Mercury retrograde wellness check

Friends —

This is a Mercury retrograde wellness check. We are really in it over here.

In recent days, my partner and I have both lost our house keys, mine down an elevator shaft and his mysteriously. I decided to finally address a repeatedly injured ankle and find myself in a brace on forced rest. I’ve missed important emails, slept poorly but had weird, vivid dreams. It’s been parking tickets and stomach aches and travel delays. I am sure I’m not the only one.

Let me begin with the practical: Mercury retrograde happens three to four times a year, for three to four weeks. This time around, it began June 29 and runs through July 23.

Astronomically, obviously, the planet isn’t actually moving backwards, it just looks like that because Mercury travels around the sun faster than the Earth does. Astrologically, this takes on symbolic significance. Mercury, the planet of communication, is falling backward in the sky. Communication breaks down. Emails don’t send. Traffic doesn’t move.

My advice on this is simple and evergreen: Give yourself an additional 20 minutes to get anywhere you need to go. Double check your texts and emails and credit card statements. Contracts you sign now may need to be renegotiated later. Technology glitches, breaks down. Be prepared. Be patient.

On a grander scale, this Mercury retrograde has me thinking about something I recently spent several weeks exploring in therapy: building my capacity to endure discomfort. Rather than immediately jumping to fix whatever situation I find myself in, we wondered what would happen if I just tried to stay calm.

I played with this for a few weeks. I was at the time doing a daily kundalini practice that included holding my arms up, at right angles, for 11 minutes without stopping. It was a training ground for me. Could I feel the burn in my shoulders and breathe through it? Could I stay in an uncomfortable conversation, listening deeply, without panicking? Could I feel my rage, my sadness, my grief without letting it settle into my body as unprocessed tension?

After several weeks of this, I saw my meditation teacher, and she said something about how we all know that while it’s important to work on our ability to feel sadness and grief and anger, etc., the more difficult task for the spiritual practitioner is actually to build our capacity for joy and abundance and pleasure.

I told her about my experiment with enduring uncomfortable states, trying to strengthen my nervous system’s ability to stay calm under pressure. Was it possible, I asked her, that this practice might also help me to build the capacity to feel everything more, whether difficult or pleasurable, and she was quick to respond: They require each other.

I had been doing good, valuable work, she said, but I was limiting my scope of consciousness. What, she asked, would it look like for me to train myself to notice pleasure, to build my capacity to stay with it?

And I started to notice something in my practice: After holding my arms up for 11 minutes, the energetic rush when I set them down was better than coffee, better than 15 extra minutes of sleep. My nervous system was rewiring itself, getting stronger under pressure, and responding in kind. The act of sitting with my hands in my lap was no longer unconscious, taken for granted. It was a pleasure.

Mercury retrograde is often meme-ified astrology. I think this is because it happens often, and also because we feel its impact in tangible, uncomfortable corners of our lives. As I’ve noted several times now, my astrology teacher Adam Elenbaas says that the point of learning astrology is to reflect on our experiences as they happen to us, but it took me a long time to view the practice in that way.

For many years, Mercury retrograde was a lens I turned on the world, preparing myself endlessly for delays and mishaps, making myself anxious and putting myself on edge bracing myself for difficulties.

But this time around, I’m trying to play with expanding the lens, using my ability to notice the very Mercury retrograde happenings as a chance to awaken. I am remembering that joy and pleasure do not exist without discomfort, and vice versa. They require each other, and I welcome them equally. Or, at least, I try to.

Alright, that’s where I’m at now. Next week we have a special little pocket of clarity, but more on that next week.

In the meantime, a few updates, things to listen to, read, watch, etc., if you’re interested:

• I am giving a book talk and signing this Sunday at the Yogi Berra Museum! My New York-area friends, I’d love to see you there.

• I also just signed a new order of books at Central Book Exchange here in Sugarhouse. For my SLC friends, go get your signed copy of THE MAGICAL GAME!

• I was on City Cast Salt Lake this week talking about the Charlie Kirk case, Mercury retrograde and my book. (Yes, you read that right.) Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I really enjoyed the conversation.

• I made a short film with one of our excellent Tribune videographers about a mythical river in Utah history that I’ve been obsessed with for months. I think it’s lovely. Please watch!

• I am currently reading the ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME series. It’s a series of seven books, four of which have been translated into English so far. It’s about a woman stuck in time. I am obsessed, and mad I don’t speak Danish.

• I also just finished I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS. A beautiful and dark meditation on womanhood and motherhood and marriage and the American West. Five stars.

• Also also, I just finished listening to MAGPIE MURDERS as my nighttime book, and I also really enjoyed it. I love a whodunit for bedtime and this one was particularly good, and a fun love letter to the genre.

• We recently re-watched MARE OF EASTTOWN. It was even better than I remembered, and lovely in conversation with ILYBICD, both of which paint a picture of the opioid crisis and motherhood in America that moved me.

• I also really enjoyed watching my friend Liz Lvov’s webseries BOIKA. It’s a BOIKA summer, thank god.

Alright, I love you all.

XO,
A