There is a big God out there counting the stars as they pass through the gate to universal pastures, feeding each its eon-ration of cloudy nebulae.
I am, I am told, a distant relative of stars, a supernova memory in its death-belch of hydrogen and dust, heaven’s indigestion hardened into clay.
I am a quantum in creation, a second in divine expression, as brief as the urge to blink, wee as a fruit-fly’s toe, smaller than just a thought and justly as large.
There is a little God too (the same one, actually) who dances with mockingbirds on the hot asphalt lots, who summons tiny suns from mosses growing between paving stones, who dares into play the stuttering desires for rebirth and destruction.
This little God has a big job too shepherding stars and children, small in stature, large in being, across the quadrants of our park constructing the contagion of laughter under our earth-shining moon, to entangle us with hope.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
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.
(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.
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 