Mercury made its illusory foray into retrograde a couple of weeks ago. I first learned of this phenomenon one fall Sunday in the early '90s from my then-neighbors, Joe and Frances.
Frances and I were sitting out on our steps, drinking coffee. It was a day much like the days we have been having lately, like a helium balloon that had broken summer's anchor and had begun to drift dreaming upward.
Some weird little things had been happening, she said. Mischief was being mixed into their normal, ordered scheme of things, a rash of unusual setbacks, thank goodness all of them small enough to be whimsical.
"But Mercury is in retrograde," she said, and she paused. "You've just got to ride it out."
I hadn't thought much about it until the other day, when my 2003 Old Farmer's Almanac came in the mail. In years past, I would leaf through it, but this time I sat down and studied it -- the gardening advice, the weather forecast. At the bottom of the page titled "Secrets of the Zodiac" was a section called "When Mercury is in Retrograde."
It is a period several times a year, usually for a few weeks, when Mercury seems to the eye to be moving backward. "Mercury's retrograde periods ... can cause travel delays and misconstrued communications," the almanac told me. "Plans have a way of unraveling, too. ..."
I noted that the first retrograde period next year is Jan. 2-23. Then I dug out this year's almanac and found the same section. The last period in 2002 began Sept. 14 and is to last until Oct. 6.
"It's best to wait until Mercury is direct again to make any final decisions," I read. "Astrologers advise us to keep plans flexible. ..."
I've always considered astrology to be little more than a fun diversion, a showy entree to a more serious world that has occupied every great culture since communities first formed. We try to interpret what we don't understand and adapt explanations that fit in with our systems of culture.
If the moon tells us when to plant and when to prune, then a planet may well serve us warnings that time is more complicated than the ticking of a clock. A clock is our interpretation, an adapted explanation.
When I look at the clock and think, "Oops, it's time to leave for work," I don't think of 4 o'clock as a make-believe thing, but it is. As the helium balloon drifts farther toward the cold, 4 o'clock is a different thing from what it was in June.
Time is one of our biggest mysteries, but we have ordered it into our system of culture so that it makes sense. We have metaphorically divided our life spans according to the seasons -- spring is birth and rebirth, summer is the flowering, and in the autumn of our lives, we cherish the lightness of the air and the last show of colors because winter's skeleton comes on too quickly.
But the trickster dances through our seasons, reminding us that our time is a construct and that our order is not the order of the universe. Half-seriously, I have Mercury's retrograde in mind now and will through Oct. 6, if for no other reason than to supply my mind with an explanation should my car keys turn up missing in spite of the fact that I always, always, put them in the same place. I might even blame this phenomenon for things I do inadvertently. But its real power, I suspect, is not over our tangibles.
If retrograde indeed drops variables into our equations, detours into our plans and clutter into our organization, it may be because we have equations, plans and organization that are not in harmony with the forces beyond our knowledge.
It is never more obvious to the gardener than in autumn that life is precious. And as we enter the autumn of our lives, it becomes more obvious that neither life nor time is what we make of it.
I guess I hope for a little of the mischief that Frances and Joe laughed about and honored. As we drift through the light, airy days of autumn, we can all use small reminders.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
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