Watching Mercury Retrograde

Watching Mercury Retrograde

“That I can keep your counsel and not mine own.”
Hamlet IV.ii.10

I’m on my second Apple Watch. I went from thinking it was a useless technical bauble, a status symbol for some, but the device earned my adoration over the years. Took a few tries to understand what it can —and can’t — do, but I’ve gotten accustomed tracking the miles I walk, or the oxygen level in my blood, and what the time plus temperature might be. Texts, while I usually don’t read them, but I like the notification.

On the first watch, a four, I think, the wrist bands took a while to get a comfortable one, but I eventually landed on plain rubber-like band.

So in Austin the other day, a few days in a row? I pulled my watch off the charger one evening, stretched it on, and snapped the wristband in two. Momentary panic, then a quick search of the rental, then a quick search online, and the horrible realization, too late to get one in the hot summer night, at least as far as I could tell. Several chain stores would be open the next morning; it could wait.

I missed the sleep data. Grateful, though, that I walked into a store, and walked out with new band that only cost, like, ten bucks. Ten bucks, ten minutes.

It was my hubris — the astrologer — that I was making it through this mess with relative ease.

That’s not how it works.

Watching Mercury Retrograde

It’s not always big stuff. I think there’s a dead tree in my front yard, in the midst of a copse of Live Oak, a single thin, arched stem that has no leaves. Thought about borrowing a neighbor’s chain saw, and then? When Mercury is retrograde?

Watching Mercury Retrograde

What could go wrong?

Really should take my own advice.

“Keep thy own counsel.”

the Portable Mercury Retrograde


May 24 at Austin’s Nature’s Treasures

Mercury in Gatorade

Tuesday at Nature’s Treasures.

May 24 at Austin’s Nature’s Treasures

Natures’s Treasures

4103 N. Interstate 35
Austin, TX 78722
Phone: 512.472.5015

11AM – 5PM, appointments encouraged. E-mail.
It’s really him,” at the rock shop in Austin.

May 24 at Austin’s Nature’s Treasures

Use the code, “sparkle faerie” at the check out — for applicable discounts.

Price Selection Won’t Be Beat!

Vincit Qui Primum Gerit

“First to arrive gets the best deal.” (Source.)

astrofish.net/travel

TMTthumb.jpg

#Austin

Old Austin, Revisited

Old Austin, Revisited

To be clear, no one died. But the cause was to help clean out the mother-in-law’s house, a treasure trove of Americana kitsch from the last — long time.

In the shadow of Nature’s Treasures back door, almost.

“We had a reader cancellation, can anyone fill in?”

I wanted to, but I set up other appointments, and as the driving male, figured I had family business, not regular work.

The best part, got an AirBnB for a few nights. Not that the old house isn’t hospitable, but with more than half a century and two millennia of stuff scattered across bedrooms, yeah, too many ancestral memories.

Too many recollections, bugs, dust, spiders, and a single dead lizard, all desiccated. Gratefully, no more rodents thus far.

Old Austin, Revisited

It was the address for last week’s AirBnB that was cool. First off, cleaning out the house? The period feature I love, but only me? Pink tile bathroom.

“No, Kramer, I grew up with that. No. Just, no.”

The pink tile, pink sinks, pink toilet? The plumbing that uses about ten gallons per flush?

So the AirBnB, it was a retro Austin number, and close, plus? Pink tile bathroom, squeal!

There was another factor, compounding memories. The address, the street’s name was familiar.

Thirty years — or more — “Garage Sale” adventures, I encountered a vaguely familiar person. He was heavier, I was lighter, my hair was longer, and he was more challenged, like a tonsured blond monk. Washboard abs and an angry, hardened visage was replaced with grinning Buddhist countenance and merry belly.

“I know you,” and I recited his last name plus first initials.

He smiled, and gave up guessing where we knew each other from. He had Army training, then wound up as Marine MP, Captain. Between that, and his graduate work in social work, he had a far greater mental Rolodex than I did.

“In California, I used to run into former patients,” he said.

I knew him, but he didn’t recall me, not right away.

Think I’ve changed a bit.

As a spiritual mentor, more a teacher along the way, as we are the same era, he was, and his influence continues to this day, as a shining light. More like a fellow on a similar path. He was the first time I heard the term, “Shakespeare as a secular canon…”

At the time, he was living in an inherited sharecropper homestead, same street, just maybe a block or two away. He long since decamped; tony, sometimes tawdry Austin fails on certain levels. I get that. Always looking for the edge where the strange music starts.

Old Austin, Revisited

It was mere blocks away, years, now several decades in the distant past, but passing through yet again, family, futility, and friends, all of that swimming back in my mind.

It’s old Austin, revisited, and a perfect way to see where we’ve been, what’s changed, and what is the same. The neighborhood feels “cool” without some of the trendy, millennial trappings. I counted two or three of the houses still clad in what I’m pretty sure is asbestos tiles, dates the original construction to a certain era. Just a guess, but there are the echos of old Austin, still present.

astrofish.net/travel

Portable Mercury Retrograde
If only there was a primer for Mercury’s Retrograde — The Portable Mercury Retrograde.

App Icon Apple Books
Portable Mercury Retrograde: astrofish.net’s Mercury in Retrograde

Tuesday in Austin at Nature’s Treasures

Taming of the Shrew

Taming of the Shrew

Solely spurred by an ongoing series from a real Shakespeare Person, I had a quick thought and commentary about Shrew. Possibly misogynistic, fearful, and narrow-minded as a play, I’ve seen it several ways. Straight, over-the-top, and the best was an all female cast in traditional period costumes.

That’s all-female cast on a London stage, I can’t tell if there was tongue in cheek, cheek-by-jowl, or just plain satire.

Best version I’ve seen, and learned from watching it.

Taming of the Shrew

Another take? Vinegar Girl.

Shakespeare sketch

Please support public libraries.

#shakespeare
#horoscope

Write it down

The Portable Mercury Retrograde

Write it down

There are two ways to remember our thoughts, plans, and goals. One of them is to write it down. I forgot the other way.

Write it down

Mercury enters a “retrograde” period every couple of months. There are warnings, dire concerns, heady diatribes, and lengthy blame sessions, all directed at Mercury’s Retrograde.

How much is true?

In fact, I use it as the easiest replicable source of proof that astrology works, and I use it as a data point to illustrate the efficacy of the planets and their energies. I always get tired of poor Mercury getting vilified for all that happens during a retrograde period.

It’s not fair!

Ask any kid, though, “Life’s not fair.”

Write it down

The same notion of writing it down, my long established habit of a daily journal? That works for some of the material, it in that liminal land between sleep and waking, in deeply meditative state? Some material gets lost.

Write it down

The simple secret, and this is an adjusted, mutated, variation on a theme version, but the simplest exhortation?

Write it down

The Portable Mercury Retrograde

App Icon Apple Books
Portable Mercury Retrograde: astrofish.net’s Mercury in Retrograde

Portable Mercury Retrograde

via Coriolanus

via Coriolanus

“Stand fast,
We have as many friends as enemies.”

Coriolanus (3.1.230)

Mercury in Retrograde?

MercRX Stuck for an extra overnight in Austin, I got to fiddling with charts and such. I was looking for the exact moment, according to the location-based astrology software I’m currently using, I was looking for the exact moment when that Sun crossed into Gemini. Yielded some interesting observations, and the two charts, back to back? Nota Bene, Mercury in its apparent retrograde pattern, tightly aligned with that Gemini Sun — fairly takes the wind out of a feller. Previously, as Coriolanus observes?

The first chart is 8:18 PM, the Sun is right above the Western Horizon, so it’s that moment before technical sunset. Hills, trees, and clouds can conspire to change that timing, at least locally, but the astrological sunset, right then.
Sun in Taurus
Look more closely, and the chart shows Retrograde Mercury at 1° of Gemini, so that Sun is technically conjunct Mercury. But wait, there’s more!

The second chart is 8:23 PM, and that old Sun has slid past the horizon, setting, and the same moment, slipping in Gemini. In a short span of time, Mercury moving backwards heads to align with the Sun moving forwards.
Sun in Gemini
While, to some, this looks like a collision, or collusion, it’s really just a normal astronomical, astrological occurrence, and such events merely mark passages.

Depends on who, when, and the particulars of a chart, over the last six months or so, I’ve suggested that “Mercury is basically retrograde for all of Gemini,” stretching from the beginning of May until the summer solstice.

While not technically true, this Mercury goes un-retrograde on June 3, it feels disconnected until Cancer, the sign of the Crab starts, the summer solstice.

When the Sun and Retrograde Mercury align then pass each other (in the night), the posited theory is that “The worst of the Mercury Retrograde is over.” Theory, and in practice? Usual cautions, caveats, and assorted dire warnings still apply.

In the coming days, as detailed elsewhere in my horoscopes? The Moon, in Aquarius as the Sun slips into Gemini, but the Moon then aligns with Saturn, then Neptune, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, with each angle a right of passage as the phase of the Moon gets smaller and smaller? Each stage illuminates a single part, individual pieces, components of what this is all about.

Meanings differ from person to person; see dealer for details; expected outcomes may vary.

Looking for that Gemini Happy Birthday? Sure, at least we’re over the worst of it, right?

via Coriolanus

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Terms and Conditions

“Stand fast,
We have as many friends as enemies.”

Coriolanus (3.1.230)

“He’s not wrong, know what I mean?”