Sunday, August 29, 2010

Mercury


photography courtesy katie wright
from our compilation project
You Will Not Be Here Forever

I let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.
- Stephen Chbosky

Oh, Mercury retrograde.

Three or four times a year, you churn backwards across the charts and wreak havoc on everything. I feel stalled, stuck, enmeshed, and even the simplest of things becomes complicated under your influence ritard.

I was trying to explain a retrograde Mercury to someone this weekend and kept getting stuck on the idea of communication. Emails sent to the wrong people or not at all, phone calls dropped, texts not received, misunderstandings abound. Maps point in all the wrong directions. It seemed rightful that I was tripping over my explanation. I develop a stutter during Mercury retrograde. Or maybe that's just the new levels of exhaustion I found in the past couple weeks.

You learn something new nearly everyday. This week's lesson: I can mostly function on less than three hours' sleep a night.

Mostly
.

Anyway, there are silver linings to Mercury in retrograde, one of them being the opportunity to drag skeletons out of closets, dust them off, and reintroduce yourself. Deal with them, face to face, as such.

This retrograde has found me purging and rearranging. I threw away bags of crap. Crap, I tell you. Boxes I hadn't unpacked since moving here from Florida three....and a half, GAH....years ago. Deleting old files on the compy. Backing up the hard drive. Sweeping, vaccumming, moving my desk two feet to the left and gazing in wonderment at how the entire energy of my little loft office has shifted to be oh-so-much more conducive to creativity and work. Putting papers where they should be, digging back through projects left unfinished and finally parting with things that no longer have any hold over me.

Mercury retrograde can be looked upon as a rather cathartic period of time. If you're willing to dig in and do the hard work. Apparently this time I was.

This MR has me going back to my New Years' mantra of finishing what I start, and this is going to manifest in me finally posting the little thingy I've been working on in recognition of Katrina's 5 year anniversary. So, yeah...that'll get posted. Yep...soon. Promise. Have to. MR says so.

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