Get thee behind me Satan
Well actually Satan, don’t get behind me where I can’t see you – stand right over there so I can just pass you on the fly.
I went through a period a while back of just a flurry of negative vibrations coming from strangers and the known and I thought good grief, who are these people and why are they in my dream. That’s when I stopped into the Botanica to buy candles and the guy there said – these are random, don’t pay them no mind, it happens. And me, always trying to find and derive meaning out of every encounter had to agree with him that it was better to let these encounters stand right over there and let me pass them by.
And lately, it got weird again, my sister wrote on Facebook that I’m my mother’s killer (always great to hear from her); my new neighbor crumbled a note I wrote to inform her I was going to plant basil and tomatoes on my side of the yard, which meant I was going to pull up her spent winter vegetables – she threw the balled up piece of paper in my front planter (she’s a hater, has been from the get go, it’s a mystery, but I was forewarned by the painter and the landlady); and then, today, my ex neighbor told me as I went to go retrieve my bikes from another neighbor’s garage that he heard the garage door and had called the police and he said, “You almost had a bullet through your head” and then as if that wasn’t enough, he sent me an email to reiterate this point (I’m gone, baby gone is what I thought when I read it).
I thought of these three encounters and as I am want to do tried to find meaning in them, or how I, the constant in them, might be welcoming, provoking, or encouraging this type of vitriol and aggression. In the book When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “The question we should be asking is not, “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?” That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be “Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?””
Which is what I did. I ignored my sister, I threw the crumbled note away, and I replied kindly to my ex neighbor’s email and signed it, “Peace, R.” In the same fashion that the other day in a brawl on the bayou with my other ex neighbor, I text an apology before fanning the flames any further. At the end of the day, I’m not going to be the one these people fixate their anger on, and it’s their anger to own.
The old me was fond of a quick “FUCK YOU” retort – say it loud and say it proud – the new me, says softly, bless your heart, smiles and walks my way.