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
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.
“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.
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.
Above, the forsythia arced, its vigil done, its yellow childhood yielded. Green held all in a network snood: July’s blue air, the calls of yesterday’s friends. I lay on my back; above me branched a basket; the alleyway a Nile. I waited, a female Moses-child among the reeds for Pharaoh’s daughter. My people must go free from this fertile land, this silent mind.
Above, the forsythia arced. In that tunnel that smelled of tomcat and earthwork trenches freshly dug for plastic Cossacks, stalls for the horses of Tsars of Russia, their forelegs insouciant, ever-enthralled in prance—and never did they sleep—in that cave I hid to practice different voices as boys would load and cock toy rifles, I said the name of God: as the groan of a glacier’s thaw; as the melt of cherry ice on a picnic bench in June; as the cube that rings against the glass; as the sear of snow in winter, hot upon my cheek; as a sudden snow hoards first things in its heart. My finger drew an ache around my breast. A ladybug crawled from beneath my hiked-up shirt, unshelled her wings in a fizz, was born to air.
My childhood lives eternal, an always still an always moving promise silent and said, a covenant that lets me ride toy horses into psychic darkness, calling me to say the name of God: as the squirrel’s plea for longer summers; as the revel of gnats around the kitchen sink; as the certainty of death; as the failure of words. My hand against my thigh supports my aging bones upstairs to sleep. Again a child, and borne by breath, to dream that when I die, I write again each time some soul exploring reads this paper scrap, I’ll meet with them, recalling meaning shared in God’s forever, past the arc of time.
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
This winter’s unexceptional in its decay the miscanthus has ceased its flagrant waltz, and from the garden a golem of dry grass rises. A single leaf dallies in the sweet gum tree, and a crow, like Rhadamanthus calls: Fall!
This time of deprivation I am used to. I’ve found a trick for it: when the seed lies underground, before its maggot roots gnaw deep to corrupt the earth with hope, lie still: do not desire.
But this unexceptional season won’t be stilled: the germ turns, restless in its bed and dreams of greatness, parting quadrants of summer stars with irascible limbs.
I am struck awake by the cold bite of your not-quite promises. Buried in my silence, arms of longing burrow beneath the wet oak leaves.
You go again. The door closes. I stand by the door exactly where I saw you last. And for one slow moment, I breathe the May air.
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 