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| The Three of Cups card from Shadowscapes Tarot. Three mermaids are suspended in the center of the image, gathered in a circle of current, their tails entwined together. Each mermaid holds a large cup, which is filled with water, and each holds it out towards the other. |
Who are you a grateful descendant of?
What connects you to these ancestors? Is your relationship to them biological, philosophical, artistic, spiritual, or/and purposeful?
What values do your ancestral relationships ask you to honor in your relationship to the world?
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On July 1, 2024, the Sun moved into the second decan of Cancer, that ruled by Mercury, planet of translation, liminality, and voice.
Mercury in a water sign is considered mute, a quality that can color the realm of communication with shades of intrigue, subtext, and non-traditional languages. What is body language, and how does it feel to speak it? What is love language, and what does it mean to understand it? What is it like when you need not say a word to be properly comprehended by the one you love (or the one you loathe)? Today, I am dreaming of a place and time when we break down the gates of connection, busting through laws we assumed were “natural” and casting aside the false value we once thought they had, and thus move through to the other side, to a new world where we need not share common language or preference or perspective or experience to hold each other as precious, and move together through the magic of our shared existence, as if in a dance.
Such a place is literally fantastic, a fantasy I have. But it is also possible and existent. This place may be embodied by many types of relational systems but one system that I know already embodies these values is that of the ancestral world, which is not exactly a location but more a practice of locating ourselves in relation to those who came before us, and those who will come after. The ancestral world is not a waystation, but a way of life.
Lots of things that we might have considered impossible can exist in this deep, watery, mercurial place. What we owe to each other can take root in the dirt of this place. What we struggle to disinherit from each other can trace its history in the waters of that world. What future might be built from the ashes of our childhoods can rise from the shores of the underworld and find a way into the light.
My keywords for the Three of Cups and Mercury in Cancer are ancestral relationality and celebration of the mysteries of care. In addition, and in general: love requires dynamic multiplicity, and our survival is interdependent.
Therefore, the book I read for this decan is the indescribably great novel Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.
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| The book cover of the novel Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. |
This book, this book, this book. Louise Erdrich has natal Mercury in Cancer, and I would argue that it shows in this, her debut longform work, a book that weaves many voices of two families together and apart, against and between, away and through each other. The novel (written while Erdrich was in her twenties) writes elders with utter compassion (heavy and deep as an ocean) and intention (sharp as a blade of moonlight). If you’ve read and loved this book, you already know; if you have not, yet, below are three excerpts that center the three core female elders of Love Medicine: June Kashpaw, Marie Lazarre, and Lulu Nanapush.
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From THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMAN (Albertine Johnson, 1981)
After that false spring, when the storm blew in covering the state, all the snow melted off and it was summer. It was almost hot by the week after Easter, when I found out, in Mama’s letter, that June was gone–not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow.
Far from home, living in a white woman’s basement, that letter made me feel buried, too. I opened the envelope and read the words. I was sitting at my linoleum table with my textbook spread out to the section on “Patient Abuse.” There were two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw. Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out it was almost a relief.
“We knew you probably couldn’t get away from your studies for the funeral,” said the letter, “so we never bothered to call and disturb you.”
She always used the royal we, to multiply the censure of what she said by invisible others.
I put down the letter and just stared, the way you do when you are hit by a bad thing you can do nothing about. At first it made me so angry that Mama hadn’t called me for the funeral that I couldn’t even feel the proper way for Aunt June. Then after a while I saw where I was staring–through the window at the level of the earth–and I thought of her.
I thought of June sitting tense in Grandma’s kitchen, flicking an ash, jiggling a foot back and forth in a pointed shoe. Or smartly cracking her purse to buy each of us children a dairy cone. I thought of her brushing my hair past my waist, when it was that long, and saying that I had princess hair. Princess hair! I wore it unbraided after she said that, until it tangled so badly that Mama cut precious inches off…
…I saw her laughing, so sharp and determined, her purse clutched tight at the bar, her perfect legs crossed.
“Probably drank too much,” Mama wrote. She naturally hadn’t thought well of June. “Probably wandered off too intoxicated to realize about the storm.”
But June grew up on the plains. Even drunk she’d have known a storm was coming. She’d have known by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She’d have gotten that animal sinking in her bones.
I sat there at my table, thinking about June. From time to time, overhead, I heard my landlady’s vacuum cleaner. Through my window there wasn’t much to see–dirt and dead snow and wheels rolling by in the street. It was warm but the grass was brown, except in lush patches over the underground steam pipes on the campus. I did something that day. I put on my coat and went walking down the street until I came to a big stretch of university lawn that was crossed by a steam-pipe line of grass–so bright your eyes ached–and even some dandelions. I walked out there and lay down on that patch of grass, above the ground, and I thought of Aunt June until I felt the right way for her.
From THE ISLAND (Lulu Nanapush)
I never grew from the curve of my mother’s arms. I still wanted to anchor myself against her. But she had tore herself away from the run of my life like a riverbank, leaving me to spill out alone.
Following my mother, I ran away from the government school. I ran away so often that my dress was always the hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned sidewalks the matrons forced me to wash. Punished and alone, I made and tore down and remade all the dormitory beds. I lived by bells, orders, flat voices, rough English. I missed the old language in my mother’s mouth.
Sometimes, I heard her. N’dawnis, n’dawnis. My daughter, she consoled me. Giizhawenimin. Her voice came from all directions, keeping me from inner harm. Her voice was the struck match. Her voice was the steady flame. But it was my old uncle Nanapush who wrote the letters that brought me home.
…I needed my mother the more I became like her–a Pillager kind of woman with a sudden body, fierce outright wishes, a surprising heart. I needed her when Rushes Bear’s son, Nector Kashpaw, started looking at me with an insisting glance. I could have had him if I’d jumped. I don’t jump for men, but I was thinking of maybe stepping high, when Nanapush came into the house and told me I should forget Nector Kashpaw.
“He went with that Lazarre girl.”
I set down a bowl of dough to rise. The Lazarre’s skin was pale as the dough beneath the towel and I suddenly reached underneath and punched the sweet mound so it hissed. I rolled it into white balls and pulled them flat to fry, cooked the bangs golden to eat with hot grease. While they sizzled, I stirred my syrup hard, boiling and sweetening the juice of sour chokecherries.
…Rushes Bear couldn’t help herself. She insisted there was too much salt in my stews, but all the same she forked the meat onto her plate. She poked my bare shins with sticks, pointed out bits of dirt I’d missed, raked at my hair with claws for a comb, even while sighing how she preferred me to the Lazarre.
One day I couldn’t stand it anymore and went down to the lake. I sat on a rock hard as my feelings and I stared at the island where Moses Pillager lived. The place was small and dark at the center of a wide irritation of silver water. The longer I stared, the more I got to thinking, and the deeper I thought, the more I remembered about Moses Pillager. I saw him wild, stalking through the town, a boy with no light in his eyes. One summer long ago, when I was a little girl, he came to Nanapush and the two sat beneath the arbor, talking only in the old language, arguing the medicine ways, throwing painted bones and muttering over what they had lost or gained. I remembered, too, that he was impossible for me. Related. The more I thought about how wrong he was, the harder I stared at the island.
From THE BEADS (Marie Kashpaw, 1948)
Nector’s mother got her name from the time she went at a bear, no weapon in her hand. As I have heard it told, the bear turned from her straight charge. The same with me. I learned not to meet Rushes Bear head-on. So when she showed up one morning, I pretended at first not to see her. She was down at the slough, a gun cradled close, sighting into the reeds. She followed a mallard with the barrel, peppered it, then gave a high trill.
Gordie heard the sounds and ran to see what she brought down. I turned away, went into the barn, decided no matter what happened I wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t care. My son came to me, his pants dripping wet, the bird hanging from one fist.
“Grandma’s on her way up the hill.”
“Pluck that thing,” I ordered him.
Then she was there, behind me as I milked the cow, skimmed cream. I could feel her sharp eyes pricking my sweater, my big man’s shirt, and I knew she saw exactly how far along this baby was because she had delivered many. I turned to greet her, as my mother, though she’d been a disappointment of my hopes as much as I was of hers. Her face was vivid, carved on thin bones, and she had withered powerfully, evaporated into the shape of her own opinions. Although I’d faced down the raging nun and had no fear of my own relatives, although I wasn’t afraid of the French priest, although I had slapped away men who came to work on Nector when he was sober, I was edgy in the presence of Rushes Bear.
She peered into my little white cream can, made a noise to indicate that the amount inside was pitiful. I was saving cream to sell in those days, trying to make butter, piecing quilts, sewing other people’s clothes, beading dance outfits, whatever I could do to get by without Nector. I even tried to sell our cats, our kittens, and dried teas and berries we picked. I had thought of bringing the old lady’s mallard to the store when I saw it in Gordie’s hand, but I didn’t dare suggest it. We needed some basics–salt, flour, sugar–to put up the chokecherries, money for dress and pants material, and now, it hit me–because I knew in that first moment that she intended to stay–we needed money for the special things that Rushes Bear liked. The sore-joint creams and footbath salts, the molasses for her cravey tooth. The only thing that wouldn’t cost money, I thought to comfort myself, was this baby.
I knew it was a girl because of June, because of how bad I had yearned to keep her. And in spite of how we barely made it through each day, I wanted this baby. I lacked softness in my life, a sweet breath. I didn’t expect good to come from anything I did anymore, but I would have this little baby, mine alone.
“Goes bad quick,” was all Rushes Bear said of my kept cream.
“Stinks,” she said of the only place we had for her to sleep.
“Saaah!” She hated all she saw and all we did.
She began to throw pots around and smack the walls with a stick of wood. She was burning with an old woman’s furious dread. Still, she raised her feather and her braid of sweetgrass and began to bless the house. Her blessings could hold rocks, we knew. Soon she left off with bringing down the good from above, and started slinging accusations.
“Leave this place,” I told her when she began to call me names. I could take the son’s absence but not his mother’s presence.
“You’re too much trouble,” I said when her shouts grew worse and worse.
“I’ll throw you out of here myself,” I said, going at her.
At that, she finally grew quiet and tried to still herself, brushing her own face with the feather of the eagle, touching the beautiful blue beads on the tip, the white buckskin fringe she had sewed there to honor it. Her voice came from a far place, very small, and she said to me, “I have nowhere else to go.”
So she tamed down and stayed. She had looked over the bleak edge of her life, saw that I was her last hold. In the days that followed, I was surprised to find that she seemed to have noticed the shape of my loneliness. Maybe she found it was the same as hers.
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Closing questions:
Of your ancestors (biological as well as not), to whom would you first turn to seek counsel in a time of crisis?
Of your ancestors, to whom would you first turn to share your cup when it overflows with joy, grief, or thanks?
Close your eyes. Imagine your descendants. (For those of us who will have no biological descendants, please return to the opening question above to remember all other ways we will relate to descendants beyond biology, if doing so would be helpful.) Now ask of them, and of yourself–
How can I help?
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