I Am So Popular: Loop To Loupe

This is not about that person’s actions though. This is about my response. But first, a look back to a few years ago. Here we have a story I’ve told before. I married into a family that included a couple of (very) young adult children who hated me. They broke my possessions and left them smashed and scattered about. They threatened to kill my dogs and once even tore down the back fence in hopes the dogs would run out in traffic and be killed.

The correct response to all that would have been to simply walk away. Take what things I had left that weren’t broken or stolen and go. But instead, I stayed too long. I lowered myself to their level, became furious, and lashed out as if that would somehow convince them that I was right and they were wrong. I screamed. I yelled. I called them names and said, to their faces, that I hated their fucking guts. As for their father, who insisted their violence was “just a means of communication”—well he pissed me off most of all. Wasn’t he going to stand up for me ever?

No. He was not.

This is a scenario I have put myself in time and time again. I think it all ties back to the Rubik’s Cube of a puzzle handed to me as a child when I could never understand how my sweet, kind mother could not only tolerate how my father yelled at me, but seemed to love him in spite of it. This drove me mad. I still have to struggle valiantly to reconcile myself to the fact that in our lives we will love people who love other people who do not love us and whom we do not love.

Last week’s rage echoed this perpetual pain of mine, finding me lashing out, in fact, at more than one person, as I demanded to know how it could be that someone I hold so dear could still be chummy with the one who had inflicted so much hurt. The ugly got uglier still. I was not my grown-up self. I was not just screaming at the pain of the present. I was a tantrum-throwing wounded child howling into the cavernous corridor of The Past, once again foolishly trying to undo that which will never be undone.

The really kooky thing about my freak out was that, as it was occurring, I was on Monhegan Island, a tiny dot a dozen miles off the coast of Maine. I do not exaggerate when I say there is not a bad view on this island. Everywhere you turn, you are bound to encounter beauty—sheer cliffs giving way to a crashing Atlantic, a bald eagle soaring overhead, huge stones rubbed smooth by hundreds of years of ocean agitation, seals surfacing unexpectedly, ten bazillion stars in a sky not hindered by city lights. It goes on.

Additionally, the ability to contact the outside world is, to understate the matter, a chore. Cell phones work for five minutes per day, maybe every other day, and only if you are standing atop the highest grave marker in the little cemetery in the middle of the night. Bandwidth is limited and so Skype affords a conversation that might be counted successful if every fourth word you speak or is spoken to you comes across the wires.

And yet, surrounded by this beauty, and limited in my ability to communicate with the outside world, I nonetheless found me some rage bait 2,000 miles away that infuriated me. I did not even try to hold back. Instead, I struck out, like a little baby snake not yet able to dole out my venom appropriately.

Oh boy was I ugly.

Then something happened. I was in Maine to attend a knitting retreat and one night, during group knit, I happened to sit beside an older woman. Bella was not part of the retreat, but she was staying in our rooming house, and she knits, so she joined us. Did you ever meet someone who so instantly strikes you as the personification of calm that you wish to carry that person with you in your pocket the rest of your life?

Bella told me, in a lovely English accent, that she’s been visiting the island for over forty years. She detailed, in such a delicious manner, the sunrises she always seeks out, making them sound like the best experience anyone could have ever. Better than any meal you’ve eaten, any love affair you’ve had, any passionate physical exchange you’ve engaged in. Such were her marketing skills that I hauled my ass out of bed the next morning before dawn, hiked up to a little summit, and then, in the clearing, I stood still for a moment.

Bella sat atop a cliff, the picture of serenity, gazing across a glassy ocean. I made a little noise to let her know I was there and she beckoned me over. The clouds precluded precisely the spectacular show she’d described the night before, but it was no less wonderful. Because as Bella spoke in her calming voice, and passed along her binoculars, and noted the different birds - “Listen! That’s a chickadee!”— I thought to myself, on the heels of so much self-created ugly, just how much beauty there is in this world. A ridiculous abundance of it. So much so that, should we choose to, were we able, we could skip nearly all the ugly and just wrap ourselves in the beauty.

As we prepared to head back, Bella extracted what appeared to be a whistle from her pocket. She swung it open and revealed it for what it was—a jeweler’s loupe. Carefully she’d bend down to the tiniest flower, peer through her loupe, and then offer me a turn. “Isn’t that MAGNIFICENT?!” she would proclaim, as an intricate, detailed world came into focus.

A couple of days later at breakfast, I heard some of Bella’s story. By then, I was not at all surprised to learn that she is a Healer with a capital H. That is her job. She spoke of it softly, answered my questions, didn’t make a fuss over it. Sort of like she just knew her role in the universe and she played it, just the same way our waitress did hers, ferrying out plates of eggs and toast.

I flew back to Austin carrying images of Bella in my heart. I continued to feel like a total shit for my actions. Monday came and, as it happened, this was Yom Kippur. Though I am not a Jew, I dig the concept of atonement. Fortified with the example of my new friend, I issued apologies to any number of people I’d offended (intentionally or otherwise) over the past year, including the target of my recent rage.

I admit, I still feel like shit over the whole thing. I’m trying to reframe it, to be thankful for such ugliness, as it so swiftly revealed to me how very much I want to never be ugly again. My wish and goal is as simple as it is lofty: that I might forevermore swap out the loop of anger for that other sort of loupe, the one that reminds us to stop and see so much tremendous beauty waiting in so many little unexpected places.

Spike Gillespie will never get angry again. She blogs for KnitBuzz and at www.spikeg.com. Her writing workshop is at the end of this month. Email spikegillespie@gmail.com for details.