Retrograde

I am not at all informed about where the planets are in the cosmos. I’m not even sure which ones are still planets, but lately I’ve been hearing a lot about Mercury going into retrograde.

So

I looked it up. ‘retrograde’ means what you think. Something moving in reverse. Backwards. Not forward.

Besides being a fun thing to say if someone is having a bad day, I never knew what it meant.

Cosmically, logically, it makes sense that not every thing is moving forward all of the time.

Artistically its pretty much how things are created. You start, you stop, you start other things, you go back, work out design issues, solve composition puzzles, go forward, go back, finish one thing, start another.

In art, in my process anyway, going backwards isn’t a negative. I don’t think it is in nature either. Plants rest, and start over every year.

In gardening, some years you cut a bush back to a much smaller version of itself for its health or to keep it flowering.

Maybe retrograde is a ceasing of moving forward, still moving, but like with finding balance, a little this way, a little that. Add here, edit there.

If I think too hard about this, backwards and forwards are only two directions, I have a mind that rotates things in every direction.

I suspect this was why learning to read was a little challenging. They taught me that the letter ‘d’ looked like this and it made this sound. In my head p,d,b and q (and when you wrote it, 9, were the same thing turned this way or that. q was different if you wrote it. Plus the 2D nature of the written word seemed both boring and to me, incomprehensible. I had no clue that decoded, it captured so much. Stories, beauty, ideas, all things I cared to know.

All tucked inside a forward, left to right moving code. For me learning to read was a true miracle.

I wonder if we sometimes think that if a thing is not moving in the ‘right” direction, it can’t work. (Not entirely untrue, reading only goes left to right, in the English language, of course)

Me flipping letters was not helpful in the first grade, but in other situations it isn’t a bad thing.

Mercury moving in reverse might be good for many reasons. A directional shift doesn’t have to be worrisome.

In life too much going one way is like too much of anything. I wonder if the discomfort is more because of the change part. We humans aren’t always comfortable with change. Even the idea can cause us grief.

So yes, Mercury did change directions and seems to be going backwards. I guess some planets do this, or appear to.

My unofficial opinion? I think its fine, changing direction is often good! It can be very good! Better than going too far and throwing off balance or harmony. For me, in art, that would be worse.