Larkin & Betsey Lee have been hanging around for awhile now.
Nearly 10 years ago, I was checking in on one of my favorite weekly astrology columns in The Valley Advocate, a local independent newspaper in Western Massachusetts.
The column, called FREE WILL ASTROLOGY, still runs in many off-beat papers across the U.S., and its insights have always resonated with me.
I first discovered its prophetic wisdom long before the rise of Chani Nicholas and Co-Star, long before I knew I was a *Leo Sun / Capricorn Moon / Scorpio rising,* and long before I fully understood what those placements mean for my own journey as a human body careening through the stars.
My first discoveries of FREE WILL ASTROLOGY came in early high school, somewhere between the years of 2000 and 2003, when I would sit with my friends in the back room of Primo Pizzeria on Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts to see what the column’s author, Rob Brezsny, had to say about our complex, teen-aged lives.
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY horoscopes have a special knack for balancing the urgent and the playful. Brezsny skillfully draws our attention to the subtle currents that carry ancestral, psychic, and spiritual messages into our present realities.
The message I received on that day back in 2013 was hard to ignore:
ATTENTION PLEASE: This is your ancestors speaking. We've been trying to reach you through your dreams and fantasies, but you haven't responded. That's why we've commandeered this space. So listen up. We'll make it brief.
You're at a crossroads analogous to a dilemma that has baffled your biological line for six generations. We ask you now to master the turning point that none of us have ever figured out how to negotiate. Heal yourself and you heal all of us. We mean that literally. Start brainstorming, please.
When I received this message in 2013, I was living away from Western Mass for the first time in my life, having pulled up roots three years earlier to relocate to New York City for graduate school.
After finishing up a two-year Master’s program at New York University, I had just begun a PhD program in Women’s + Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
I was living with a rotating cast of characters in an overcrowded apartment perched above a McDonald’s in Jersey City, learning to be a plant parent and working hard to create a life that looked very different from the one I grew up in.
My family, the root and the rock of my existence, was experiencing a series of ongoing crises. Upon my parents’ separation in 2009, my dad’s alcoholism was once again pulling him down, down, down into the depths of despair. For him, that looked like rotating periods of lock up in the county jail, chronic housing instability, and complicated health issues punctuated by long parties with the familiar demon called vodka.
Like always, I felt his desperation acutely in those days. I suffered alongside him, fearful and uncertain about his future. However, due to some years of intensive work in therapy and Al-Anon/Adult Children of Alcoholics and a life-sustaining connection to peer recovery communities in Franklin County, Massachusetts, I was beginning to learn that I couldn't really *do* anything to change the direction of his life or the heaviness of his spirit, regardless of how much it pressed upon me.
But like always, I still had so many ideas about how he “should” get his life back on track--ideas that I believed in deeply. As I wandered across 14th Street from the PATH train exit on 6th Avenue to my therapist's apartment in StuyTown, my dad and I had countless conversations about the role his own childhood trauma played in his current life circumstances and the many community-based supports I thought might help him (Hello, RECOVER Project!).
Sometimes, I hung up feeling sure we'd mastered a turning point. Other times, I hung up feeling angry and defeated and just cried about it hugging a throw pillow on my therapist's living room couch.
And yet, he soldiered on, drinking like there was no tomorrow, falling down, getting hurt, getting locked up, falling apart, getting his shit together, and in the process, generally wreaking havoc on the lives of the ones who loved him.
As a witness to the chaos, I was deeply affected and forever curious about the root of my dad’s pain and the potential solution that might change the course of events for him and I alike.
While reading Brezsny’s horoscope that day in 2013, I felt something indescribable shift and click into place. More than a realization, it was a kind of deep, old knowing that buzzed. Or a kind of rescue line tossed out from the cosmic soup Maybe it felt like something lost was found, or something was re-attached that I had forgotten broke loose. Maybe it felt like confirmation of something that had been tugging at me, unnamed yet persistent, since I was little.
It had to do with the sense that perhaps I wasn’t alone in the work of trying to “figure out” the root of my dad’s pain. Perhaps I wasn’t alone in the work of pulling up those roots and examining them for myself, in order to prevent their replication in my own body and soul.
Perhaps, this horoscope was saying to me, there was a deeper pattern to this pain, and maybe -- just maybe -- there was some invisible crew of involved entities who moved about in our shared genetic line -- a group of ancestors who were also deeply concerned about the lingering paths and roots of my dad’s pain and how to alleviate its pressure on all of our existences.
And, they could talk to me.
Up until that point, I had spent most of my life quietly listening for the unspoken undercurrents that flowed through family stories-- stories about the ways similar “demons” affected other people in my family line -- people lost too soon from the bottle, or from accidents that might have been something else, or from the many ways sadness and loneliness take people apart and away, even as they go on living. I saw him in those stories, and I wondered where I was in all of it, too.
In 2013, while reading that fateful Free Will Astrology horoscope, I began to brainstorm, as Rob Brezsny instructed me to do. Art and creativity were some of the main tools I was learning to work with in those days to access all the dirt that went beyond words.
So, I took out my colored pens and watercolors and went to work inscribing Brezsny’s message on a long, skinny, heavy piece of paper. I made the call to action concrete, and I pledged to listen to these voices who might be able to help me find the other worlds I already knew were possible.
I began to see myself as an active, living agent in the collective work of unpacking the familial baggage I carried forward into this plane of existence.
All those bottles rolling around in those old, dark New England closets are not my sole responsibility. It can't be my job to fix the pain, but I could begin to practice, minute by minute, a kind of deep listening--a kind of spiritual care--which might, if I stuck with it, lead to some kind of freedom for me, and for all of us.
When I discovered the story of Larkin Thorndike Lee at the end of last year, it took a few weeks for me to realize that I needed to calculate the generations between us -- to figure out where we are in relation to each other and in relation to the greater imperative presented to me by Rob Brezsny in 2013-- to “master the turning point,” so to speak -- which I interpret as the cultivation of intense self-love and self-trust.
So, I opened up the Ancestry.com family tree I’d made and counted backwards.
From Larkin & Betsey came:
1) Samuel & Lucy, who begot
2) Jeremiah & Mary, who made possible
3) Charles & Mary, who brought us
4) Harvey & Ellen, who delivered us
5) Charles & Sylvia, who brought forth
6) Leonard and Nancy, who made
7) Charles and Cynthia, who made me.
The math is shaky, but it's close enough for me. I am here for it, and I am here for them.
These people are my co-conspirators -- the “we” coming through in the voice of Brezsny’s horoscope.
We are here for each other.
Unpacking ancestral baggage can be a slow, tedious, grief-filled process. It involves making our way through tangled webs woven over the course of centuries -- nearly two in this case.
It involves confronting hoarded shame and fear, and the willingness to look deeper. It involves witnessing and observing the legacies that are held in objects and artifacts and memories.
A lost mummy. A model ship. A bottle. A silver coin. A bed pan.
Unpacking ancestral baggage also demands we look squarely at the harms we have perpetrated alongside those we have experienced.
History, as philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, is for cutting. We use it to make new senses of the present. And there is much to be cut open and cut away in this story.
A merchant's ship coffers, overflowing with raw materials -- wealth generated from stolen human bodies, and stolen spices, and stolen stories. Our whiteness, protected and insured. Our citizenship and belonging, refracted against the deep blue grave of the Atlantic ocean.
Sinning. Trying. Failing. Falling.
In 2013, I barely had language to talk about what these co-conspirators wanted me to do, never mind what that work would look and feel like. Today, I can see the work so much more clearly. I trust it, and I trust them.
So here we are in October 2020, amidst the pandemic and the looming election and the fear and the sadness and the uncertainty of everything.
And here I am, the queer, non-binary recipient of this line of sad seamen and their offspring.
What is my work? My vision is clear and cutting. Heal myself and I heal all of you.
Could it be that simple? Could it be more harrowing?
***
Join me next week for a post on what it means to ALCHEMIZE TRAUMA for ourselves & our ANCESTORS. We’ll talk about middle school ass sweat & closing toxic circuits & the time-traveling potential of anxiety & as always, more will be revealed <3 <3 <3
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