The Thread Between Us
Three of Cups — Cancer II — Mercury's Rope
Joy isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a shared silence, a soft tether in the fog.
Through the veiled image of the Somnia Tarot’s Three of Cups, I explore the second decan of Cancer—where Mercury becomes a diver’s rope, threading emotion, memory, and silent understanding. In this quiet ritual of connection, joy is not found in clarity, but in the comfort of shared presence. This is a decan of emotional depth, not noise—a weaving of fragile, infinite life energy held together by the quicksilver thread between us.
I return again to the image of the Three of Cups from the Somnia Tarot. Not the clinking-glass celebration the card often promises, but something quieter, more subterranean. The three robed figures, faceless, facelessly kind, stand around a stone basin overflowing with water. Their cups tilt endlessly, spilling without hesitation— as though they know the source is eternal.
When I first met this image, I saw the Moirai: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos—timeless companions who weave and measure and end. Not in a grim way, but in a rhythm I can nearly hear if I’m quiet enough. They pour not wine, but **moments**. They fill the shared well with the essence of time itself— encounters, longings, silences, partings. Each drop holds a strand of some interwoven life. Today, I meet this image differently. I don’t arrive in a celebratory mood.
I come veiled in fog. My lens is soft, blurred. I am not seeking clarity, but comfort. And still—this card meets me where I am. Because even in the fog, something guides me.
Something mercurial, a filament of awareness that moves between worlds. Mercury in Cancer is not the clever talker here. It is the diver’s rope, the psychic tether that keeps me from drifting too far under. It winds through the waters of my inner ocean, looping through memory, intuition, dream. It’s how I know what I’m feeling, even when I can’t name it. It’s how I sometimes understand someone else before they’ve spoken.
Even when I misunderstand, it’s with tenderness. I find myself resting in that kind of moment now— the strange peace of shared misunderstanding. With close companions, even the off-notes ring with a kind of truth.
The dissonance becomes its own harmony when the bond is deep enough. Mercury, ever the psychopomp, travels between me, myself, and I— and just as effortlessly, between me and you. It leaves mental fireflies in the dark of our emotional tunnels, carries notes back and forth between heart chambers that may never speak aloud.
The Three of Cups reminds me that joy isn’t always loud. It can be veiled, draped in robes, standing in ritual silence.
Sometimes we gather not to celebrate, but simply to continue—to hold the thread.
So I hold it.
This shimmering rope of mind and feeling.
I hold it when I’m submerged in my own moods, when I can’t see clearly, when I need to trust the line.
Because it’s there.
The rope is always there.
And we, pouring from our small cups into the same deep basin, are still weaving something sacred.
This energy, fragile but infinite.
Even when I can’t quite see the pattern— I trust the hands beside me, the rhythm of the pouring, the echo in the well.