We're Not In Kansas Anymore

We're in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Wait, let me throw it in reverse here for a minute. Happy New Year 2018!  A quick numerological study reveals 2018 to be The Year of Healing - more on that shortly - and at The Higher Haven we’re leading the charge. With South Haven, Michigan currently buried under two feet of pow pow - an old (51 in April!) snow-boarder's term for snow- we're looking forward to kicking off the year’s retreat schedule the weekend of March 18th, starting with a One-Day and potential overnight lead by standout Detroit yoga teacher Soojin Kim. But before our Spring bloom, there’s our annual Winter break, including the Holiday season.

This year’s personal Christmas plans proved a bit unorthodox. After spending a traditional Xmas eve and morning with my sister’s husband’s family in central Michigan, I headed out West to my meditation teacher Shinzen Young's annual southern California year-end retreat. Ending and beginning the new year on the cushion for nine days with The Mighty Shin is standard personal practice. This year, however, we eschewed Uber fares and long airport lines, loaded up the F150 and drove to California instead. “Who the heck gets up Christmas morning and rolls West on The 60?”, I thought, gunning it across the frozen, sun-glittered landscape. I’ll return triumphantly in early January with a truck bed full of Sonoran Desert lava rocks to run Ceremony and retreats all Spring, Summer and Fall.

But before Arizona, there’s New Mexico, and before Colorado there's Incredible Kansas. To slightly misquote Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like Kansas. Studying the U.S. map pre-trip reminded me of a book I read years ago titled Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. The two points I recall from that book are 1) the author referred to his relationship with his former wife as The Indian Wars and 2) truly connecting with the land and having an authentic, quality run cross-country comes about by taking  byways that aren’t readily visible from the major interstate routes. "When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then." writes Heat Moon. "People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." 

 So inconceivably cool, Kansas' yellowed, snow-dappled swath offered a sweeping horizon, a stretch that's escaped the impact of human progression for centuries.  The expansive skyline provided a magnificent backdrop for rugged grasslands, one of the world's most endangered ecosystems. Reveling in the wide open space of undisturbed nature, I imagined Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa people roaming the area over a century ago in search of great bison herds before signing a peace treaty with the United States in 1867. Being an indigenous U.S. history buff, I may be back later in 2018 and sit on a bluff (a buff on a bluff) overlooking a natural amphitheater as more than 1,000 actors perform the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Pageant, a reenactment not far from the original site. It's easy to see why the original settlers, The Ioway tribe and Chief, Ma-Hush-Kah (White Cloud), held an undying passion for this land. 

The Sunflower State offers an impressive portfolio of Land and Sky Scenic Byways. But check a map of those endless ribbons of road and you won’t find any at all in the state's Southwest corner. On the way to Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, dropping off the I-70 and south onto the I-40,  I hardly passed another car, truck, person or God help me a gas station from noon to sunset. For over five hours, there was nothing but me, half a dozen awesome birds of prey and some of the most wide-open, wild but barren country I’ve ever cut across. Spooky! All that was missing was a vicious black Twister ripping across the horizon.

If there was a town, it wasn’t much of one, more a decrepit clump of homes with some burned out old grain elevators and other agricultural buildings. I could tell by the tracks in the snow that people did reside there, but it certainly wasn’t bustling. God bless my bro-in-law Kevin, who, right as I pulled out of his home town of Concord, Michigan, suggested I “just pull over and fill up at every half-tank." Half empty of half-full, the recommendation was a Good One. More news from the road to come, along with some super duper articles for all you would be-meditators on Shinzen’s mighty teachings and nightly dharma talks. Toksha

Retrograde Beliefs

The planet Mercury is small, not much larger than our moon, but dense, mostly a molten iron core with hardly any crust or atmosphere. It flies fast, orbiting the sun once every 87.97 earth days, and spins slowly, rotating only 1.5 times every trip around. During those long nights and days, temperatures drop to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit and rise to 800 degrees. The poles, surprisingly, contain deposits of ice, but the rest of Mercury’s surface is rough ground, a record of the early years of the solar system, when the planet was pummeled by asteroids and meteors.

All the craters are named for artists. Shakespeare, John Lennon and Walt Disney are there. Alvin Ailey is too, as are Bach, Basho, the Brontës, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kahlil Gibran, Michelangelo and 361 others, all cataloged in “The Gazetteer and Atlas of Astronomy.” The planet is a hot, fast, magnetic monument to earthly imagination.

For about three weeks three times a year, Mercury appears to move backward across our sky and will, according to astrologers, disrupt technology, communication and human concord. Facebook and Twitter will clog with reports of appointments missed, important email sent to the spam folder, wars between nations, cars crashed and iPhones dropped in toilets, all followed by some version of the hashtag “#mercuryretrograde.” Advice from astrology blogs will arrive in unison: Back up your computer, expect miscommunications, don’t make agreements or important decisions and don’t sign contracts — and hide.

The belief that the movements of celestial bodies govern our lives is more popular in the United States than it has been in two decades, according to a recent National Science Foundation report. In a 2012 survey, a third of Americans viewed astrology as “sort of scientific” and another 10 percent as “very scientific.” Belief is most prevalent among 18-to-24-year-olds but has markedly increased among 35-to-44-year-olds in recent years. To put this in perspective: More Americans believe in astrology, or “sort of” believe in astrology, than believe that climate change is influenced by the burning of fossil fuels.

The astrological belief that Mercury retrograde leads to confusion and breakdown is inherited from the time before we understood that Earth is not the center of the cosmos. From our perspective, Mercury appears to move quickly and erratically, so the ancients called it a messenger and a trickster. It took three millenniums to figure out that this was an illusion. Before that, Ptolemy constructed elaborate models in which the other planets spun around us like insane tops, and the models stayed with us long after the observations stopped matching the math. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory explained retrograde motion much more elegantly, but he kept it unpublished nearly until his death. Mercury told its story, anyway: To understand the illusion of its movement means to realize that we are not at the center of things, that there is a reality beyond the one we see. (For astrology bloggers, this is less a problem than further evidence of the planet’s wiliness — as if its dangerous power is drawn less from what the planet actually does or is and more from the story of our confused efforts to understand it.)

Of the 372 craters on Mercury, only 22 are named for women. One of them is Madeleine L’Engle. When I was a child, I read her book “A Wrinkle in Time” so much that I lived almost as if it were true. I grew up in rural Indiana, but I pretended I was that book’s protagonist: a 13-year-old math nerd named Meg Murry, from Connecticut, whose astrophysicist father had disappeared from Earth while working out the science of “tesseracts” (basically wormholes), whose mother was a biologist and who was visited by witchy women — Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which — prone to explaining quantum mechanics and general relativity to children. With the help of these visitors, Meg makes an intergalactic trip to rescue her father and fight “IT,” a malevolent consciousness that controls human minds so that everyone in its power speaks the same, thinks the same, dresses the same, does the same dull jobs.

It’s not that I believed I lived in L’Engle’s universe, exactly. But I lived as if I did. There was something about this story that married a love of quantum physics and astrophysical theory to a witchy sense of cosmic magic; it sent me not away from science, but toward it, suggesting that my relentless research, in my parents’ library and in the woods and streams of our farm, might matter, even though I was a girl.

This is not to say that astrological belief is childish — L’Engle’s book is not — but that critiques of astrological thinking that assume it is opposed to science tend to ignore the “sort of” and “as if”: the radical utility of narratives that provide a sense of connection to a cosmic drama. But in the case of Mercury retrograde, it’s not clear how “magical” the thinking is. What’s striking about the online commiserating during the retrograde period — the labeling of thousands of different experiences as one thing — is how un-Mercury it is; how it narrows language and experience. Blog posts and tweets about Mercury retrograde fantasize about a kind of technological anarchy so extreme that we’d have an excuse to hide from the devices that are supposed to connect us, but they speak the suffocating and reductive language of branding. Perhaps the problem is that we don’t let this particular planet influence us enough. Mercury, icon of creativity, has much more to say to us — much more, I think, to mean.

The story of Mercury is a cautionary tale too, about thinking there is a connection between how things work on Earth and how they work in the heavens. Every time Mercury orbits the sun, it ends up a bit ahead of where it began, so that the planet traces in space not a steady ellipsis but a pattern of flower petals. Called precession, some of this jumping ahead is explainable by Newton’s laws. But some isn’t. The difference between where Mercury should end up, according to the law of gravity that works on Earth, and where it actually ends up, is minuscule — 43 arc seconds per century — but it was enough to puzzle astronomers for years, even leading to speculation about a phantom planet, Vulcan, that might influence Mercury’s orbit.

What it took, in the end, to explain Mercury’s precession was Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity; Mercury flies close enough to the sun that it travels through a part of space-time so bent by the sun’s mass that the planet is dragged a bit farther along each time. The fact that things work so differently in space than they do on Earth, not to mention at the quantum level, has physicists conjuring ideas even stranger than any malevolent planet — string theory, multiple universes — to connect it all together again.

To believe in Mercury’s powers is to express a fear that masks a very legitimate desire: to drop our iPhones in the toilet, to not respond to email, to stop working so hard at constant communication. And the planet tells more stories than that. If it tells a story about our connection to the stars, it also tells one about how easy it is to misstate that connection. If it tells a story of miscommunication, it also tells one about how good we are, as humans, at striving to know beyond what we can see. Its reverse motion is an illusion, like all that we see when we imagine ourselves central in the world, a reminder of how much work empathy for the position of others takes, and how tied that is to the imaginative labor both of science and art. - with Thanks to The New York Times Magazine January 9, 2015 

Mercury Retrograde Again and Again and Again

Just when you think everything is flowing along quite swimmingly in the new year 2014, Mercury grinds to a cosmic screeching halt in the sky and begins going backward. Or so it appears.  Such is the movement of Mercury turning retrograde,  the apparent motion of a planet moving in a direction opposite to that of other bodies within its system, as observed from a particular vantage point, in this case good ol’ planet earth. The term retrograde comes from the Latin word retrogradus – “backward-step”, the affix retro- meaning “backwards” and gradi to step or “to go”. Mercury’s retrograde motion occurs three or four times a year and can be quite problematic for people, prompting suggested do’s and don’ts during these astrologically funked up times.

Touching on the aspects of a Mercury Retrograde period back in March of 2012, you might review the forwards and backwards of that previous discussion  here. You may also enjoy checking out the simple site that answers the big question Is Mercury Retrograde (?) here.  As to simple guidelines during this transit, one Quick and Dirty Guide To Surviving Mercury Retrograde online suggests not taking potentially clouded communications too personally, backing up your data, not signing contracts or purchasing big ticket items, and finishing projects previously started. I would add not worrying too much about the cosmic craziness is also a good idea,  as my friendly Vedic astrologer James Kelleher jokes, “Mercury is retrograde, uh oh, don’t go to the store!”

Avoiding retail acquisitions not being part of the list, feel free to pick up some free-range eggs and Kombucha. However, you may want to be well aware that, in general, Mercury rules thinking and perception, processing and disseminating information and all means of communication, commerce, education and transportation, thus Mercury retrograde gives rise to personal misunderstandings; flawed, disrupted, or delayed communications; glitches and breakdowns with phones, computers, cars, buses, and trains. As a personal example, entire weeks passed between my two previous blog posts, below. That said, keep writing, travel safe and breath deep. Mythologically, Mercury is the protector and patron of travelers, thieves, orators and wit, literature and poet. Considered quick, cunning, and a bit of a trickster, Mercury is known for outwitting others gods for his own satisfaction or the sake of humankind. So awareness, however you practice it, is always particularly good at this time.

For this specific retrograde period, per Mr. Kelleher, beginning on February 7th and continuing through February 27th, Mercury will be direct in Aquarius, in Shatabhisha nakshatra. Shatabhisa is a nakshatra related to various healing modalities. Boosted by the beneficial aspect of Jupiter, this transit is good for getting insights about health and healing. In general, Mercury Retrograde periods are good for research, organizing, relaxation and taking a vacations, although travel might be thwarted. The good news is that Mercury turns direct at 9:00 AM EST (North America) on February 28th. But be aware that come June 7th – July 2nd and October 4th – October 25th in 2014, Mercury will be retrograde again. And again.