Earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, a string of Facebook posts, in the form of letters to our younger selves, filled my news feed. They were heartfelt, gentle, encouraging missives. They were worded hugs sent backwards across time, for the purpose of easing sore hearts. I wondered though then, and still, what letter those younger selves might have written to us, at middle age, the end of our lives if not in view, there just over the horizon, every course we chart leading us irrevocably there and to whatever lies beyond. Would we have written, like in the Bradbury poem, "I remember you," an enigmatic phrase bringing to mind the sort of time travel from present to past and back again that Proust undertook? What would the younger me have said to the one on the edge of a heart attack, recovering after, the one that at 53 found herself thinking death was not such a bad thing, ready to let go of this world whether that meant something more or just a dark blanket of endless sleep?
Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio, which makes this a prime time for such deep musings. And while I have always focused on reflection at such times, somehow this particular Mercury retrograde, on the water, a huge change separating my old life and this new one I've made, so they are almost unrecognizable one to the other, seems the perfect time to consider the obligation I owe that younger me to live life, to make it glorious, to reach out and to take chances for what she dreamed, what I dreamed. Would she have been happy with me and my life at 52? Definitely not. As deeply interior as she was, to her the world was a symphony that filled her ears, thrilled her soul, drove her forward every day, urging life and the living of it, fully, completely, even simple days of around home and the backyard made magic by the thrill of a world so generous with Her gifts that what choice was there but to be generous too. Would she approve of this life that I have made hers at 54? Looking at her, sunglasses donned, beaming, sunny and sure of the happiness present in every moment of life, even when her parents argued, threw things, hurt each other unforgivably with hands and words, I'm pretty sure she would be, is. I think she might be sitting there still in Milwaukee of the very early sixties, catching a glimpse of the water, the boat, the man, the life we live and the dreams we hold, and part of that smile is for her future self, the one that learned to live and love and believe in in the midst of the worst, that the best was there too, just as present in those hard moments but invisible, waiting to be called.
I'm not sure the younger me would have had the words to speak her heart to the older me, that one stuck, the one near death, the one on the other side of it, the one trying to figure out how to love the gift of life she was given, the one trying to live after years of not. But maybe her whispers across the years are enough, the reclamation of this sunny self after decades of a more melancholy bent. Maybe this is how they talk, in remembrance and reflection, in these pauses we take trying exacting our past, not rewriting our history as much as find some sort of archeological evidence that makes us completely re-think our views of a time, a place, a people.
During this Mercury Retrograde my you be blessed with the kind of remembrances which fill the soul with joy and hope, love and life. So mote it be.
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