It's giving backwards

We are now fully in fall. This season ushers us into a slower pace. The light dims and awakens our night vision. Leaves come to rest on the ground, having finished their months-long work of transmuting light into fuel. We eat food that grows in and on the ground – yams, pumpkins, potatoes. As we consume roots, we get closer to our own, too.

Right now, both Mercury and Venus are retrograde. While retrogrades (and especially Mercury retrogrades) are discussed with an air of anxiety in popular culture, I find retrogrades to be useful and necessary.

When planets are retrograde, they appear to slow down and move backwards in the sky from our point of view on Earth. (They are not actually slowing down and moving backwards – this is a visual effect caused by changes in planetary speeds, not a physical reality.)

As you may imagine, when ancient astronomers noticed this, they were like, “WTF?!” – and this WTF quite literally gave them pause to ask different questions, review their understanding of how the world works, and slow down.

Retrogrades continue to offer us that pause – a moment in which our sense of linear time and movement are challenged, when our rational minds are pushed to reset, when we are invited into strange, unexpected, and magical rhythms.

Under racialized capitalism, retrogrades are a threat because they challenge its fundamental notions of constant, linear progress and production. This worldview does not give value to the unwieldy, unpredictable processes of reflection, review, reassessment, and reimagination.

For me, this is what makes retrogrades powerful. They are potent pauses in which our norms are challenged, checked, and reset. They are dynamic dances that drive new directions. It’s not to say that they don’t “mess things up” – because they can definitely upend our plans! – but occasionally we need things to be messed up to drive courage, clarity, and change.

This season, take as much time as you can to pause, reset, reorient, reimagine. Give yourself moments to close your eyes, breathe, and listen.

In the quiet dark, with our night vision honed, radical dreams, possibilities, and potentials begin to emerge.