Mercury Retrograde: Review, Reflect, Resolve

Gavin The Golden gives high-fives and whirls me into laughter during Mercury Retrograde time.

***

I sneeze and my tailbone yelps. 

The wail of pain interrupts my packing. 

I eye the messy canvas of jeans, yoga pants, tweed skirts, sweaters sprawled on the bed, and question tucking the yoga pants into my suitcase. The daydreams of returning to Kentucky and practicing yoga at my hOMe studios seem to vanish in that one damn sneeze. 

I’d rather blame Mercury Retrograde for my disgruntled lower back than claim full ownership for accidentally bruising it. 

In fact, Mercury Retrograde is totally to blame, because Mercury sent the snow. 

Yes, I suspect that my whining tailbone and the sudden snow are manifestations of Mercury Retrograde’s mischievous nature.   

Texas sun spoils me into forgetting the icy temperament of winter, and the surprise appearance of snow in Austin chills me into a state of paralysis…or laziness. The type of laziness that results in sitting in a moody slouch in front of the TV watching reruns of Sex & The City.

I ignore the pleas from my back because I’ve stubbornly huddled into the wisps of heat cultivated by coat and blanket and dread the cool air awaiting me if and when I gather the courage to adjust. 

I adjust too late. My tailbone reprimands me with whimpers of discomfort, throwing my pack-and-prepare holiday agenda into a jumbled orbit of procrastinated to-dos. 

I could continue to complain and moan or reexamine and shift the situation of the brooding tailbone. 

The unforeseen ache presents the true gift of Mercury Retrograde: permission to slow down. 

And even though I’m half-way through packing, and my mood is mercurial and spinning with stress of what needs to be done before bouncing back to Kentucky, I know more is accomplished when I am calm than when I am rushing and racing to complete and succeed. 

Either slow down, move mindfully, practice presence in the pause, or be hurled in the mishaps, miscommunications, delays, and detours Mercury Retrograde infamously spins over our earthly dimensions of travels and communications. 

My tendency toward action before there’s clarity on an answer has tangled me up in anxious situations, so I decide to kindly accept the Universe’s first initial offer.   

Slow down. 

So I step away from the room exploding with Christmas presents and jeans, and the debate about if wearing my new furry coat on the plane would be “extra”, and depart to a coffee shop where I can practice the three Rs of Mercury Retrograde: 

Review. Reflect. Resolve. 

In my reflection, of all the re-verbs ruling retrograde, resolve stars at the main motivator, especially this past few weeks.

Mercury Retrograde whips and whirls the past into the present, simmers suppressed issues right to the surface: the job, the friendship, the closet re-organization project. 

I take the hint and tidy up loose ends in Austin: 

I reconnect with friends. 

I reorganize my closet.  

I reexamine my current situation, my feelings, and exit from my job. 

I create space to go back to the bluegrass state to reset and strategize, and replenish and restore in the company of my family, my grandmother, my golden Gavin. 

With the ticket purchased to revisit Kentucky, there’s a rekindling of memories, and of pain. I prefer my whistling tailbone to this sort of emotional hurt. 

Similar to my tailbone, I need to acknowledge, work with and sit with the hurt. 

In returning to Kentucky for Christmas, I step back into a domain of memories. Mercury Retrograde orbits into my awareness the unfelt grief of broken friendships.  The return trip is the opportunity to rinse the past clean so I can fall back into a healed alignment for 2018 journeying. 

And still...there's reluctancy. There's a barrier. So I let it be, and carry the well of grief with me knowing that when it's ready to be released, the emotion will river naturally. 

I continue with my plans. I inform my yoga student of my holiday trip home.  

We practice on the edge of evening in a former classroom turned quaint yoga studio. 

We flow through sun salutations as a lavender, rose streaked twilight descends deeper into night. We mindfully move through air and space to honor the light within steadily burning no matter the darkness. 

And this year there has been darkness. Globally, nationally, personally. 

Personal narratives connecting to the grander narratives. A mirroring. 

Trauma. Pain. Grief. Disappointments. Betrayals. 

Trying so hard. Trying too hard. Trying and losing anyway. 

The scenes unfold, the emotions river into existence to be expressed through feeling, through a movement intended to release pent up stories and energies in stretching. 

The breath is still full as I rewind, rise, bow down, buoyantly lift back up. 

And as I surrender back to the earth, to the floor, to the mat, there’s a flickering of an epiphany, a creation of space to whisper a truth that now can be embodied and lived: I can forgive, now. 

I can grieve, now. I can own that I loved these people deeply and fully and there was an ending, and it felt like a betrayal, and I can now understand and see my unmet needs, see them more clearly in their pain and projection of pain. I can grieve, now. 

And in the grieving there’s a release, and in the release, there’s a creation of emotional space, which I can feel reverberating out in a lightness in my body. 

A body bowing to the sun in the darkness. 

And here I sit, my moaning back quiet for a sweet spell, as I watch another sunset from a neighborhood coffee shop that enchanted me during one of my Austin stays. I remember sipping and journaling and realizing, “I’m happy, I could be happy here.”

And here I am. 

Reflecting on the journey, on the power dwelling in feeling forming vision. 

And my vision for revisiting Kentucky emanates in continuing with the graceful guidelines presented by Mercury Retrograde. 

Slowing down to be present in the hOMecoming, the deepening, the becoming waiting and wanting to be seen in all its darkness and light, maybe grieved and perhaps celebrated, and probably joyfully and achingly both.  

***

Mercury Spins and DJs: 

Into Gold - Matthew & The Atlas 

No Diggity – Chet Faker 

Drag - Day Wave 

Marrow - ANOHNI 

Pulling Our Weight - The Radio Dept. 

Like Real People Do – Hozier 

Another Sad Love Song - Khalid 

These Days - Nico

Starring The Boutique: Acting & Advocacy

Styling in a dramatic foot-pop to show off holiday gift wrapping at the Austin boutique. I'd like to believe the deer approves. 

*** 

“You’re my favorite vagina.”

I beam in the Chipotle line. I feel like I just won the academy award.

Since my debut as the Happy & Not-So-Happy Vagina in Eve Ensler  revolutionary play, The Vagina Monologues, I have basked in a glorious after-glow of campus stardom.  

I blush and bow in response before redirecting the conversation to the goods waiting to deliciously fill the burrito bowl.

Years later, I brush up against my former college-self.

I stand at the front of the boutique on the iconic South Congress strip, I spin and tap around in my glittery Toms to a remake of “Jingle Bells.” My acting training serves me here.

One foot back, softness in the knees, connect the ring finger to the tip of the thumb (gives the hands something to do, so the body is at ease and the lines flow effortlessly).

I press into my feet. I engage my belly. I speak from my gut.

“Good Afternoon,” I croon. “Welcome in.”

And then a big grin. My smile is sincere, but like a good actress, I choose to exude the emotion needed to enhance the scene.

Behind the screen of greeting guests and spontaneously twirling (because my new tennis shoes are so comfy and fun to whip around in), I dive into currents of thought on purpose, passions, effortless bliss.

And I bump into the Happy Vagina. 

That college gal was/is truly happy. That Happy Vagina emerges to speak. She’s got a monologue ready-to-go. She’s coming to remind me that I can merge advocacy with the arts. That I can utilize dynamic gifts - a voice restless to rise, a heart yearning to reach out and embrace, a muse impatient to create - to shape a life-role rooted in purpose and service and lifting the vibration higher, and this life feels like bliss.

I know the feeling because the feeling has been felt. There have been life chapters where parallel rivers of energized interests coincided and connected and the result initiated a cascading flow of embodied excitement and intuited knowledge on how to proceed.

In retrospect, the timeline shimmers in crystal-clear clarity.

The curiosity to take the gender women’s studies class, which leads to a new circle of great women to befriend, and the uncovering of the covert narratives shaping masculinity and femininity, which sparks deeper introspection on the unquestioned ways I move and fear and interact with women and men, and express or don’t express my own masculine and feminine energies.

And the class leads to sign-ups and auditions for the college production of The Vagina Monologues, and the invitation is to step into the collective feminine pain (which includes the pain of men who have been forced to brutalize their own emotional selves), and through movement, through the powerful art of humor, through strong and loud voices birth the stories the feminine shakes to share.

Standing on that stage, twirling after giving a bow, I emanated a happiness, a bliss, a contented joy that continues to exist in a body now restless and a heart heavy with desires and dreams and questions on how to make those creative entities breathe.

There will always be two sides of me: the academic and the creative. The intellectual and the free-spirited artist. The deeply serious advocate and the light-hearted creatrice.

In college, I nurtured the advocate through my studies, and infused my yoga classes with creativity, and I acted, and I wrote.

My post-college-life has been a hot mess of attempting to appease either side through compromise, and I simply do not feel complete unless both the intellectual and the creative are acknowledged and incorporated into the daily play of life. 

Moving to Austin did not ease this fight. The intensity of the two sides grabbing and yelling for attention has escalated, and there’s a pressured realization of time. There’s no self-established deadline, but there’s an unnerving feeling that time is extremely precious, and I need to scoop up time and use those rented moments very wisely.

And standing in front of the boutique, booming my voice to greet, I know this is an experience calling forth times from the past to train and inform the next scene.

The twenty-seven-year-old wistfully musing by the Texas tees is grateful, and a bit in awe, of the trust my college-self naturally leaned into to feel into an aligned step.

In listening to my past self, the monologue of passion meeting purpose, I immerse into the feeling of contented bliss, and the feeling shimmers into existence as I tune into a podcast on improv classes for refugees, called Improv Without Borders  (star-kissed thanks to the superstar humanitarian who sent a text of inspiration my way).

An audience to the podcast, to my former self rising to present a remembered truth, a return to enlivened feeling, I can listen and bow to relinquish the fight, and surrender to trusting feeling.

So, I’ll channel the Happy Vagina to sing greetings and hellos, and keep my heart open for the spark of insight on how to step onto the next stage to advocate, to perform.