To say that this retrograde season has been a total wash, a grand cataclysmic nothing, a cosmic plunge into the void…to say that I have regressed to a level of spiritual and emotional adolescence not seen since Obama’s first term…to say that any sense of linear propulsion has come crashing down in an inferno of nihilism and disdain…
“To Hannah…taking the next step in a series of random steps…how strange our journey is through life…”
For some reference: Mercury is in retrograde in Capricorn (in my twelfth house of self-undoing) through January 18; Mars has been in fucking retrograde in Gemini since Halloween, finally wrapping up January 12; and Uranus is retrograding directly on top of my sun, going direct on the 22nd.
The other day my friend Emily pulled a full Jennifer Love Hewitt, threw her hands up in the air, and yelled: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? It doesn’t make sense — after so much progress, so much inner spelunking, such a beautiful revivification, for it to come to this point of total…nothing. Just nothing. This was the year when I touched ecstasy (and, not incidentally, did a fair bit of ecstasy), my Dirty Dancing summer, my age of embodiment. Now I’m back to being a 14 year old watching Queer as Folk on my friend’s couch?
And when did I become such a brat? When did all the gratitude (or whatever) fall off? Is this how easy it is? A little self-sabotage, a little chaos, some nihilism, and suddenly I’m done?
But it’s more than that. It’s the disappointment. Disappointment that I’m back here again, doing the same shit I’ve been doing my whole life: isolating, numbing, running, destroying, wasting, reducing my field of consciousness to a perimeter the size of a sarcophagus. These retrogrades have made me question if I’ve changed at all, if I ever can change.
But I also know: there’s a game within a game. Backlash, stalls, blowback — they’re a part of the cycle. They represent a clamping down of consciousness in the wake of promethean liberation — both globally and personally. For all that’s gone so wrong, the world is coming back to life: the cities are abloom with beautiful bodies and new chances to collide with them. I’m one of them now, and I suspect, so are you. In working the 12 steps and awakening my sexuality, I have felt the promise of my recovery fulfilled: to feel alive, lovely, whole, sane and safe.
And so the answer to this reality-shifting metamorphosis is to return to the old truth I carried: that I am damaged goods, that all I can do to cope is hide away and watch TV, that I must leave NYC and my community, and maroon myself yet again. It’s been pitiful. But it’s not new. Even if I can’t break the cycle, the possibility of seeing the elliptical swing wider and wider affords me a chance to grasp it, ride it and give the Wheel of Fortune a spin.
I know it will let up, and that this year is going to be wild. I’m currently in Houston, burning with a lust for life which only NYC can answer. I feel like a teenager again, dreaming of moving to the big city for the first time. If this misery can afford me a new beginning, a feeling of first romance at age 32, then I’ll sign up for the tour of oblivion. As they say in The Mummy: Death is only the beginning. Ready yourself: the resurrection is already underway.
See you on the other side,
David Odyssey