Mercury Retrograde Revisited
October 28 - November 17, 2006
Have you noticed in the last two weeks or so that things in general have been a little strange? Has the little old grey haired lady at your local Wal Mart climbed back on her spiffy little electric cart and started trying to mow down other customers, again? Yes folks, it's that time again, Mercury is about to retrograde... again.
I pondered for several years why the Universe would do such a thing to the people of earth, but I know that everything has a reason for existing. What could be good or useful about a rip in the already bogged down communication aspect of our lives? The answer came one morning as I was drinking coffee, staring out my window meditating on the concept of balance. I came to the conclusion many years ago that life is not about love, it's not about being made aware of any one particular problem. It about knowing that if something negative happens there will be a positive action (or lots of little bitty positive actions) to balance the energies in your life. Somewhere, somehow something will occur to balance the stupid mistakes and missteps that we all seem so good at.
The best clue that I had was staring me I the face all the time. I always knew that during the retrograde period it was a good time to rethink, redo, redirect and finish up things started in the past but never completed. I certainly always seem to be taking care of past issues during those times. I began to look for the things that ultimately became "finis" during those times when Mercury and the Universe were laughing their butts off at our antics. I seemed to have a penchant for dragging up projects that I could never seem to complete. Repainting the thin places in the in the dining room that should have done months ago, taking the car back to the mechanic so that he could actually repair an on going mechanical problem, rearranging the furniture that I had been wanting to do, sometimes for years. I would find myself geared up and actually productive! "How very strange," I thought to myself as I scanned over my list. I began to wonder if everybody had something specific from the past that could be handled during a retrograde so I took a survey.
I started with my daughter. Several conversations later, after rechecking dates and timelines, we discovered that she would be contacted by or run into someone from the past in almost every retrograde for the last three years. Her friends are all of an age, late teens and early twenties, when school, jobs, major life changes are happening and it is very easy to lose contact with friends. The most unusual circumstance, however, became much more than just reestablishing contact with old friends or acquaintances. My daughter is now a junior in college, a productive, mostly happy young lady. She's engaged to an exceptional young man and has her own side business as a web designer and upcoming fractal artist. This confidence that she has now was not always the case. Middle school was pretty much hell. My friends and I had many discussions about the middle school agenda in our area. It was common knowledge that if a teacher completed the course of study for a master's degree, his/her stature as a teacher as well as their salary would increase proportionally. We had a hard time understanding how a bachelor's degree in PE and a masters in Marketing could equal an expert child psychologist, but that was a prevalent attitude among the recipients of master's degrees. We were very busy parents and as long as this odd circumstance did not impact us personally we just made fun of the arrogant, misguided teachers. (That may seem cruel and judgmental, but most of these people had problems carrying on a conversation unless you kept the words to three syllables or less). My daughter's teachers, generally speaking, were caring, intelligent educators. They seemed to like and in some cases admire my daughter's attitude and progress except for one particular woman. This person, who was one of the aforementioned educational jokes, decided that my daughter's social connections were lacking and had tried several times to force her into walking away from her two best friends. My daughter would come home complaining and I would smooth over her anger and point out that the woman (I think for convenience sake I shall call this teacher TWIT - the woman idiot teacher) did not have the right to do such a thing and I assured her that I would step in if and when TWIT overstepped her bounds. I did write a quick, friendly little note asking TWIT to back off and let my child make her own decisions concerning her friends. I never got a reply.
Several weeks later I received a phone call from the principal. She stated that my daughter had threatened TWIT and I should get to the school post haste. I was there in less than twenty minutes. I walked into the principal's office to find my daughter in tears, TWIT repeating over and over that she had the right to have my daughter arrested and the principal standing back wringing her hands. I have Libra Rising so the unfairness of the situation infuriated me. First, I pointed out that TWIT was beating a dead horse with her threats of arrest and to just drop it. I then took over the meeting demanding to hear all sides of the incident immediately, starting with my daughter. It seemed that one of my daughter's friends had asked TWIT, most respectfully, if he could have a ruler to complete his assignment. TWIT chose to throw the ruler at the child, narrowly missing his face. My daughter took great offence to this action and said, in a low voice unheard by TWIT, that she would love to strangle the woman. It was not a great choice of comments but that phrase is one used commonly in the South to state an opinion not make a threat. Unfortunately, this all took place about a week after the Columbine incident so one of the students that overheard the comment ran to tell TWIT.
After hearing my daughter's side of the story, my rather terse comments on Twit's actions and being on the receiving end of plain common sense, the principal finally took over and ended the incident. My daughter, however, could not let go and continued to hold a major grudge against TWIT. She is after all a Scorpio and they are known for their intenseness. Oddly enough, about two months after all this happened my daughter called me into our home office to read an e-mail that had been mistakenly delivered to our computer. The email was from TWIT to a friend and colleague with the same last name and very similar email address as ours, and was a rather vicious little missive. It seemed TWIT's husband was in the hospital with a severe kidney stone attack and she was relaying his very painful experience in the Emergency Room with an unnatural glee. Of course my daughter wanted to email her right back and let her know that we now had enough to begin blackmail procedures but I advised that the information might be useful at a later date and to keep quiet until such a time. No opportunity ever arose and I had to listen, on an average of once a year, to my daughter saying rather pointedly, that she never got to use that e-mail.
The third day of the Mercury retrograde in July this year brought an amazing occurrence. My daughter, now 22 years old, came dancing into the living room, babbling with joy. It seemed that the very same teacher, now living in another state, had once again contacted my daughter in error. TWIT had assumed that she was talking to another former student on My Space. My daughter stood in the living room doorway, dry washing her hands and giggling like the assistant to a mad scientist or perhaps the mad scientist herself. She regaled me with all the nasty things she could say to this woman, she could tell her that her attempts to sabotage my daughter's self esteem and psychological health (I said she was Scorpio, remember?) had been for naught. My daughter even gave thought to some very profane words and phrases. "Just let me see what you write before you send it, ok?" was all I said. This was my daughter's party.
A little while later my presence was requested in our office. I looked over my adult daughter's shoulder with a little bit of trepidation. I won't give you a blow by blow description, just a synopsis. My daughter informed TWIT that she had the wrong person, then gave TWIT a lengthy update on the success that she had and was enjoying in spite of the incident all those years ago. She closed by asking after TWIT's husband's health and commented that kidney stone attacks could be extremely painful and she hoped he had not had another attack as bad as the one TWIT had told her about in the incorrectly addressed email we had received so many years ago. TWIT immediately got offline and cancelled her membership in My Space. The evil that followed my daughter for years folded its tent and crept off into the ether.