Mercury Retrograde: a Review

It’s been a weird few weeks, y’all, and I’m blaming Mercury retrograde. You've probably heard of this astrological phenomenon, since it's sucked up into pop culture in recent years. That may be because it happens fairly often - three times a year, for a few weeks at a time - but I think it's because it's really, truly annoying. Mercury is the planet that rules communication, travel, technology, and commerce, and when it goes retrograde (appears to move backwards in the sky) it makes those things go wonky - tech malfunctions, communication goes awry and travel gets snarled.

The wifi has been in and out of functioning for no apparent reason all morning, here at ALC-NYC, and I’ve been in and out of a not-fight with a friend for three weeks now. On Monday, I got to the train station to find that my metrocard expired, and all three of the machines at my station were only accepting cash. Luckily, I had enough cash for a single ride, but not for the monthly unlimited card that I rely on. When I swiped the card at the turnstile, though, it told me to swipe card again at this turnstile… and then it told me that I had an insufficient fare. I went and argued with the stationmaster about it, and they opened the gate to let me in. Then I went to school, did a whole day, and forgot about it - until I got on the bus in the afternoon. I swiped 2 different (empty) metrocards, shrugged at the driver and got on the bus. When I got to 86th street to transfer to my train, I thought to myself finally, I’ll be able to get my unlimited and I won’t have to deal with this any more. But, of course, none of the machines at 86th street were working either - every one of the (seven!!!!) machines at the station were only selling single rides. Knowing it's Mercury retrograde helped me find a sense of amusement about it as I bought a single ride, explained what was happening to a tourist, and swiped into the station just in time to miss my train.

Mercury retrograde is annoying, but it’s not just an annoyance. It forces us to slow day, and slowing down things we take for granted makes us notice them - like how I discovered that I could, in fact, hold boundaries with my anxious brain on my Mercury retrograde journey to Australia last year.

I’ve been spending a lot of time, this retrograde, with my old notebooks and past selves - 25 books worth of them. I got sick the first week, and was forced to slow down all the way to a halt. I spent 4 straight days in my apartment, sitting with my changing selves. It is still loud in my head, but not a cacophonous as it once was, I’m noticing.

As I record my present selves - in free writes, in staff check in notes, in journals and reflections on tarot cards, in blog posts - and the data available to me about my patterns piles up, becomes several-cycles-worth of observations, I can see my self getting better at slowing down. I can trace the path of learning to hold my paradoxes: all of my thoughts are valid, even if they are not all as urgent as my brain would have me believe.It’s a shift that I didn’t notice until this retrograde-review-cycle, but it’s been a seismic one. It didn't start now, but now is when I can finally feel it: not all of my strongest thoughts and feelings are urgent and need to be acted on. It’s really hard for me to just sit with them - to not go racing down the mental track of contingency plans and what-ifs and hypothetical conversations - but it is possible. When I read my traveling-to-Australia-through-Mercury-retrograde thoughts I can see the buds that are now flowering - I can't wait to discover the buds under this flower when I check back with this post in a year, or five, or ten...

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I’m so excited to go play at @schoolofthealternative this May!! I’ve been thinking about this drawing since I made it for their application, and while Pisces season mercury retrograde has me swirling in past-present-future unknown-undefined-unknowable time, I don’t feel as helpless as I once did - I feel rooted, and grateful, and optimistic, and unfurling. Non-hierarchical education for all, indeed! 🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚🕛🕜🕝🕞🕟🕠🕡🕢🕣🕤🕥🕦🕧

A post shared by Mel Compo (@the_melicorn) on Mar 13, 2019 at 8:01am PDT

This Week: Intense Astrology, Rainy Days, David Bowie and the Art of Omelettes

It’s been overcast every day this week and raining most of that time - the energy is a mirror of the weather and I’ve noticed our stifled, humid tensity. Towards the end of the week things have been clearing up, thankfully, and it looks like the sun will come out soon. But, like I just told Siena, I cannot and will not predict the weather, I just live in it…I had a great Acro day on Monday! I can feel my body getting stronger, which is so awesome, and I based not only Ash but Katherine on top of him! Yoni is a rad human for a lot of reasons, but I’m coming to appreciate his superpower of getting one to do something they didn’t know their body was capable of without making a fuss about it. I was basing Ash and then Yoni was like “okay, now Katherine is going on top” and then there she was and I was holding both of them with my legs! I have a skeleton and it is strong! Also on Monday: started my second astrology post (forthcoming) in Writing Time, watched "Why Does the Universe Exist?" and talked about genocide, dysentery, and the Oregon Trail in Philosophy, and read more Ancillary Mercy with Timo and Ash. We’re getting so close to the end of the trilogy...Tuesday was a strange day, and not just for me. Astrologically speaking, there were two significant events: Uranus moving into Taurus, and the new moon, also in Taurus. The former is significant because of its rarity - Uranus moves signs only once every 7 years - and because it is the planet of unbalancing, of breakthroughs and breaking open, of unequal balances of power. In Taurus, the sign of the earth, stability, and groundedness, it’s not particularly comfortable, and this transit will certainly be an interesting one. With it conjuncting the new moon in Taurus, it was a potent day. New moons generally are - they’re a time of beginning, and powerful moments of inception, hence it intensifying the Uranus shift.Astrology aside, I started my Tuesday by talking about the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, (quick plug for the Revolutions podcast if you’re interested in an in-depth look at both/either - his season on the Haitian revolution is particularly good) and the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict in History. The last felt especially important, and present after waking up to the news reporting the deaths and injuries to Palestinian protesters at the hands of Israel’s army (speaking of unequal distributions of power over land…). I then rolled into Spanish, where Abby, Timo and I translated “To Change the World Enough” by Alice Walker and then from there into Cook Noob, where fry-master Chuck spent three hours presiding over the production of french fries. I didn’t do much cooking, but I did talk at length to Even about how I don’t think that your brain is where your personhood solely resides - how I think all of your organs, your whole body as a system, is an inherent part of your person. If you’re new to this blog, check out this post for more rambles on this topic.On Wednesday we had Dan and Grace Ports come and visit with their three under-4-year-old children. It was fun having tinies in the space and seeing our small humans react to them being around (shoutout to Abby, for being a baby whisperer). It definitely felt like an ALL THE THINGS day, although writing about it now I’m grateful for the opportunity to get one-on-one and one-on-small-group time: I worked with Beth on writing for over an hour, and read more Ancillary with Timo and Ash, and screened Labyrinth (one of my favorite movies OF ALL TIME) in anticipation of Thursday’s trip…Because Thursday we went to the Brooklyn Museum (a.k.a. my favorite museum…) to see the Bowie exhibit! The whole day was so great. I met Beth, Saylor, and Siena there right when the museum opened since we’re all Brooklyn-based, and we went up to the 4th floor and rambled through the period rooms and also Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. Saylor took all the incredible photos below (except the ones she's in...) and I want to acknowledge her for capturing the creepy/cool/beautiful sense of hauntedness that I feel in the period rooms in particular.

Then we met up with Hannah, Nahla, Ash, Joaquin, and Abby, who had traveled down from east Harlem, and we went and checked out the mummies and then went to BOWIE.First of all, can we just have a moment of appreciation for the human that was David Bowie? Not only was he a rock star - he released 27 albums in 50 years! - he painted and drew and danced and wrote movies and starred in movies and and and… There are over 500 artifacts in this exhibit, from costumes to videos to handwritten pages of lyrics. David Bowie is one of my heroes - his prolificness as an artist, his rejection of gender, his fascination with space and reinvention of the self all inspire me in the creative life I seek to live. Most of the kids on the trip weren’t familiar with Bowie beforehand (some of them had seen Labyrinth, but that was about it) and so there was the fizzing magic of getting to share in that first-time seeing on top of my massive baseline excitement. Saylor and Ash and I moved slowly through, reveling in all the work. We sat for a long time in a room with several giant projectors where they play a loop of him at a live show as Ziggy Stardust. Honestly, David Bowie is magic and the fact that he existed is proof enough, for me, that the universe is full of infinite possibility. If you have a chance to see the exhibit, I highly recommend it.Today has been mostly chill - it feels like the humidity has broken. Wally, Roan’s dad, was here taking portraits, which was so fun, and Svetlana, Rachel, and Adrienne came in to start on an ALC Memory Book (a kind of scaled-down yearbook project…) which I’m super excited about. I went and pulled out all my school photos from this year and there are over 400 of them! It feels like a lot but it also feels right. I made a four-egg omelette with broccoli and mushrooms for lunch that was so delicious. I’m really mastering the art of omelettes. The key is to get the pan very hot and well-greased before adding the eggs.That’s about it. There’s only 4 weeks left now (AHHHHHHH!!!!!) and I’ve got a lot of writing started so watch this space - I’m trying to channel the prolificness of Bowie…<3Mel

Astrology I: Why Astrology?

The first thing you need to know about Western astrology is that it is a cycle. The elliptical path of the earth around the sun makes it appear as though there are fixed stars in the sky, called the Zodiac, which occupy the space directly overhead at different times of year in a repeating pattern. Astrology divides that year-sky into 12 equal parts, called the signs, and tracks the movement of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets as they travel through it. Each sign is named for the most prominent constellation in that section of the sky, and has a collection of qualities or traits associated with it - I’ll go deeper into this in a future post. Usually, when people talk about astrology, they’re talking about these 12 signs and their qualities as they are reflected in themselves and others. When someone tells you their sign (“I’m a Taurus”) they’re actually telling you which sign the Sun was in, where it was relative to the skywheel of the Zodiac, at the time of their birth.Western astrology is a prescriptive schema: it tells us how we are, based on something that exists exclusively outside our selves. We are moving through space; we experience mass and, therefore, gravity. Astrology is not a tool for predicting the future, but it can be a powerful means for making sense of the cycles we live in, and a reminder that the universe, and our selves, are not always in our control. I'm particularly interested in astrology as a schema in self-directed education, because I find that children display the traits of their signs more strongly than adults, whose personalities are steeped long enough in their experiences to complexify, like a soup that's left to refrigerate overnight and tastes better, deeper, the next day. All the same elements are there, but their interplay makes it harder to distinguish the pure flavor of one ingredient or another.The Sun is always moving through the signs (it’s in Taurus right now…), as are all the planets and the Moon, and astrology asserts, “as above, so below,” that movement affects our lives. The Sun takes about a month to move through each sign, though these astrological months do not line up with months on the Gregorian calendar, or start on January 1st (this is very interesting to me, but also not a blog post on the comparative history of calendars, so I’ll leave it for now…).The astrological year begins with the vernal equinox (i.e. the onset of spring) and can be divided into four sections representing the four seasons, running from spring equinox to summer solstice to autumn equinox to winter solstice and back around again.The astrological calendar isn’t perfect (no calendar is perfect) because the year isn’t perfectly divisible; we’re trying to overlay structure on the motion of a rock hurtling through the void, trapped in the gravitational pull of a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old star. Humans are amazing in that we seek to make meaning of that senseless motion, and do, somehow. The universe is vast and unknowable. Schema are a flashlight and grappling hook and rope for splunking the unknown, or a field guide, or an atlas. They’re a language, they’re roadsigns for the psyche. The universe is outside us and inside us too. At its base, astrology is a schema for dividing the year that acknowledges that the motion of the heavenly bodies (the Sun, the Moon, the other planets) have effect on the ways we be here on the Earth. I like to think about their gravity; I think that we are all like planets, or solar systems; everything pulls on itself and that’s why there’s something instead of nothing. We are all representations of constellations of this cosmos in the moment we were born.I’m into talking about the metaphysical. The why of astrology doesn’t necessarily matter, except that it does to me and you’re reading my blog post. You don’t have to believe all this to be into astrology; I like that it’s a schema that goes as shallow (or deep or vast or miniscule or cosmological…) as you like.Next time, I’ll give an overview of the signs that make up the astrological wheel (and ramble less about schema and spatiotemporality).<3Mel