Saturn, Dreaming of Mercury (pt 1)

I didn’t fail a single paper until I was a freshman in college.

I had spent my entire lifetime waiting until the last minute to write something only to turn it in and get immediate approval. I’d have notes, too. Pressed into the thin college ruled paper, oozing with red ink, messages of support—you should really look into writing, Elora.

I did not know the power of revision because I hadn’t ever had to use it.

And then, the failing grade.

I remember that day with clarity. It was a small classroom. My desk faced the door. I was laughing with some friends when our professor begin passing back our first assignment. It was a personal essay, and I had written about something that at the time felt undeniably true. I didn’t look over it before turning it in; didn’t read over my words to make sure they felt the same way they did when they sang through my veins. I wrapped up the story, stretched my wrists, and shoved the papers in my backpack eager for the praise I knew I would receive.

How smart, he would say. How insightful.
I’m so excited to have you in my class.

I felt confident, clearly. This was not where I experienced anxiety—I knew language, could feel the was she whispered to life within me. Math was foreign to these bones. Logic, too.

I was all feeling.
All heart.
All story.

He placed the paper face down on my desk and when I flipped it over, there were no messages of support. Instead, an F graced the top of the page—underlined twice, for good measure.

This is definitely an F, those lines seemed to say.

I started at it for a moment, thinking it was some kind of mistake. I glanced to the corner, making sure it was my name attached to that grade. It was. My mouth popped open in confusion. If I wasn’t good at this, if I was a failure (as the grade seemed to suggest), then who was I? My entire identity wrapped around this golden thread.

I didn’t know I had to pull it.
I didn’t know I was meant to unearth it.

//

I struggled through the rest of that semester, and found a bit of relief when I moved into the next Literature class. Professor Shelbourne leaned into metaphor—that Greek word that means to carry across. In another lifetime that I could not see at the time, I would one day teach his son, the tables reversed in an odd way that speaks to how time is a spiral instead of a line. In that moment though, he cracked open a door for me: there were messages in stories if we looked hard enough. Kernels of truth buried in words that when squeezed, would emit the sharpest scent of awareness and knowing. If we followed that scent, we’d drop into the thing behind the thing. The both/and of storytellers and myth makers.

With him, I learned the lure of a trickster.
I just didn’t know it yet.

//

Synchronicity always lands within me like a clanging bell. And this week, it’s been ringing—brushing up against my ribcage, demanding attention, forcing me to pause.

It started with a message that came in the middle of the night. I’d woken up at my cat’s insistence she be fed, but there was that smoky aftertaste of a dream that I couldn’t escape. I grabbed her food and leaned over her bowl, waiting for the plop of food. I had my eyes closed, willing that tendril of smoke to turn into images. I was missing something. Or I had forgotten something. There, in that liminal space of morning, I saw a woman leaning toward me. I saw her mouth moving, her eyes wide with urgency for the message she had to give. Her hands were on my arms.

Trickster. She had said. You must be a trickster to escape the enemy’s grasp.

I knew, in that tiny space of intuition where words are not yet formed, that this was a goddess. She’d come to me before in dreams, and her she was again.

With one eye open to see the screen, I fumbled with the keyboard on my phone. I needed to get this message down before I lost it. I needed to get it out before falling asleep again.

//

A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch in our living room when something to my left caught my attention. I turned to capture the movement, thinking I would see a cat lurking in our backyard or a squirrel performing acrobatics in order to steal the birdseed hanging from our pergola. It was neither. I gasped and dropped my book, standing up without thinking.

“Hey love?” I called toward my husband. “I think there’s a fox in our backyard.”

“A fox?” He asked, confused. “In the middle of the day?”

I rushed toward the back door, pulling out my phone. I needed to capture this—it felt important. The fox turned and looked at me through the window before turning and walking toward something. She pounced, and then started playing with it, before walking toward the shadows and collapsing into the grass for rest.

My husband had joined me then, was watching the animal with curiosity.

“Why would a fox be here in the middle of the day?” He mused.

I knew though.
It was a message.

Be alert. The eyes told me when she turned her attention toward me. Stay cunning. Listen to your intuition.

The next day, I pulled cards.
I pulled Mercury.
And right under that word, was a fox.

//

A few days after my dream with the woman, I am pulling cards again. I open my Chani journal to write down my thoughts, and pause. There, on the page right before March turns to April, a past version of me had written the words remember the fox. Stay cunning. Listen to your intuition. Be wise.

I do not remember writing this message to myself, but there it was—moments in time converging, the message clear. It is here I remember the book I purchased about six years ago—The Trickster Makes this World. I went and pulled it off the shelf and cracked it open to the first page.

I guess it’s time, I thought.

//

My junior year of college, I had Dr. Cole for Poetry. I’ve written about her influence before, how her art saves lives pin that she wore every single day shone into the darkness of my psyche with a pinprick of light. By the time I’d reached her class, my writing had been refined. I’d learned that there was no such thing as a perfect first draft. I’d survived the dreaded Western Civ course that every student was required to take, had read the entirety of Dante’s Inferno, had begun to unravel the ways in which history always overlaps into literature—and vice versa. And it was in her class where I experienced the first request for revisions.

I had written a paper on John Donne and the many personas he took with his writing. It fascinated me—tapping into different energies and signing your name a specific way to reference which John the reader was experiencing. I got a B, but Dr Cole pulled me into her office. “This is good, Elora.” She told me. “But there’s something else here. Keep pushing. Revise it and turn it in to me by Friday.”

I balked, but did as requested.
She asked for two more revisions.

At first, I was frustrated. I felt as if there was something specific she was wanting me to see. Something she could see that I could not. I know now that what she saw was my potential—my own insight into this poet who held such gravitas and nuance. The more I chewed on the kernels I found, the more I caught the scent and the deeper I went. There was a truth here I was circling, like a hound.

Like a fox.

The final paper I gave her was an A. It was the first time since high school that a teacher had written an encouraging note in the margins of my words.

//

In the introduction of The Trickster Makes this World, Lewis Hyde mentions of Saturn, dreaming of Mercury. I laughed out loud when I saw that phrase, a deep resonance clanging through my bones like that of a bell.

It’s me, I thought. As much as I hate it, as much as I resist it, it’s me.

I am Saturnian discipline, dreaming of Mercurial freedom.
I am slow, dreaming of quickness.

It’s why I waited to the last minute all those years. If I forced myself into proximity of rushing, I would have no choice but to tap into the Mercurial lion resting in my 10th house. I did not want the Saturnian speaking. The one with so many conjunctions, holding the scales of justice, and resting deep in my psyche in the 12th house—I did not want those thoughts to reach the light of day.

No thank you.

But the kernels of truth are hiding there, underground. It’s the lion that has the bravery to say the thing, but the fox is the one who must be cunning enough to find it.

//

There is something else here—something tender.

It’s the language of the Heartwood, exposed. And as someone with an intense desire to keep certain things hidden, of course I wait to rush through the writing of things. Because then I don’t have to reckon with the truth trying to be discovered. Then I don’t have to face that those words in that sentence make no sense because it is not the thing behind the thing. It is not rio abajo rio. It is just…there. A dead thing. A no-named thing. A thing with no pulse.

The paper I received an F was a paper about my lore. And at the time, I wrote the lore that was acceptable. The stories I believed to be true because they were the stories that were told to me. There were not the stories backed up against the edges of my inner forest, placed in a chest and locked away for safekeeping by my own internal trickster. If I had read the words back to myself, I would have felt the ways in which they held no pulse and that inner knowing would have keened her demand for reckoning.

But it was not time yet.

And so I spoke words made of plastic, until I knew how to speak words made of flesh—how to pull the golden thread of life, of the erotic, up and out of my throat.