Author: Kitty Yanson

Painting the Dames

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This month has brought images in my sketchbook–paintings of the ladies who live with me in the little world of my head and heart. The first began using a Chagall portrait as my inspiration. My black cat Francis (who is growing purple with age and irritation) sat next to her, then a goldfish plopped in a bowl. I call this woman Lady C for Lady Creativity.

Then I had a dream that above a Gothic doorway was inscribed “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit” (Called or uncalled, God will be present), the inscription that C.G. Jung had above the doorway to his home and the office where he saw his patients. So Lady Creativity in the next painting stormed that door, mirroring my daily prayer that I borrowed from Darius Bashar, a meditation teacher on The Artist Morning website (https://www.artistmorning.com/.

Dear God, it goes, Please use me as a vessel for your divine expression. Use me as an instrument for your love. Give me the strength to go into the depths of my heart to find my truth and the courage to speak my truth in my own authentic voice. Whatever happens from there, I let go and let God.

In his approach to meditation, Darius uses Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book I highly recommend to all creatives to help to feed their souls.

Then, I revisited my old friend Lady Wisdom, to me both a representation of Sophia, the feminine aspect of God, and an embodiment of the Great Mother Archetype. Francis my cat and the goldfish return again, but as I was painting, I saw skulls with flowers bloom while Lady W prayed the rosary of years. She became Baba Yaga, a Slavic fairytale figure with the characteristic doubleness of all archetypes: the benevolent grandmom and the witch who lives in a hut in the forest and terrifies children (which was, perhaps, the hidden reason why I thought 70 some years was the age when I would begin to terrify my students–though some of my former would say that I started much earlier than that). So Baba Yaga is here:

Finally, I had to render another Lady W, standing before the triple trees of life, representing, perhaps, the triple lives of women: maiden, mother, and crone. She wears a cloak of spirals and the moon in her hands. Someone once told me that living was like moving up a continuous spiral up the core of ignorance; when you start up the climb, you are flat up against the core of ignorance, so you cannot see what you do not know, the bricks of the core blind you in their proximinty. But as you ascend farther up and farther away from that core, you begin to see how much you do not know, and when you get to this age, it’s a heck of a lot. But at the same time, you can see the layers of circles you have traveled, the mistakes made over and over again, the former selves that have transformed and reshaped who you are today: the lady of wisdom, of knowledge and ignorance.

A Feast of Seven Fishes

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This past December I had a dream of a man standing with a very-pregnant woman. Her water breaks, and in this gushing river fish swim–many fish splashing in this prelude to birth. It was a simple dream, but one stocked with archetypal symbols and meanings of the Advent season. Then came the urge to paint in my sketch book, one image, then another. I’d go to sleep and wake up with yet another image. Another followed, then again, another. Finally, I thought I was through all the fish painting and then, in a session of unplanned intuitive art making, music notes on a piece of collage paper reminded me of a woman’s eyes. Fish Lady emerged. A fish jumped into her arms, a glorious fish with golden fins and scales. I asked her what all this was about, and she told me. This blog post is a storybook of images and lessons learned.

Yesterday, I started another painting…of a train from my childhood, the Little Engine that Could. Next to the track there is a stream. I was getting ready to pack up my paints for the day…a fish breached tissue-paper water.

Fish Lady Speaks

Fish Lady: I stand at the crossing between what you know and what you don’t. Don’t you like the gift I am bringing to you? It is a beautiful fish, at first pencil drawn then all blue, the color of the sky and the sea, all the fluidity of the outer and the inner, your daily mind in retirement that flows from one thing to the next without plan or methodology unless you are cooking a new recipe or learning a new lesson about how to paint shadows. Because the fish’s scales are gold tells that it is from God and needs to be eaten and consumed, digested and made part of your wholeness.

Me: But it is beautiful, Fish Lady! If I cook and eat it, it will be destroyed. I do not like that. I want to watch its beauty swim in my awareness.

Fish Lady: That is your need to keep things certain and in one form. But this gift allows all that beauty to go into your core, just as it is now hugged against my heart. I know that the physical act of eating no longer brings you the pleasure that it once did now that your taste buds are dull and confused, but maybe this is a call to eat of the spirit.

Me: I am aware that Jesus and fish are associated; if this is a call to buy the Jesus of religion and eat it completely, I am afraid that the bones will stick in my throat. It has always silenced me.

Fish Lady: You are stuck in the old stories and need to digest the beauty to become the beauty. The stories of Jesus you remember from childhood when he was all goodness and light even in the face of death, these are stories that float like beautiful clouds in the sky that produce the rain that becomes the sea that you find yourself in swimming with the fish that are now the gifts of mystery. Watching childhood stories, like watching the action in an aquarium, may calm but not sustain you in what you are doing now. You must slit the fish in its belly, pull out its innards, filet it, throw it into the fire, and eat it. That means finding Jesus in the missingness of taste you used to revel in, the pains in your face and joints, the cake you bring to your new neighbors, the squirrel on the back deck you fed with peanut butter, the conversation with the kid down the street who shoveled your walk who looks like a linebacker and wants to become a clothes designer, a visual, walking contradiction whose dreams you can support. You see God through curious attending to both mundanity and magnificence.

Me: And like the initial dream of the fish swimming in the water breaking before the pain of labor and the joy of birth, the work of dailiness is the catching, gutting, cooking, eating and digesting, avoiding the bones when I can. I am not sure I can.

Fish Lady: Yet you also dreamt one night of can openers. But can is not just a noun; it is a verb too. You are being invited to open your fears and have dinner…Take another look at my image. Did you notice that the only piece of collage visible still beneath the paint is the dictionary page. Dictionaries give definitions and meaning. Definition and meaning. There is more here to look for. Pay attention!

Ritual

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When I was a child, I used to dress
and redress the body of the baby God,
Infant of Prague, with satin clothes
tailored to liturgical rhymes,
running my fingers across the hemline
rows of sequins, struggling to pull
the ruched armholes around the orb
of power his innocence cradled
in one tiny hand. I love you, Jesus,
I prayed as I returned his plaster vulnerability
to the altar atop my Uma’s chest of drawers.

In the afternoon after school, I met my friends
and a drafted brother or two to play Communion
in the basement, bribing my bros with chocolate
Jesus Necco Wafers giving the licorice ones
that nobody wanted to my ex-bestie Gerry
for some unremembered grievance,               
grabbing a bed-sheet from the laundry pile
as vestment across my outlawed priestly shoulders
to dole out sugar in lieu of transcendent mystery
around the sweet table of childhood.

But these were stories of another time
when I played with God, splashing
in the shallow waters of rituals’ river,
too young to swim in the deep end of faith.
Now I finger the decades,
counting faults and graces
bead upon bead, blurring
into wholeness in the rosary of my years.
I dress and redress again
that child of Prague, swaddling
his naked holiness in satin comfort
with sequins I have poorly sewn upon it,
now a broken princess playing with God
in second innocence repeating
and repeating the ongoing ceremony
of the all-along truth of love.
-Kitty Yanson

Turning

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The starlings in the dying oak,
loud as children in a schoolyard,
gather force for an evening murmuration
that will clot the sky with commas.
I pause to wonder at and wonder again,
(though I have seen many times)
this turning and turning of the dusk
like the turning of the soil in spring, 
like the turning circles of life
in this chittering world seen once,
seen always, ever-changing, ever-same.

Wisdom is a pattern-finder
seeing circles in straightforward time.
She lives behind a veil that sometimes stirs
in dark breezes to unmask our shared laughter
in a sudden, spectacular sun
much like when a sinner squints
through the confessional grate to find
a person breathing the equal air
of absolution in reciprocal eclipse.

So I look for circles in these ever-turns:
the world cracking open like an eggshell
pouring its gold into a pink china bowl,
like the empty vase’s round absence
that promises tomorrow’s rose,
like the eye in the great storm in the Gulf
churning up our broken trust,
like the unwinding white of the moonflowers
dilating silence in the eyes of night.

-Kitty Yanson

I Love This Getting Old

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I forget a lot of what I read.
Some days I’ll fall madly for a moment, a phrase,
a word, then I’ll scuttle with compulsive curiosity
to find more meaning in all this. I’ll swat at a life-changing
articulation (I got you, you elusive bugger!),
then smoosh it like a drain fly smacked
against a kitchen wall to keep it, black and white, forever.
It is usually gone by bedtime.

Where do all these things go? Into unconscious
trash bins to hang out with used-up TV tropes
and winged horses and my flesh ballooning
like yeast dough rising, pressing against the
walls of dreams? Or do they just hide to jump
out dressed in white sheets and shouting BOO
in the middle of a conversation about which
is better with pan-fried, crispy gnocchi,
garlic spinach or roasted brussels sprouts?
I remember once (I think) that I woke up from sleep
in the middle of the night to scratch life’s meaning
onto the pad I kept at my bedside. In the morning
I looked: “Airedale.”

But maybe all the forgotten words are really seeds
that germinate in the dark to sprout one day
as a glorious dahlia or noxious weed in the garden of my being.
Or maybe they will one day gather with the quiet drones
of departed declensions of Latin nouns and (what?)
I ate for Tuesday’s dinner. Together we will stand around
the altar of my heart in the sanctuary of silence,
counting breaths and waiting for an Easter meaning to arrive.

                  -Kitty Yanson

Fall Apart

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“Our undoing is also our becoming.”  
-Terry Tempest Williams

Fall apart.
Let yourself crash to the floor and come apart.
Pick up the pieces and see an iris of an eye,
a tree twig on another, a sliver of sky,
a letter that looks like it could be Q: 
a Question, a Quandary? a Quiet?
You are a puzzle you did not know you were.
Find the edges first then work inward from there.

When finished, fall apart again.
Pour yourself into the box of God. Shake.
Slide yourself out on the ground of being.
You are now a shattered crystal vase
to superglue with sunsets.
It will hold the roses you have just brought in
from your garden overgrown with excuses.
One hides a spotted lantern fly the experts say that you must kill.
You smash it. It becomes the pattern of your dying–
red and black scraped across the concrete pathway
you no longer walk that is still cemented in your heart.

Fall apart again

You are not just a puzzle to be solved
or something unwhole to be heroically healed:  
You are all of these and none:
your breath in continuing circle:
unknown to known: known to forgotten:
back again repeating: always new, always old:
your heart broken open to a begging world.

Once more, fall apart.

You are now a billion stars.
Orion and the Pleiades have left;
Wanda the Story Weaver is waiting
in the wings of your experience.

Find her.

-Kitty Yanson

Gangster’s Gift*

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Before its leaves return in April’s sun,
the cherry tree flees the winter’s thuglike grip
with blossoms breaking from branches bare.
Was Al Capone aware that beauty springs
like this, unbidden, from naked bark when he
gave cherry trees in gratitude to weep
before the hospital that had agreed
to treat his curse of Venus, residual
remuneration from early gangster days
as brothel bouncer in old Chicago Town.
One tree remains, and every April now
this seasoned moll on a Baltimore street
joyously vamps her coy pink hair to the ground.

Was this gift his feeble shot at goodness?
Or did Capone’s decaying brain forget
he ordered massacres in lieu of roses
to celebrate the yearly feast of love?
Perhaps, recumbent now in his deep, big sleep,
he dreams of galaxies of rosy blooms
that briefly flirt with air, then petals fall,
implanting stars of blushing pink to feed
with constellations of rotted grace
the bloodstream of a forgiving earth.

My questions, too, are shaken to the ground,
and quiver from the strain of evil mixed with good.
But when this April’s sun enshrouds the chill,
a blessed moment comes, and I forget to think
as beauty stuns from being’s leafless stem.

-Kitty Yanson

* Al Capone was paroled from Alcatraz to receive treatment for his advanced neurosyphilis. First, he sought out Hopkins that was well-known for advances in this area. However, they did not take him on because of Capone’s notoriety. Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore did treat him, and in gratitude, Capone gave the hospital two weeping cherry trees. One has survived and blooms every year in April on 33rd Street at the hospital’s former entrance.

What a Person Is

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These two are you,
the label that is you and its referent
like apple and what it stands for,
its consonants and vowels aiming
to cram essence into fact
but miss the tightness of the skin
before surrendering to tooth,
the sweet flesh, the ping in the air
beneath the nose, the punctuation
of seeds as tongue and bite
circumlocute to center.

You are so much more than name
and occupation, marital status, and yearly income,
all words spilled like coffee grounds
on the counter of your days that turns you
into a measly datum excelling in surface
to scrawl across a spreadsheet.

But you, brought up from the root cellar of time
to dwell in that bowlful of harvest we share,
you are a sweetness in manner, a tartness
in sorrow, so full of flavor,
an open-ended richness like the exhalation
of mystery that escapes when you pierce
the skin of an O or an A,
liberating the breathing hidden in a word,
as together we swallow to our core
the hushed longing that lives there
with its seeds of unsayable truth.

-Kitty Yanson

Ecce Ancilla Domini

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(After the painting of the same name by Dante Gabriel Rossetti–Behold the Handmaid of the Lord)

This girl cringes on her pallet
from the sight of an angel
standing in her bedroom
with fire at his feet.

She draws back against the wall
as if it were a blanket she wraps
around her thin body to hide.
She does not meet this angel’s eyes.
Instead, she cowers from the lily stalk
he holds before him like a stick
as if to beat her down with purity.

Or is she drawing back in thought
against this wall in her house of self
to recite the words, lovingly stroking
the iambs and anapests of heartbeat
cadencing in her belly as she waits upon
the language that will enflesh the wind?

Or is she distracted by the flames
this angel seems to tread
from far-off hope to promise,
a path of fire that leads
through gateways of dream  
past synapses of mind
to a conception of hearts?

Perhaps, she is not trying
at all to articulate the ineffable.
I think this Mary will practice
practical mystery as, half-asleep,
she rummages through her mother’s
store of medicines for salve to ease
the burning mission in Gabriel’s toes.
She’ll move to sooth the pain of angels first
before she folds that baby’s wails in her arms,
and, to make the world all better,
kisses the boo-boo’d finger of God.

-Kitty Yanson

Dancing Whole

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When I was seven, thinking I was pleasing
my mother and God (in that order), I danced
at the communion rail, fingerpainting air,
my kid knees composing primordial poems
against the kneeling bench.

In the parking lot after Mass, she stopped me with a slap:
never embarrass me like that again, she said.
Of course, she was right, and I had been wrong
(which was usually the case),
so I folded my stinging face
into the envelope of my body, posted the pain
with a forever stamp, mailed it to forgotten.

Past seventy now with arthritic joints and neuralgia
in my face, I tell my analyst about that long-ago ballet
for which my mother clapped against my cheek
a hapless applause.

The undelivered letter opens;
story mixes again with unsealed pain, jolting,
like old lavender blended with blood’s steely tinge,
filling the vast space between us, me at home,
my analyst in Zurich, sitting across a virtual table.

Healing rarely comes alone. It needs a hand to hold,
someone to hear the cry that was uncried,
to say the name with love once unsaid with love,
to breathe in my pain, breathe out abiding presence.

Today, as I run my thoughts along the polished scar
that marks the knit of memory and hurt,
my girl voice calls me again to come
before a beaming God who cocks one
eyebrow and asks me ever,
Dance?

-Kitty Yanson