Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday I drove in to MSH for the first time since Friday July the 13th. That Friday the 13th was the last day that everything was right. It will be June 2008 before we have another Friday the 13th and I hope by then everything will be right again. Hanging in the eleven months between two Fridays the 13th, there we are, plodding, away from the accident and towards our recovery.

A few weeks after I got home in August we were told that our accident had something to do with Mercury being ‘in retrograde,’ a peculiar constellation in the skies that make it seem as if the planet Mercury is moving backwards vis-à-vis the earth. Mercury is in retrograde 3 times in 2007 and in those periods everything that Mercury rules over (the mind’s processes, studying, communication, businesses, travel) is affected we were told.

Axel has more of a Cartesian mind than I do and does not buy this. But I am more susceptible to contemplate the powers and energies that hover in the universe and do thing we do not understand. There was so much that went wrong in July that I had to know more. So I googled Mercury-in-retrograde and found more than a million entries; If it is superstition, at least I am not alone and I have plenty of stuff to keep me reading for years.

Here is what I learned. Mercury in retrograde is upon us again (since October 12). It is a time in which the mind turns inwards to analyze its own thoughts and follow familiar thinking patterns. It is a good for time for meditation but not a good time for new intellectual pursuits. Since Mercury appears to rule computers, communication and travel you can expect that things will go wrong in those spheres in the form of unexpected failures, delays, and crashes. The advice is to be prepared and hold off on buying Mercurian items such as books, cars (or planes), computers and mobile phones. More importantly, this is also a time to refrain from signing important contracts, which includes marriage, by the way. Instead we are urged to do the things that the Mercury retrograde period is good for (in character with its reverse flow): re-do things, double-check, re-read a book, study an old topic, see old friends, and travel to places you’ve already been to before. Apparently this is also a good time to tackle that old unfinished project and everything else you never finished. And in order to prevent any bad things to happen, double-check your agenda, call your business partners to confirm that everything goes as planned, have everything ready before the deadline and leave some extra time for unexpected events. Make copies of your important files and documents, and please do back up that computer!!

I particularly like the suggestion to go on vacation or at least slow down the pace of your projects. All in all, the message is about going slow and stay on familiar terrain.

Now that I know all this, I did OK yesterday. Axel and I started off with our weekly massage (slowing down) and then I traveled to a place I had been before (MSH) and took it easy (half a day of work); I saw plenty of old friends and colleagues and we did a brainstorming in our meeting that only generated familiar stuff. After work I picked up Sita at South station and there I made a mistake of not re-checking how to get there and promptly missed the exit and got stuck in the 5-o’clock-leaving-Boston traffic. But everything turned out all right in the end. We came home to a dinner that Axel had cooked for us. And today I think I’ll tackle an old project.