Tag: laughter

Insistent Joy Series

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

It has been hard lately to stay optimistic in this time of unsettled turmoil and division. One way I have been trying to cope is to look for moments of joy in my daily life, whether it be my cat Francis acting like his silly self or the heavy yield of moonflowers over my front entrance or a phone call from a dear friend when a text will just not cut it. Some days I have to work hard to keep my intention to joy ever on the lookout for golden moments (ok, some days a shiny piece of aluminum foil will have just have to do).

Painting this series is one of my ways.

Joy in the Forest of Blank.

This painting really is a collage of string for the trees and paint for the person. A study of contrasts, it reminds me, as C.G. Jung says, to hold the tension between the opposites until the third, the Transcendent, emerges. Not easy even on a good day.

Infestation of Humor

I love this goofy girl on her goofy horse infecting the grey forest with laughter. Heard and good jokes lately? There’s always cat videos!

Out of Chaos Comes the Dance

This canvas started as a repository for left-over paint, all globby and clashing. Then I saw people moving and trying to get free from their acrylic confines. I join them in my living room, often to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” It’s hard to be sad when the blood is coursing and the breath is far from even. Join us!

Turning

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

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

Immortality

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

My mother would have been 100 today.
Two, two two two two two she tittered
when asked her birthday. Back then,
all eight of us misbehaved in all directions:
Peter tortured Claudia’s hair with scissors;
Frogs from the creek found their way into bedsheets;
Strangers, reading dog tags momma
made Jack wear, returned our wanderer
from the last remaining barn In Northwood.
Sometimes, strap in hand, face pink as
our backyard peonies, she’d grab the nearest,
perhaps one with fanny prophylactically
padded with philosophy books from
the living room shelves. She laughed,
trying not to, yet sometimes happy thunder
struck, and she could not stop,
her laughter winding up
like an outboard motor, round and round
the circular pond of threadbare chairs
until no voice remained, only her breath,
like Precious Pup the cartoon dog
we watched on Saturday mornings,
her laugh went round and round until
we were all whirled up in a tornado of mirth,
all of us thrown to the floor and holding bellies
aching with joy, my brothers rolling around
like pups in their punishment of glee.

I got that way too, caught by fun,
laughing so hard I lost the sound
or, worse yet, sent out waves
of cackle that pulled my students
into a merry whirlwind. Out of control,
I imagined the other teachers said of my class,
out of control, such a frivolous fit.
I know mom sat with me then,
her laughing ghost in my teachers’ chair,
as close to me as breathing.

I like to think that some child
I taught grows up and laughs so hard
that she, in turn, catches her children
in a lasso of merriment and all
fall out of control for the good of joy.

And in the years ahead,
another all-grown-up child releases her
always-ready laughter two hundred years after
my mother’s two two two two two birth.

She will be there, and I with her,
in our legacy of laughter,
now nameless and faceless,
moving through the years
like love.