Mirror Minuet

The last 36 hours have been a time of growing frustration, anger and resentment for me.
I didn't enjoy them in the least, but I can't say I'd have rather avoided them.

Oh, nothing major happened - just a series of everyday occurrences combining to make me wish that everyone would drop dead, or alternatively that I could quietly melt away from this life for a little time.
The bad attitude has passed though, and it was time to take a look at my Natal chart to see if I could start to make sense of this outburst of misanthropic anger.

Well, yes: there went Mercury, in retrograde, trailing across my 5th house, while opposing my Natal Pluto at the same time.
Anyone with half a drop of astrological sense out there would have recognised this as a time of severe social-ego roughing-up. But I don't have much astrological sense. In fact, for many years I resented the very existence of astrology, as I was bent on becoming an astronomer, and hated it when people, on hearing this, would launch into a discussion of solar signs.

 I started to recover from this intractable attitude a few years ago, and now I find astrology fascinating, although I probably spend less time on it than I do talking to the ancestors.

Walking the garden with a plastic bag in one hand and a plastic bag covering the other hand, picking up dog shit, I reflected that this was probably the perfect occupation to snap me out of the last vestiges of wounded petulant childhood - for the moment anyway.

You know, many of us regard astrology - when we don't disdain it completely as superstitious nonsense - as some kind of predictive mechanism. This couldn't be further from the truth, I have found.
Instead of foretelling the future, the shift of local planets against the background stars seems to be a vast cosmic mirror, held up to each of us individually and all of us collectively.
The passage of Mercury retrograde across the tail end of Pisces might have given me an inkling of what to look out for, it is true. But far more it is a reflection of what was going on in my own microcosm. A pas-de-deux, not a forerunner.

And it occurred to me that this is an awesome set up: we dance together, the Universe and ourSelves, doing the steps together in the Round Dance we conspired to create so long ago, this Cosmos and We.

Pic: found at Beta Tarot

For great thoughts on how this degree of retrograde affects us All, read Robert Wilkinson on the subject.