On ancestors, laughter, tears, hope & magic

by Kayce Stevens Hughlett

Sometimes I cry for no reason at all. The same thing happens with laughter. I get caught up in the joy and simplicity of living this thing called life—the pathway that has all become one journey. It’s hard to discern the inner world from the outer or the mundane from miracles, they are all so intertwined. I feel like I’m on a watery path these days. The lines of this story aren’t straight like precise rows of wheat. They are curved like a drunken toddler aiming her scooter toward a swimming pool. We know someone will get wet, but will they drown or giggle? The metaphors pour out of me like rain gushing inside Hurricane Matthew, but I need more than metaphor and simile. It can all be exhausting, this making meaning out of everything and so I turn to a few of my favorite things: hope and magic, laughter and tears… Join me, if you like. 

To stir up hope and magic, let everything else go and allow yourself to laugh or cry from deep inside your belly. Welcome the kind of laughter or gut wrenching tears that happens when amidst safe and trusted friends.  Sometimes these friends are the unseen kind, like the ancestors from my past, the ones I only know through faded photographs. Or those whose names I’ve heard whispered in the night just below my consciousness. Somehow I know they’re near and when I’m open to them, my emotions summon these ethereal friends like wind chimes blowing in a fairytale forest. Laughter is magic. It calls up ship captains from across the Scandinavian sea and dairy farmers from Irish pastures, dancing French girls, drumming Cherokee chieftains. 

Laughter is contagious. It resonates through centuries bringing all of time into one infinitesimal moment. Tears do the same thing when we allow them to flow unabashedly. Sometimes laughter turns to tears and other times, tears turn into laughter. The two play back and forth in a watery dance. It’s all about releasing the potency. The goddess Psyche was born from a dewdrop and Aphrodite rose to life from the sea. I imagine much potent laughter accompanied their arrivals.

There is a fictional character who shows up in my journals named Lucille. She is one angry and profane woman. Lucille is pissed because she’s trapped. Trapped inside the infinite stitches of ancestral threads and cords of forgotten bones. She’s surrounded by hungry ghosts begging to be fed, pleading to be acknowledged. She reminds me to pay attention to the sea captain in my SoulCollage card and the rooftop dancer in my journal—the hungry ghosts who are met and fed through creativity and laughter. Great Aunt Trudy, my own glorious Gilmore girl, building her house in the Mojave Desert. Aunts Grace, Arcylla, and Sally touring across Europe with their painted crimson lips and birdlike bodies. Mighty women, these, all from my father’s side. 

What of my mother’s people? The clear blue eyes come from Grandpa Birt Moore and likely those before him. It is their eyes I see, but not their stories. The Stevens, my father’s line, were darker, more mystical. Both lineages filled with silent men and women, hungry ghosts whose voices were never heard. They beg to be heard now, to join me as I follow the pathway across the beckoning bridge. My journey is theirs, too. Together we shall cross the chasm, dance in the field with open arms, and dare to go deep into the forest. Keep writing, my love, they say. Keep telling your story and ours will come, too. 

We shall cry until we laugh and laugh until we cry… sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes for all the reason in the world.