Author: Kitty Yanson

The Uses of Water:  II. Bethesda

Kitty Yanson7 Comments

My first AA job forty years ago was to make coffee, hauling plastic pitchers of water to the silver coffee maker that wheezed when it got going like a bad asthma attack or dry heaves after a bad drunk. I set out the sugar packets and jars of powdered creamer filled with trans-fat that would get us eventually but maybe slower than the alcohol, the stirrers, the napkins the tin foil tart shells to serve as ash trays. We were all on the water wagon, striking up our agency a day at a time. Our lives had been paralyzed by addiction, but here we were, laughing our shared shame away in a bubbling pool of humor sweetened with the intensity of metanoia. The chalices were Styrofoam, the coffee sacramental, celebrating the shift in perspective when “I drink because of my problems” becomes “my problem is that I drink.” If I had lacked power over my addiction and needed to find a power greater than myself to recover, then sharing this communion of caffeine helped to show me how to heal.

After the meeting, we could walk outside in the evening cool and look into the sky to watch the constellations line up in different forms: There was the horse that Mac had talked of when he spoke of horses that have more sense than humans; when one of their herd was ill, the others gathered and pressed their warm bodies against it, to heal and give strength. There was Hermione the Trashcan talked about by a delicately made woman with pinch-nose glasses who spoke of taking her empty bottles to her neighbor’s trash can because she didn’t want the trash men to know how much she drank. To its right in the autumn sky was the Forest of Words which kept our minds occupied while the real healing of propinquity took place. Finally, where the Big Dipper transformed into the coffee cup in its imaginary clouds of Styrofoam pointing in the heavens to the North Star, Polaris, the navigational beacon that we could rediscover if we lost our way and kept our sight sober and true. This North Star, the power greater than ourselves, the God of our understanding that some saw in the religion of their upbringing, some saw in whatever…a doorknob, and some saw in the group.

Many an evening, our cars filed the familiar path up Charles Street to go the meeting after the meeting at the Towson Howard Johnsons, the orange-roofed HoJos that some may remember, where we cemented our friendships and dedication to the 12 steps with French fries, and hot fudge sundaes washed down with even more coffee. On the way home, I passed a familiar friend, a beautiful, old weeping willow across the street from the entrance to Sheppard Pratt Psychiatric Hospital with its fairytale stone Gate House. This willow took one’s breath in the spring when it leafed out before any of the other trees, weeping gold first, then green. It reminded me of the willow my father had planted in the backyard of our Northwood row house that that grew with the vigor that only proximity to the sewer lines could give it in its incredible thirst for water

Weeping willows are greedy flora. Their roots spread fast and far to suck up any form of water in the nearby soil. God help the homeowner who plants one in a backyard that also holds the water and sewer pipes in terra cotta pipes. Well, my father did, and after many plumber visits and roto-rooterings, he finally had to admit defeat and take the darned beautiful tree down, digging up any remaining roots that could sprout a sapling to begin its cycle of destruction all over again while it leafed out toward the sun in beauty. I loved that tree. I loved the way the hanging branches stirred in the breeze to tickle your face. I loved how you could cut a long branch and tie your brothers’ hands together, an older sister torture technique. I loved how the fully leafed curtain of withes made all the weather theatrical: the August lightening, wind whipping from the west, the curtain parting for the curtains of rain, the air thundering with anticipation, my grandmother, afraid of lightning , calling us away from the willow to go into the basement to pray the rosary until the storm passed. But I had already been struck…with wonder as this tree grew more beautiful by day, its roots sucking in the dirty bath water and stinking excrement from the sewer pipe, converting our waste into juices of life for new leaves burgeoning like our ever-expanding family, this tree, itself a meditation on living, the tree growing taller and taller with each inhalation and then raining to the ground an exhalation of branches.

Early in my sobriety, my sponsor suggested that I begin a meditation practice, I think because my mind in post-acute withdrawal was racing around in circles like clothes in the spin cycle, only with peanut butter (of course, all that coffee didn’t help). My beginning practice was sporadic; only in the last 20 years or so have I settled into a regular sitting routine. Recently, however, I have been studying the Christian mystics because I’ve come to understand that this longing for something, for something more that I have felt all my life is really a longing for God.  One practice is that of Centering Prayer, a method of contemplation named and popularized by the late Trappist monk and priest, Thomas Keating. In this, the prayer is instructed to choose a word meaningful to them to repeat as an anchor, much like a mantra or breath counting in Zazen, to help still the mind enough to hear the breath of God in the inward ear. I am particularly fond of the way James Finley in the podcast Turning to the Mystics describes the use of the word: look at the birds, he says, the eagles, vultures, even gulls that ride motionlessly upon the pillars of heat that rise from the earth called thermals. 

They just fly. And then every so often, as they lose a little altitude, they flap their wings a few times. So, you’re sitting in this presence, and you realize there’s distractions. And so, you say “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus[your word],” like you flap your wings a few times to maintain altitude, but you’re really trying to use the word to get beyond all words. And I think it comes full circle. We use the word to get beyond words to discover the holiness of words, how God’s present, and the way we talk to each other and so forth. (Finley)

The word I chose is Bethesda.

There is a story that many, many years ago, an angel came to Jerusalem. Where its heel struck the ground, a fountain sprang and the pool that formed from it healed all those who bathed in it. This healing pool became know as Bethesda a name that means House of Mercy or House of Grace for the healing that occurred. Yet the place also became called the Place of Shame or Disgrace for the people who hung out at the pool, all suffering the shame and disgrace of disease-wracked bodies, a multi-denominational leper colony, so to speak, unspeakingly shouting, “Unclean! Unclean!” to those who came near.

But this is just the kind of place that always attracts Jesus. Traveling to Jerusalem for some sabbath or another, Jesus passes the crowd of those waiting by the pool, waiting for the angel to stir the waters, waiting to be the first in the pool and get healed. He sees a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Jesus asks him if he wants to get well, and the man answers that he has no one to help him into the healing waters. Jesus then tells him to take up his mat and walk. Which he does. And is healed. Later Jesus tells the guy to go and sin no more so he doesn’t have worse things happen to him. Of course, no good gesture ever goes unpunished, and our man J catches grief for healing on the sabbath and the healed guy also is hassled for working on the sabbath by carrying his mat. Apparently, there were legal hair-splitters then too who enforced the old Blue Laws in Jerusalem (am I dating myself talking about Blue Laws when one couldn’t buy or sell stuff on Sundays?).  

But the part of the story that interests me is the answer that Jesus gets when he asks the man, do you want to get well. The guy says that there is nobody to get his ass into the water. Jesus ignores his declared lack of agency and tells him YOU get up off the mat and walk as if he is making the man aware that the healing is already hiding within him. No one can do it for him. But someone can do it with him by reminding him of who he truly is, or, as the Zen koan suggests, showing the man his original face before he was born, his Buddha nature, his child of God-ness. I think the man sees this in Jesus’ face. So the man, made pliant as a willow by his thirty-eight years of suffering, chooses to take up his mat and to walk into his life.

That’s kind of the way healing worked for me in AA. I got sober at a meeting place called Agape that was held in an old classroom out-building on the grounds of the motherhouse for the School Sisters of Notre Dame. I met the woman who had answered the phone at AA, and we walked into the building with the words Alcoholics Anonymous shamelessly painted on the wall with an arrow pointing to the two rooms where the meetings were held. To me, that sign could have read, Disgusting People’s Entrance or Weird Wackos’ Cattle Call, so great was my apprehension. But after a few meetings, I took my last drink and I picked up my metaphorical mat and walked (well, drove, actually, in a falling-apart Honda) to more meetings where the folks there showed me that there was a true self beyond the person who drank and got drunk, whose life was filled with the waste and whose marriage was crumbling. And I picked up my agency by not picking up a first drink. A few meetings later, someone asked if I would help make the coffee.

That angel who stirred the waters in Jerusalem, the Bethesda Angel has a central place in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play set during the AIDS scourge in the 1980s gay community in New York. It’s an extraordinary commentary on disease and healing, grace and shame, paralysis and agency, as the protagonist Prior Walter discovers the lesions that herald the infection and loses his lover and his belief in certainty. An Angel, hallucinatory or not, crashes through his ceiling at the end of the first play to tell him that he is called to be the prophet of paralysis, of stasis of the way things used to be even though they are crumbling in decay. God has walked out on them and taken the force of Creation with him. In the end, Prior, refuses this role by becoming, instead, the herald of creative energy, by declaring desire to the Angels of Immobility sitting in a derelict heaven. “We just can’t stop. We’re not rocks—progress, migration, motion is modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it’s still desire for. Even if we go faster than we should. We can’t wait” (Kushner 264). And Prior takes up his desire and walks into the final scene of the play, set five years later at the Bethesda statue of the Angel of the Waters. He and his friends, all of whose character arcs reveal healing and action and transformation, talk about Peristroika, the fall of the Soviet state and the thaw of the cold war into a spring of uncertainty. Prior, leaves their conversation to deliver his final words to the audience: “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life. The Great Work Begins” (Kushner 280). And the four walk up the stairs from the fountain. In the excellent HBO adaptation of the play (starring the likes of Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, and Emma Thompson in multiple roles), one hears their animated conversation into the fade-out. But in the movie remake that lives in my head, I imagine them drinking coffee from white Styrofoam cups.

The year I got sober was 1983, and as I’ve said before, my life was a mess, as was my marriage. I was running to AA meetings as many times as I could and reconciling and re-reconciling with my husband, moving out, moving in. During the summer of that year, we decided that I would move back into the big cedar-shake house that we had been living in and try again. Ten days after, he told me that he just didn’t think he could do it, and we decided that we would remain together through the summer and then get legally separated. I am not going to get into why we broke up because I’ve found that most relationship ruptures are overdetermined in causality and much too complicated to explain simply, and now I count my ex-husband as a dear friend. Yet there I was for the rest of that summer, mourning the end of the marriage while living it still together and mourning the end of dependence on alcohol.

The backyard of that house had a spot in it where the drainage was just terrible. Every time it rained, one could feel the lawn get soft and spongy making the squishing, sucking sound where your tennis shoe hit the grass. For years I had suggested that we plant a weeping willow there because that area was a place so soggy a willow could weep for joy in it.  But that summer, my husband suggested we do it then, the summer we were splitting up, and I found myself sinking into an emotional morass: planting a tree is about the future and for him and me, there seemed none, so we never planted that tree. But I did. Inside.

We all have inner worlds, landscapes that we have built and gardened, a place to go where the soul can breathe and rest especially when the world is unraveling which it always seems to be doing a lot of now. This inner space is a place for stillness and reflection to pull back into awareness with the massive help of faith that things come apart so that they can be put together anew. Like the constellations in the night changing shapes and meanings. Like the seeming death in winter. Like the creation of new metaphor from cliches that lie around in one’s writing, worn out and drained of energy. Inside in my imagination I built a house of light to live in a towering a-frame with two storied windows that rise to a peak piercing the sun that warmed the slate tiles of its living room. There I watched the sun rise and fall and the stars at night. One day I found a high ladder and climbed to the top to pour translucent paints down the window’s face. Red and blue and gold and green washes of tear-like color. My inner living room became glass stained with the palette of the earth and sky: sea and forest and sun and moon. I have lived in that house for many years now, and just outside my inner house of light, I planted a weeping willow that has been nourished by the things that have hurt me, the shame and guilts that I have brought to this ground. It lives next to my Bethesda pool, the lake of forgiveness, that deep reservoir for compassion that living has carved into my heart.

Lady Wisdom sometimes visits me there, more often nowadays because both of us have old bones that slow us down, especially when it rains. She has become a good friend, and we chuckle at my younger self who wrote her off as a silly old lady. That’s the way the young are, she tells me, but she knows I loved her even then. Some days we just sit in silence weeping for the latest school shooting or the latest civil injustice or my latest blindness to another person’s pain or my own loneliness. But most days we weep with this beauty of the healing cycle and the gift of the waters as we sit quietly drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, watching sunsets through the willow’s rain. I say the word Bethesda, my wings awaken, and I am once again borne upon the warm pillars of love rising from people of the earth and the God who lives in the love we share.

The angel stirs the waters here for everyone.

All are welcome. Bring your bathing suits:
Coffee will be served:
The Great Work Begins.
-Kitty Yanson 7/20/22

Finley, James, host. “The Cloud of Unknowing: Listener Questions.” Turning to the Mystics. Center for Action and Contemplation. Podcast. 8 June 2022. https://cac.org/podcasts/the-cloud-of-unknowing-listener-questions/.

Kushner, Tony. “Part Two: Perestroika.” Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992.

The Uses of Water: I. Nunc Fluens/ Nunc Stans

Kitty Yanson2 Comments



“Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatum.”
(The now that passes makes time, the now that remains makes eternity.)
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

I
This is the city of air and foam
where heat from dunes and metal hoods of cars
dulls vision, and lights at night steam up the heavens,
and block the stars; where daylight’s ocean
muffles cries of children running
from moms to sea-froth filagree.
When I was young in time, rows of women,
lay on beaches, Venuses unearthed and vandalized,
with purple scrawl across the backs of thighs
in the pre-sun-screen sheen of baby oil and iodine.
The nacreous slick of yellow hair dammed
the flow of backs, bared and browning in the sun.
When I was young in time, I sat at the ocean’s edge
in the incoming tide and watched the sea
throw itself upon dry sand, again and again
and asked it: why life? why death? and why again
until the waves and existential whys were one.

II
If I spoke to the sea, would it answer?
Am I nothing but a minnow in the night,
galling the ocean in its vastness,
a scratchy sound, like a tin can
on its shore rubbing against a rock?
Water, I know you, I know you not,
hidden in my depths, as invisible as air.
You are baptism and blood.
I drink you, I wash with you.
With your brother wind
you can blot out cities
yet sing us to sleep
in our matching language
the throbbing of my heart,
the throbbing of your waves
as the dumb moon
with its tongue-tied force
calls me to collude with you
in surges of internal tides.
Water I know you, I know you not.

III
I lecture to this mystery.
But like Proteus who counts his flock of seals at night,
shifting his shape at every human touch,
each concept I pour sea into
explodes, becomes another:
bearded lion to boar
to fountain to towering tree:
it will not stay still. Concepts
are levees against the unknowable
that break and push us under
leaving the land inundated with unknowing,
becoming rich with dark silt, rife
with enigma, pregnant with our hopes.
Watching my dreams in combers come,
I swim to capture one, to ride it into shore
where surf meets text. Most I miss.
Most remain in the ineffable turning
of waves and the questing whys.

IV
One day when I was young in time,
my mother woke up early
to sit upon the porch that faced the westward bay,
waiting for the sunrise to set alight the sea.
We sat with her laughing and inhaling coffee.
Time right, place wrong.

Now when I am old in time,
my sister sits and faces westward
waiting for sunsets and eagles,
the moment of rightness
to snap a pic and applaud
each spectacle of eros:
each singular repeat of passion
in light’s affair with flood.
She posts these paparazzi snaps
to tack across her Facebook timeline
from spring with its spreading arms
to grey-eyed winter.

Now when I am old in time,
the blowing sand combines
with breath to cloud the sky
as coldness sharpens sight
enough to recognize the final chill.
As ice, the sea sets skin on fire;
as foam, it is my christ’ning lace,
that dressed my birthright carrion
carried ever closer even closer
in the flowing now.

Yet here nunc stans:
Never mind why life, why death.
They both live in a single sun
that rises each day and sets
in an ever-widening circles.
It only asks that I be here now:
with the taste of the god in the salty air
with the roaring of the ocean’s exhalations
with the gulls that plead for invisible bread
with the mystery, the many fathomed mystery,
of love that lives, timeless and deep
in my opened heart, more boundless than the sea.

-Kitty Yanson

Download
My reading.

Images of God

Kitty Yanson10 Comments

“…Divinity is found in the current that generates the light and not the container of the light….No one I know collects light bulbs after the luminous capacity has left them. We are briefly illumed, and then what is left is the glass receptacle not light.”

                  -James Hollis. The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves

A pyracantha bush, burning, by the side of the road,
collects in its thorny, painful love, tossed liquor bottles
and cellophane wrappers tucked together with incendiary berries
like the abandoned resolutions of not-quite-evil sinners.
No wonder God gave Moses two stone tablets; it takes a hard head
or downright idolatry to break them. Poor calf, shining in the valley
like investment accounts in a bull market.  Va vitello d’oro!

Or the Old Man River Deity on the Sistine ceiling
touching Adam’s outstretched finger,
a guy after a guy’s own heart. Yup, you’ll follow Him
through the just-cleaned kitchen and litter it
with stinky sports clothes and bloody Crusader armor.
But he kisses you on the cheek and says he loves you!
All is forgiven. Why aren’t there any kitchen lady gods?
No Santa jolly either, He, without the toys and Christmas lights
unless we include the burning bushes of underwatered
pines, the too-dry catastrophic tinder.

And why do we never see a God who laughs?
I’m not saying a slapstick guffaw; that would be mean.
But maybe a raucous hoot while rocking a hip-hop tukus
or conga line kick at a Pascal celebration.
God must have a sense of humor, you know,
to put up with the rest of us. I mean what does He do
when we do the equivalent of peeing on the floor
behind the bookcase because the ants need watering?

But seriously now, it’s more convenient to believe
in the skinny one who hangs upon the cross
than the skinny one we see on Calvert Street
with his sign that reads: Homeless Vet, Hungry,
with hand outstretched whom we choose to believe
…or not.

Yet no one pictures a female God. Her sense is touch.
We feel her deep down in subtle skin below our skin,
Hidden in the unlit corners of souls.
She is the heartbeat that trained your heart to beat,
The unmet longing that threads your pulses,
a string of perpetual beads, of never-ending feeding. 
She rocked us into breathing, then retired to the primitive good
that lives in ancient parts of the brain, the body’s memory,
escaping awareness through cracks in useless concepts.
She calls us to love as she did in the early tales of loving,
even when we act like an ass and sin.
I imagine that she covers her nonexistent mouth
with a nonexistent hand to keep from laughing.  
But, anyway, we hear.

It’s time to ditch the stash of burned-out light bulbs,
and look for God in other places:
in the jagged fissure of a broken heart,
in the untold stories of a dark night’s stars
in the purple halleluiah of the Lenten Rose.
If Rumi is right, that what you seek seeks you,
be still. Wait to be caught.
Wait for God to sneak in secretly
Between, perhaps, two mundane moments.
Or maybe wait for the shock of God,
a jolting bolt of love
to run joyfully amok
through the firing filaments
of your longing.

-Kitty Yanson

Lady Wisdom Speaks:

Kitty Yanson2 Comments

Lady Wisdom and Friends by Kitty Yanson 1/2022

Prologue: This began with a dream: I am teaching a class in a sunken atrium-like classroom. On the way to class I think that I will assign a research project: what is the most important book ever written? When I get there, however, I assign a group research project: what is most important in life? The class breaks into two groups: one says water, and the other says wisdom.

It was clear to me that I should invite Lady Wisdom to speak.

I.
I’ve known you.
I’ve watched you consume a library
book by book, as if it were
a pound of chocolates to savor all alone,
licking each melted passage
off the roof of your mind.
You danced with each new idea
until its shoes wore out and it clanged
back onto its flat metal home.
New partners always awaited
your curtsy and admiration
for a well-argued waltz, a syllogistic samba,
a polka for persuasion, a non-fallacious foxtrot,
or even the a priori bunny hop hop
hop on to the next one.
Knowledge is power, you thought,
over what you never were sure.
Real power, you found out, was
not getting what you wanted
but getting what you wanted
that you had not known you wanted.
And there you saw me:
The step beyond.
The perspective of wait.

II.
I am the pattern seer,
staring at disparity until I see its sameness,
like your forehead’s wide span of skin
curling in a wrinkle, given time.
Love has a billion forms, each one unique,
as does hate and courage and fear
and all things human, but I see
chords and echoes everywhere
in the meter of beating hearts.
Listen to the lives of uncountable souls,
all taking one breath, then another and another
and hear the rhyme of living:
people are a boundless poem–
neither sonnet nor sestina–pulsing meaning
in the rhythm with the kindling stroke of love.
In images of un-love even, the daily news,
love throbs on, made loud and louder by its absence,
the volta between octave and sestet,
the midline’s caesura, the stanza break,
the punctuation in the verse of being human,
created by a poet God.

III.
I speak this poem by heart.
It is the way to the gem in the lotos,
distilled by age and the concentrated sun
of close inspection that burns off fluff, excuses,
broken resolutions, a crystal rendered
from sleep, from loss, from the unbearable borne,
hard-pressed by the weight of waiting:
Bright diamond! Hagia Sophia!
I am not the source or word or spirit.
I am she with whom they sit,
prudent and still as a mountain.

If you would see me,
build a home for your soul of light and glass,
warm the stones of your suffering with meaning,
attend the stars when you wake at night’s center,
find a face for me in your teachers and elders,
then look in your mirror.
I will be there with your books
and your darkness,
admiring the fugitive beauty
of purple chrysanthemums
and the faces of children
against a blue morning sky.

-Kitty Yanson 1/2022

To the reader: Thank you for taking the time to read what I have been writing (and now painting). Your time is a generosity! If you are so inclined, I invite you to follow this blog and to comment on what is here. When I was teaching creative writing at Mercy High School, we would read one another’s works and comment on them. A reader’s reactions are the most valuable guide for improvement, and I would value any of yours about content or technique or its affect on you. Even if you hated this piece, knowing why you hated it would help me a lot. So blessings, all!

May you be happy and know the root of happiness. May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering. May you dwell in peace.

Mary, Mary, Not Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

Kitty Yanson4 Comments
ky 9/2021

This all started with a meditation and a painting, the painting you see at the beginning of this reflection. I have had a devotion to the Black Madonna, who, in the words of the late Jungian analyst and author, Marion Woodman, is an embodiment of both matter and spirit, who is not just the spirit-heavy, idealized sweetness and balance of the Renaissance Blessed Mother, but a woman who is matter with real flesh and real blood and real emotions, is sensual and sexual, and not just air-possessed spiritual. This Dark Madonna is a woman whom I could relate to, who, pun intended, could matter to me.

But what about the other Mary, the one who seems so passive and bloodless as described in Luke’s narrative? What was she like under the heavy weight of that story? The picture I made that stands at the front of this essay is of Mary taking off the cloak of the Gospel of Luke. Who was THIS Mary?

In meditation, I invited her to speak with me and the cast of a few of the many forms of Katherine that live in me and speak for the diverse and faceted parts of me. (Oh, come now, you can’t tell me that you have never experienced this in your own consciousness: just listen to what is going on in your head when it’s time to get on that exercise bike or turn down that luscious slab of chocolate cake with the butter-cream icing, yes, the one that haunts your dreams.)

At any rate, Mary agreed, and this is what followed:

Me: Mary, you have been with me all of my life in story, in ceremony, in learned prayer, but I’ve never felt YOU with me. I do not think of you; I think of your dark twin sister, the Dark Madonna, in whose deep shade I have lain, who gave me comfort in my dark times. But who are you? I’ve only heard stories about you. And why are you in my garden? You are a small brown girl, not the vision of complete balance and calm that the Renaissance painters have imaged you into being.

Mary: I love your garden!  It needs some tending, though. Where I’m from, the heart of the summers is longer and stronger. I wish I had had a hose like this to water vegetables and flowers. Come, I will help you weed.

But I am wondering: why does a part of you get angry when my name is mentioned?

Katarzyna: I’ll tell you why she is angry. She gets angry because you let yourself be used and you didn’t even question it. So this stranger angel shows up in your bedroom and tells you that you that you will be God’s mom. Sure thing, Boss, you say. So, you are pregnant and you don’t know how you got that way. I sometimes think that this whole angel thing was some sort of a screen memory under which hides something really awful. They didn’t have shrinks back then, I guess, or someone would have made you go. And if you didn’t actually have a man, you end up pregnant by some bizarre pathogenesis thingy and didn’t even get to enjoy the sex part. This is what I’ve always hated—This god is a SOB god who says, you’re going to do this job, and I’m not even going to ask you if you want to. And from what I hear, you didn’t even complain. How stupidly compliant of you!

Me:  Katarzyna, please calm down. I don’t want to drive her away with your anger. I know that you have been trying to protect me all these years, but sometimes I feel you are like that old Star Trek episode where the holographic woman left over from a long-gone civilization keeps appearing with a challenge to ANYONE who arrives. “I am for you, Captain Kirk. Phasers  charged.” Your anger shuts people up. This girl came at my invitation. We owe her respect.

Mary: I understand Katarzyna’s anger, really I do. But I need to say something about where you got all this. It’s as if you know me as a woman who was made up by Facebook or some 1950’s ad agency. I am what Luke says I said and did what I did. Stories are ruthless. You know the way people make up things about the motivations of people they don’t know. Misinformation. They were trying to create a myth to support their message and some things just slid right out—like my inner struggle. Who says I just took all this without complaint? I was scared to death and confused as hell. It was NOT a good inner scene for me. But my story is told for other purposes than the inner truth in the process. It all has to serve the architecture of a story for a bigger Truth. And that’s why I went along with it. I knew in my heart even then when I was naïve and not yet educated by the centuries of myth, that love was life. Life is love. It’s a simple equity. They are the same thing in different clothing. This is the law written in my heart. And God is this, but at times in human living, we just don’t get it, don’t give it the wonder it deserves. This God is in me, in you. And when I knew this, I had no problem bringing it into the world as my child. We all are incarnates, but we forget because we don’t see it. We are focused on other stories or shiny distractions—like those moving garden ornaments I saw on TV. I guess you need stuff like that when you have no flowers. It’s like a substitute beauty, a substitute life.

But giving birth out of wedlock in those times. Yes, that was hard. Don’t you think I struggled with that as much as you struggle with the love inside you waiting to be born? So I was a young child, pregnant, who had another young child in the garden with her which was as full of weeds in September as yours is now. We run out of steam with the work and we both need to ride the back of a sturdy story. So I ride my simple story of simple equations and the other child, the other me, rides a big galooting St. Luke Christmas story which they constructed from parts of other stories when all we really wanted to say was—Damn! it’s dark in here and we are scared and we need some light because fear lives in the dark. And danger.

You feel, and rightfully so, that there were people in your life that turned away from you when you needed them, and yes, loved them, and it was desperately dark and you drew the dark around yourself like a blanket and waited until the darkness passed. We all have versions of this story in us. But we were turned away in the Bethlehem story, not because the town was angry with us or wanted harm for us but because there was no room like your mother who was a loving mother but who had so little room for you in the chaos of all those children, and you felt left in the dark. And I know that it is hard to be angry at someone for being human and limited when you are human and limited but you do not have to hate yourself because you are the only available and safest target. I doesn’t matter what happened to you so much as what you do with it that counts, obeying the law that is written on YOUR heart.

I know that it may not be as simple as all that, but you can hate me if you need to until it is safe enough. I can wait.

Let me dip back into the BIG story, the part about my going to see my cousin. You know this…you’ve said it many times with all the intensity of one who knows that one’s words are hollow…my soul doth magnify the lord…It’s not what happened to me, but it’s what I did with it that counts. I am the one who uses my life and the whole damned story into something that you can feel and taste and see and hear and smell: love. The energy of life that you as a meditator, of which I am born, consciously sit with every day. But it is with you all the time. My life magnifies this. I am here.

So let me help you weed this garden together. And maybe when we are finished this day’s work, we can all sit down on the back deck and breathe together. Katarzyna, come on. There are no dangers here. I would say take a vacation, but I know you won’t.

Katarzyna: Maybe you can get Kate to stop trying to lure some poor guy into her procrustean bed of her logic. Isn’t she getting a bit old for that?

Me. Aren’t we all. I’ll get the tea.

We all belong.

……….And, if you’ve been kind enough to stick with me this far, look at the picture of Mary that began this essay. You can see Mary putting on the cloak of words once again, as do I.

Kate, Katarzyna, Me, and Mary Sitting in Our Garden 9/2021

-Kitty Yanson, 9/2021

Anahata

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

Inside this cold is real and white.
On the drainboard the iceberg lettuce froze
filling the world with absent landlords
droning cross-wired conversations:
the rent is due the rent is due:
it’s always a bad connection.

They say that hearing is the last to go.

Here inside, the faint-hearted hunter
stalks her rodent soul; for practice
she picked off goldfish through ice-cream
scum on dishwater; ragdolls she routed
from hiding among the household bills.
In the traps she set for dragons,
snakes, or fathers–bigger game–
a rabbit lies rehearsing death.
Steel teeth hold it by the leg,
suck its flesh, as fiercely locked
as an unborn flower, petals
grit against the winter. Unmoving
the rabbit feeds its pain the blank
flow of milky quiet, unmoved.
The snare resists with the ingrown
grip of a curled childhood, groans
and gives, submitting to bloom, forced
by the hunter’s coward hand.
Freed, the rabbit leaps.

They say that suffering is the first grace.

From deep within my burrow,
above the din of bleached noises,
I hear my crippled spring snapping
angels from glaciers.
Blood sears snow and feelings hiss:

Anahata:
the lotus opens.

-Kitty Yanson

The Perfect Bind

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

Consider the source:
She is a person who has never considered herself “normal,” has come to realize that her concept of “normal” is most likely wacko, and currently has the sneaking suspicion that she just might be “it.” She is the type of individual who leads a rather quiet life externally but gets into rather bizarre situations between her two ears. There, she is in continual training for the Baltimore mind races, practices daily, and like other devotees of this reckless sport, often mistakes speed for quality. Many times she has pushed her brain’s motor well over 180 miles per hour, internal instruments indicating that the velocity and and direction were well in conformity with the logic of its own system, then crashed bloodily into reality.

During one of her convalescent periods, she decided to take the advice of some well-meaning friends and try meditation. How hard could it be? The breath goes in, the breath goes out, just focus the awareness on the breath and let your intruding thoughts just float peacefully away like a leaf on a stream. But her leaves carried on their backs brass marching bands, and she surfed after them downstream looking for the big waves to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Then she tried a guided imagery exercise she found on YouTube of some woman leading her through an imaginary journey to consult her inner wisdom figure. She enjoyed it well enough. The path through the pine forest smelled like pine. She saw the appropriate pool of water. She entered the building where the figure lived and met a marvelous woman with a face like a pared-down Polish babushka. The woman even wore a modified Grecian wisdom-giving dress. The YouTube woman told her she could ask the figure’s name. She did.

“I’m your mother,” the answer came.

“The hell you’re not,” she replied.

Consider the source.

Now that that is established, let me slip from under the third person into something a little more comfortable. (It was getting a tad warm in there anyway.)

In the early stages of my recovery from alcoholism, I had a friend, Mac, who became a kind of father-confessor and reality check-point for me. He looked a little like a seventy-year-old, bald, and wiry extra from the town scene in Moby Dick, and sounded like, while he may have been in recovery from alcoholism, he had overdosed on a lethal combination of Rousseau, episodes of The Wild Kingdom, and The Tao of Pooh.

Now, I loved Mac a lot, but I was never really sure of what reality I had checked into. I would go to see him when I was in the middle of an attack of terminal angst, usually triggered by something with the metaphysical significance of why my ’77 Honda had appointed itself as my personal guru for tolerance training or what I was going to eat for dinner. He never gave me answers or concrete explanations. He just talked, and talked…and talked: about how his truck full of capture Calvados kegs got blown up by the Germans in the Normandy Invasion; about the mating habits of various ape species; about how the Monarch Butterflies manage to find those Mexican trees in the fall. Then he would show me pages from Henry Miller’s autobiography.

Much, much later, with me half asleep on the sofa, he finally came out with his advice: “Avoid perfection at all costs.”

Now, I had been waiting three hours for this gem, and I’d heard the story before with less brandy and fewer Germans; this was the third go-round for the apes. “Aw, Mac, come on. What’s the alternative–no one ever aims to be run of the mill. That’s not in our training. We live in a country that’s in search of excellence, where winning is everything (and the only thing), where there exists such an animal that can produce 150% without exploding. What about “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat”; “Any job worth doing is worth doing well”; “No pain, no gain”? What would poor sainted Vince Lombardi say?

That’s just the problem, Mac said, misinformation; we’ve go too much of it. They start out early. You’re still in the cradle and you catch your parents’ expectations like some kind of a virus. This is the way you go to the bathroom—don’t forget to pull your pants down first. This is the way little girls play. This is the way little boys play. Don’t touch yourself; you’ll go blind. Then you go to school and you are good or bad by your A’s or F’s. Then they throw religion at you and give you a big parent in the sky who tells you that if you do like you like to do, you’ll go to your room forever. You get a little older and they tell you that if you work harder than hard, you’ll make it to the top (where ever that is). Then it turns out that if you don’t invest more than full time energy and anxiety in your work, you become a strange kind of abomination–a sinner, a social retrovert, and your own sweet mother’s heartbreak. You don’t make vice-president either. No wonder we drink. What it’s like to be a perfect human being has gotten so tangled up with misinformation that it’s impossible to sort it out.

Maybe Mac had a point: perfectionism is a dubious virtue at best. Those 1940’s movies I saw on TV when I was a kid starring some pre-adolescent girl whose beloved horse has a heart attack from the strain of his winning surge of effort at the finish line I saw from the viewpoint of my own pre-adolescence. The horse DIED. What’s so virtuous about that? Those same screenwriters who canonized the poor horse portray the hard-driving cop, the I-want-it-all superperson and even the artist chasing their vision as scornful of the limits of average humans. They are impatient, highly competitive, deadline preoccupied, time pressured, achievement oriented. Their standards are high above reach or reason…or their peers’. Characters on fire with their own potential are somehow forgivable, even at their worst, because their goals are so lofty. They either go out with a blaze of glory or go out in a blaze, and we, as spectators, love a good fireworks show.

Off the movie set, however, we don’t tend to gloss over the pitfalls of perfectionism. Its darker side is seen in the person whose self-worth is completely measured in terms of success and productivity, the individual who is paralyzed in the face of self-set, impossible goals, the student whose fear freezes her at exam time, the office worker who procrastinates the report until the night before or it is assigned to someone else. Perfection has to be faultless, without error, so the person tied to perfection is always vulnerable to being “found out,” to be found inadequate, is defensive to criticism, super-sensitive to disapproval. Often, “the best defense is offense,” and unreasonable performance standards are projected onto others, returning annoyance and more disapproval to the perfection-sick soul.

Within the past few years there has been a glut of self-help books on the market to help folks to employ cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to alleviate the self-persecutory aspects of perfectionism, but this dichotomous win or lose framework is deeply embedded in the epistemology of our Western civilization. It doesn’t allow for anything in between. One mistake equals total failure. One mistake is ALL mistake because it must follow the logic of its own system: if perfect is not perfect is not perfect is not perfect until your self-talk begins to sound like the demented computer, Hal, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This two pigeon-hole perceptual grid–perfect/imperfect leads to a rather rigid view of the way the world should be. I used to tell the kids I taught that our perceptual grid controls how we see the world. Picture this: you are walking around with a set of those cubby-style mailboxes in front of you. Someone throws an apple or a banana at you and you can experience dessert. If they throw a watermelon, however, you get a smushed mess or nothing. As a morality frame, this is a pretty judgmental (and besides, nobody wants a smushed watermelon living next door or, god forbid, married to your daughter). So everyone is saint or sinner, madonna or whore, democrat or republican (duck), and yourself an ego-maniac with an inferiority complex. This can make you pretty unpopular with yourself and/or other people unless, you can find others with the same perceptual grid as you and form your own religion.

My own Catholic upbringing called this way of thinking scrupulosity (although I don’t remember any of the nuns ever saying one could be too good–they usually didn’t bother you in that direction unless you kept leaving class to go to confession every two hours). Scrupulosity swings two ways. For example, I am old enough to remember when it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays. OK. You’ve gone to the home of a non-Catholic friend (we called them publics) for dinner and your fiend’s mother served you a hot dog. You’ve forgotten it’s Friday and you take a bite. All of a sudden Divine Intervention did its thing: OH MY GOD, IT’S FRIDAY and you’re caught on the crest of a moral dilemma . You can a) spit the bite of hot dog disgustedly onto your plate or at your friend’s dog (while praying hard that your friend’s pet would not become the hot dog of hell); or b) swallow the hot dog, and, since you have already been condemned, finish the bite and run out to the nearest steak house for the biggest prime cut you can find.

The scrupulous self-evaluator will, of course, find it difficult to achieve any goal that requires protracted, daily effort. The runner will be torn between inertia and shin-splints, the dieter between starvation and Godiva deep dives. It takes some major cognitive retraining to even begin to see “progress” over “perfection.”

I don’t know, Mac. Maybe we are too balled up in misinformation to even start to know what real perfection is. I hesitate to throw the concept out completely. I still find it pretty repulsive to “aim for average” and still suffer from PTSD from a graduate school teacher who kept grading my papers B+ (as an incentive to do better, mind you!). And I don’t see anything called The Quest for Mediocrity on the New York Times best seller list. It still seems too simple, vaguely immoral to do as you implied and please yourself and let it go at that. Perhaps part of my problem lies in the word itself–perfect seems to have a set of self-cancelling meanings, an internal equivocation. On the one hand it is “the state of complete excellence, free from any flaw or imperfections of quality; faultless. That meaning plunges into never-never land, where potential is posited by act, where a touchable reality is only a starting point. Yet, perfect also means “having all its parts, all of its essential characteristics; complete. To be a perfect human being, then, is to be flawed and….

Hold it. The third-person writer wishes to interrupt. She feels as if there is an intrusion dangerously into her territory and this is one of her favorite places to spin out. She is fond of fantasizing about what it would be like to live inside a self-relevant construction–to be perfect is not to be perfect is close enough. To be a perfect human being is to have all its parts. Part of being human is having flaws; to be flawed is not to be perfect. To have all its parts, a human has the ability to abstract a perfection it is not. Or is it? (Isn’t this fun?) She wonders if the Hebrews forbade the utterance of the name of God, Yahweh, I am Who am, because of its self-relevance, back and forth in a spinning mystery. If the writer keeps this up, continually rebounding against the sides of meaning, where would it eventually take her? If she were a computer, would she self-destruct? Would she implode into a black hole? She imagines that it would be like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole with no end. Lines of memory remaining where her thoughts touched the walls of reason, mirroring the shape of the double helix….

I’m sorry. I seem to have lost myself for a moment there. She must have jumped me when I wasn’t looking. Well Mac, if you are listening to me from heaven, we seem to have made a fine mess of this essay. Your thesis, to avoid perfection at all costs, is still fighting in me with Sister Mary Rigida, Theory Z, the old afternoon soaps and the Green Bay Packers, a sad and unreasonable state of affairs. I will not blame the reader one bit for dropping out completely. But we can’t say we didn’t warn you. It seems as though “authorities” on this subject are a little more skewed than we thought: a writer whose judgment cannot be trusted, a self-admitted old fool , and a hopelessly confused “I” in between.

Consider the source. Really.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

Lisa Bridge unties her halter top
so the sun can play unfettered
her untempered clavicle
her shoulders’ rounded notes:
Allegra.
Mr. Bridge in his upstairs bedroom
watches his daughter on the lawn
through panes of old glass
that ripple like heat risen long-ago.
The tongue of her thigh parts
the wide mouth of her shorts.
Her hair in amber rebellion
falls in the indoor quiet
like sweat beneath white linen.
With her father just the day before
she practiced Juliet from the balcony:
Wherefore art thou Romeo?

It is August.
The afternoon is sullen.
Mr. Bridge makes love to his wife,
her curlers in rows of recapitulation,
her eyes wide as a daylight owl,
irises wild in an ungardened field,
their pupils, pinpoints
of a thousand doubts surprised mid-dance,
or none. Their sheets are stained
with silence and mown grass.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge will go
to Paris to view the Louvre.
He will admire the Winged Victory.
For the sake of tradition,
he will bury his daughter
wrapped in tea and burlap
until she, too, has no arms and head,
appearing ancient and all wings,
on the lawn, a gift for his wife.

Mrs. Bridge will join an art class
and paint a woman standing
calmly in the ocean’s surf,
holding a swan of Dresden china.
She has no feet.
Outside the gilt
of this portrait’s frame,
the firebombing has begun.

-Kitty Yanson

Proofing the Generations

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

In memory of my mother, gone and ungone.

In the back of the pantry, behind the oatmeal,
to the right of the dried milk and cans of pencil stubs,
on a willow-ware plate,
my mother lives
beneath a blue glass bowl.

I watch her brew beneath the glass and wait
for her to storm the surface with her flesh,
impress against its imperfections, cracks
and chips. She’ll crawl into arms of spider galaxies
to grout her sky with great clouds of self.
She will rise
until the horizon breathes to her rhyme,
balanced like a babe on her white hip.

My fingers sink hollows that do not heal
into her round skin.
Dinner’s at eight.
The table is set,
butter knives sharpened for this occasion,
heavy with need, thick with expectation.

But she rises still, breeding beyond her promise,
rebellious as a heartbeat,
sticking to the roof of my soul,
beyond the prying of my words.

-Kitty Yanson

A Sort-Of Love Poem

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

This poem is not your regular erotic;
The usual metaphors of fruit and flowers,
the sweetness of vegetable amours,
do not apply: we are not viney lovers.
No, we see used moonflowers, limp
on the concrete at dawn and laugh
at their resemblance to condoms killed.
Venus does not rule here, but Mars.

You lean close to my ear and the whisper
of my name becomes an arrow hissing
by my cheek. You bury lightening strikes
into my earth; I break open, a gibberish of breasts
and mouth against the volley of your fingertips
and blasts of deprivation,
and, alas, my wide wound weeps
with glowing sorrow.

Infiltrate, dear enemy. Bury your dead deep
behind my lines, and then, perhaps, wild grape
will grow to mark our mutual surprise.
Later, when the sun comes again through
the stained glass window to scar the wall
above my bed with blue light,
surely, our peace will be stained
with strong blood metaphors, oh, my sudden soul,
is this birdsong?

-Kitty Yanson

my reading