There's nothing to resolve,” I told him, stubborn in my righteousness. Head down, furiously weeding a particularly stubborn and obviously deep-rooted patch of mugwort, I ignored him.

“Jesus!” he said loudly looking around, our fight obviously forgotten for a moment. “You really went nuts!” At that I lifted my head and looked around. I had indeed “gone nuts.” I had ruthlessly weeded a patch of ground that historically would have taken me an hour and a half (or more) to weed. And I had done it in half the time and more effectively than usual. “You got so much done,” he said and I had to agree. I had harnessed the energy of my anger and used it to great effect. My anger that morning almost felt like cocaine. It was fast and sharp and made my heart race. It gave me strength and a single-mindedness of purpose.

Michael Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, often talks about his 30 years of prison service, working with maximum security inmates. Not surprisingly a lot of these men have anger issues and it was while lost in the energy of their rage that they murdered someone. “Anger was my drug,” these men will often tell him. “I only felt okay if I was fighting or getting ready to fight. Rage was my happy place.” But now these men are locked away forever and will have to come to terms with what they did, who they harmed, and where their anger ultimately led them.

But it was while rage weeding…at my husband…that I understood for maybe the first time what these poor imprisoned men were talking about. My anger felt pretty good while I was lost in it. Energizing even. My adrenaline was up while fighting in the garage and then while weeding. And adrenaline is a drug that I have always been quite fond of.

Standing there surrounded by enormous piles of five to six foot tall weeds and roots (our mugwort can grow to eight feet tall if left unchecked) my husband and I apologized to each other. He apologized because he is a mature human being and I apologized because I needed help with the weeding. But after I mumbled a desultory "sorry" I felt better, and then I apologized again, this time sincerely. As we started to weed together and discuss exactly how we were going to net our bushes something felt off. I was hot. Tired. Worn out from my previous hour of furious enraged action. The sun felt relentless. I missed the buzzy energizing experience of being really angry. 

“Say something to piss me off,” I implored him.

“What?” he asked while on his hands and knees with a spade examining some new intractable root ball that he had just uncovered.

“I need that angry buzz back. Rage weeding is much more effective than regular weeding,” I informed him.

“Piss yourself off, I'm busy,” he said, and although I tried to piss myself off at his response I couldn’t. My anger was gone. And so was the energy of it. 

The feeling that I'm getting old and the bird watching and the love of gardening have all come to pass over the course of the past few years. But this experience of really feeling my anger and almost enjoying the energy it gave me was enlightening and one that gave me compassion for anyone with an anger problem. It also gave me a wariness towards the anger itself. My fury that morning felt like a drug. Delicious, intoxicating, dangerous. I wanted more of it. “I've worked my way through enough addictions,” I reasoned with myself while we toiled together under the blazing sun. “Do I really want to be addicted to anger at this stage of my life?"

The answer, of course, is no. Even if my anger did help me weed like a John Deere-sponsored whirling dervish, the anger-hangover is just not worth it. For the men that Michael Singer works with, that anger-hangover will last for the rest of their lives. They will spend their remaining days locked away because of some crazy thing that they did while high on the drug of rage. That’s tragic, but it’s an excellent lesson for me. Although that anger coursing through my veins might feel good while it lasts, the downside of acting on that anger can be deadly. And not just for the weeds in my yard.