Whims & Gems

Send in your Gemini themed questions for my birthday season to dearmercury@substack.com

As many of you know it is my birthday season and so for those of you who love the Gemini part of your chart (and everybody’s got a Gem in them somewhere ;) - I’ve compiled a moodboard to celebrate us! Gemini has such a beautiful pollinating quality about it and I feel like this image from Thursday’s opening procession of Sail Through This to That is a great example of this (shout out to fellow Gem Olivia Dwyer at the Fabric Workshop Museum for this pic!)

Gemini meets, greets and gets a sense of the environment and how we are connected within it and that’s exactly what we did as we processed from the Historic President’s House through Old City in Philadelphia where Ona Judge escaped from the most powerful family in the newly forming United States (the Washingtons) on May 21st, 1796. As a group we formed a human river of drumming and choral performance and live intimate musical performances down to the Delaware river to see new sails rise where Ona had boarded a ship called the Nancy to sail to her freedom. More photos and video to come. It was a beautiful afternoon.

Sail Through This to That procession. Image by Olivia Dwyer.

In this image, I am getting into position at the fore of the procession as one of three ginkgo leaf bearers carrying strips of sailcloth with hopes/dreams/prayers for participants’ individual experiences of liberation written on them to be lifted by the wind and carried down to the water.

Gingko is a major design element in the sails with its association with memory. The historic ginkgo tree at Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia was planted in 1785. It is the sole survivor of the first three ginkgo specimens brought to North America, making it the oldest documented tree of its kind on the continent. Gingkos are over 200 million years old and incredibly resilient as the only surviving member of their entire plant division (Ginkgophyta). Much can be said about the resilience of this plant and the resilience of displaced tribal nations on Turtle Island, indigenous Africans stolen to the Americas, all of their descendants, and the resilience of the most vulnerable among us everywhere, including Dominique Rem’mie Fells who we honored alongside Ona on Thursday.

Gemini is associated with the planet Mercury who is, as you know, a psychopomp, a kind of archetype able to freely pass between the realms of the living and the dead, the human realm and the realms of the Gods to facilitate communication of all kinds. What questions do you have about Gemini as an archetype and energy and way of being? Send them in to dearmercury@substack.com and tune in at the end of the week for answers.