I feel as though my life is making unusually good time, if not record progress, plowing against whatever metaphorical waves one might wish to imagine. My illness has not subsided in any meaningful sense but it isn’t paralyzing me as it did for most of the last eighteen months. I’m doing things more in line with what I want to be doing and spending less of my time doing things to distract me from my own nagging internal narrative.
This week, the past, with its peculiar gravity, has been tugging at me with greater insistence. My sister and her husband have spent the last decade a couple of time zones over. They returned to their old home town, just a few hours from here, this afternoon They drove back, and on the way, met up with our aunt and her considerable tribe. I haven’t seen that side of the family in decades and the photographs of people I knew only as infant embracing their spouses was jarring. I knew, abstractly at least, that I needed to see them, but it’s a more concrete imperative.
At the same time, I spent the day chatting with an old friend of mine who I’ve not seen in over a decade now. The fact that we fell right back into conversation as though we’d be close this whole time made me want to carve out some time to see him next time I visit the north.
Which is all to say, it’s been a little melancholy around here this week. Nothing bad, but just some events which have left me a little preoccupied with the past.
For a brief while, the romantic in me wanted to believe that clusters of travel, change, and setbacks occurring during a period of backwards movement by the planet Mercury represented a meaningful coincidence. I don’t think I ever really bought in to it, and I surely don’t now. Regardless, that romantic facet is reminding me now that Mercury is currently moving reliably forward and I would do well to take that hint. It’s been good to look over my shoulder and enjoy some memories and let them inform my plans, but my it’s good to feel the sense of forward travel these days.
“Two auxiliary telescopes (1.8m diameter) and UT1, one of the 8m unit telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), looking quietly at the Moon, Venus (brightest planet on the picture), Mercury (Between Venus and the Moon) and Mars (redish point above Mercury and Venus). ” No comment on the direction of Mercury’s apparent relative motion.