retro

Mercury does not go backwards and neither do you.

photo credit: Thomas Lloyd Qualls

There is no such thing as going backwards. Every moment is forward. Mercury may be up to its old tricks again. Illusions of mirrors, reflections of smoke, making us believe that life has a reverse gear.
 
Backtracking, reminiscing, nostalgia, these are all just of gathering wood for today’s fire. We are always building, even if it feels like tearing down.
 
Death is part of life. Decay is not loss. Without it, there is no new life. Just ask the soil in your garden.
 
The cliché is true. We cannot go back and put our same feet in the same river. But we can go to the place we’ve been and put our current feet in the present water. And we can remember when we’ve performed this ritual before, while enjoying how it feels now.
 
If, on our upward spiral of life, we encounter people, things, situations we’ve known before, we have not gone backwards. We are revisiting these things from our current perspective. Not to relive the past, as that is impossible.
 
There is folly in wanting to go back and relive certain parts of your life. But you can reconnect with those you have known before, in new ways. And you can bring new life, new wisdom, new intention to those evolving relationships.
 
You can meet old situations like you would old lovers, bringing all your life’s treasure to them in order to experience them in new ways.
 
The hero sets out from the sacred mountain in search of the sacred mountain. His adventures are deep, treacherous, beautiful, and layered. When he returns, it is not to the same mountain. And he is not the same person.
 
He has not gone backwards. He has gathered medicine, wisdom, clarity. And both he and the mountain are better for it. If the hero had never returned, thinking somehow that returning would be going backwards, then the journey would be incomplete, and he, the mountain, and his village, would be deprived of its singular beauty.
 
The Lumineers sing, “Nobody knows where the story ends…” That’s because the story doesn’t end. And it doesn’t go backwards. It keeps going forward, building, growing. The mystic poet Walt Whitman knew this, as well, teaching us, “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.”
 
Whenever any of your planets are in retrograde, literally or figuratively, know that neither they nor you are going backwards. It is a time for you to offer up the gifts you have collected from your journey. To add to the compost of your life’s soil. To bring new life to those who invite you in. And to experience it all with new eyes.

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