A short note on the rage inside great love.
A person full of great love is also a person capable of great destruction. Great rage. Great hatred. Never forget that. Never forget it. Love and fury are the same fire, and they burn in one chest.
Think of the person you know who is the most loving. The one who sees the good in everything, who lifts every room they walk into, who forgives what you could never forgive. You have been reading them wrong all this time. That softness is fire held under total control. That person wants to break the world in half, because they can see, more clearly than anyone around them, exactly what is wrong with it. They are the furthest thing from naive. Nobody loves the world that hard while staying blind to what is being done to it. They see all of it, and they grieve it, and they burn over it.
You cannot love deeply and stay blind. The deeper the love, the sharper the sight, and the sharper the sight, the greater the fury at the cruelty and the waste and the lies. A person who feels nothing has nothing to be angry about. It is exactly the ones who feel the most who carry the most rage, and they carry it folded up and held down, because they know what it could do if they ever let it loose.
Read their kindness for what it truly is. There is a whole furnace behind that calm. And when such a person finally shows you their anger, meet it with respect, because that rage is the proof of their love.
The whole work is learning where to aim the fire. Point it at the wrong thing itself, and keep it clear of the people who happen to be standing near you. Let it build instead of burn. The most powerful people alive, in the best meaning of that word, are the ones who love that much and have learned exactly where to put the heat.
If you are one of them, you already knew every word of this. You have felt the size of what lives in you, and it frightened you, and you taught yourself to appear harmless. You have always been powerful. You are kind by choice, which is a rarer and braver thing than anyone around you understands.
Somebody needed to hear that today.