Stationed/Stationing

"... any experiment of interest in life will be carried out at your own expense.” 

― John Wilmot

   Every once in a while someone posts a quote or a poem on Facebook, sometimes just a few words, sometimes in its entirety, and it finds you, like an oracle whispering the words of the gods.  It's a form of bibliomancy, divination with words and books.  Sometimes those quotes, those poems, strike like lightning, shocking you into some realization.  Sometimes, they come more peacefully, words finally put to those vague feelings troubling you.  

     The above was one of those latter bits of wisdom, come after my first Thanksgiving away from my daughter, my dogs, my old life.  It was a much more eloquent summation of my own thoughts just a few days before, crying as I sometimes do in this new life, wanting my cake and wanting to eat it too, wanting what I had and what I have, knowing you can't exist embodied in two different universes, but must be a ghost in one or the other.  Crying that Wednesday before, missing my daughter, knowing I had chosen this path, understanding at the core of me the price I have paid, I steeled myself with the thought that everything has a price.  Isn't that what we learn in fairy tales, that happiness demands its sacrifice, its blood and bone, its pound of flesh?  It is, I realize, a Grimm philosophy, but one oddly suited to my Greek ancestors and those cold, hard-scrabble kin of my father's trying to make a farming life in the unwelcoming earth of Massachusetts.  And maybe there's a touch of regret in that quote, or perhaps it's just the bit of perspective you'd expect from a man living at the start of the Enlightenment.  It's hard to tell with words out of context uttered hundreds of years before.  Maybe it's why we turn to them, for their malleability so can make of them what we hope or fear.  

     It's a good quote for deep, dark waters of this Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio getting ready to station, to pause before going back into the light.  There is in it, perspective and courage, the realization that change is inevitable and that we are responsible for our own fate, our happiness or unhappiness.  Again, the perfect philosophy for those heady times when science seemed like it could provide all the answers, when Decartes could utter, "I think therefore I am" and not be considered a blasphemer.  Me, I lean more toward a philosophy of co-creation.  I like to think that life is a work in progress, my masterwork, and that many hands have made it what it is, Life's and mine, but not just.  And there is in this quote, something a bit more positive than punishment and payment, which suits me at 54 living in  this new world, a continent away from the old.

     The whole point of Mercury Retrograde, I think, especially in these frenzied times of 'do, do, do,' is to force yourself to pause, to reflect, to dream a bit, to catch your breath.  We don't make the time and so this time makes us, either by choice or by force, pause a bit to get our bearings.  And there is something of life in this pattern of retrograde and direct, something we seem to match in our planetary wanderings.  I feel it, my own stationing, my own equinox, that point of revelation, of balance, before it begins again, our orbiting.  

     So as Mercury gets ready to station, and I do as well, this quote seems a good summation of my looking back this three week span.  There is always a danger in reflection, Narcissus' obsession with himself, Lot's wife's salted regret.  However, if as above, so below is true and we are wanderers, like the planets, then onward is our destiny with only these brief moments of pause and ponder.  I am content to be a good scientist, to risk myself and my hypotheses, in the pursuit of that which Socrates, the wisest of men. called us to: Know Thyself.  May it always be so.