Shadows, Shadow Play

Toying with a simple pen and ink depiction, I was trying to convey the messages of Mercury in its apparent retrograde pattern, and what that means, how it plays out, and what the future holds by way of looking at the past.

The timing is what interests me. The messages have largely been familiar, and while my earliest teachers talked about how “Mercury in retrograde is bad,” I’ve grown to understand it is a natural time, and can be useful.

The image, I started with a simple line drawing of the alchemical glyph for Mercury, the symbol I associate with the planet. It looks like a Venus — or female — symbol with a little set of horns sprouting from the head. It is supposed to be a winged helmet, associated with Hermes, the messenger of the gods, later known as Mercury. Although somewhat distanced, Loki is similar in form and function. Personally, I like the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream as a mercurial fellow. That symbol, though, a simple line drawing, small circles, stick coming out the bottom, a cross bar, then, the little ears on the top, again symbolic of Hermes’ winged helmet. Mercury had wings on his sandals.

“Fly monkeys, fly!”

Sorry, wrong mythos. Anyway, the glyph? Venus with little antenna, for communications.

Shadows, Shadow Play

June 13, Mercury arrived at 16° Cancer. Mercury crawls up to 26° Cancer, turning retrograde on 6/29. Mercury retrogrades back to 16° Cancer on 7/23, staying at 16° until 7/28. Mercury doesn’t arrive back at 26° Cancer until 8/24 (coincidental with the Sun going into Virgo).

Shadows, Shadow Play

I’ve got a pepper plant thriving with my abuse, overwatering, drought, too much attention, no care, and similar inconsistent behaviors. It’s about two feet tall, and the shade in the direct sun is negligible, but as the afternoon light dips lower on the horizon? That plant can cast a shadow up to a few feet long if only for a short time. The shadow is ephemeral yet still exists. It can appear longer, taller than the object causing the shadow itself. The shadow of Mercury can extend well beyond the known limits of the actual, observed retrograde. This Mercury in Retrograde?

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

Weighing Substack against WordPress

Me looking at this, it isn’t an exhaustive or comprehensive look. It’s a simple, casual, non-techie overview for myself.

I really gots to sort out this crap.

There are differences. When I started using WordPress, it was built on open-source code, freely available, and it had a “5-minute install” package. Cute, but also: really useful. From renting a domain name to spinning up a website, I could do that in less than 30 minutes. Substack is more pointed towards branded content that exists out in the ethers of the internet-nets. Both claim: own your content. As a writer, that means I own my own copyrights. Steal from me and expect the wrath of, I’m not sure, maybe it will rain frogs or something. Get all biblical with plagues, famines, and crops withering in the fields.

Weighing Substack against WordPress

I subscribe to a couple of Substack newsletters. An author I love, actually, might be three or four authors I look to for entertainment and enlightenment, easiest via substack. But the way it works, it’s too limited, and there’s no permanent repository for previous material. I’ve got archives that stretch back as far as 1993, and that’s just the horoscopic material online. Some of my earlier rambling is even older than that. It hasn’t been scanned and uploaded, and these days, I’m too distracted to care. There are a couple of points that I need to work out. Part of this is the crutch of using a word-processor front-end that links directly to a WordPress backend. Near seamless and effortless. In its original design, WordPress started out as a way to wrangle weblog content. The system metastasized into a page builder —slash— web page management protocol, but at its heart was always the weblog-style entry, a roughly chronological series of textual entries. That’s what I do. My biggest challenge with this question, how to store, online, the material that I’ve already got, what I’ve already done, archives, memories, dreams, images, and keep that alive?

Weighing Substack against WordPress

Getting kicked off twitter just brought about more focus to this question. But wrestling the thoughts to paper, so to speak, in which there is neither paper, wrestling, or speaking going on? Typing it out, and thinking it through? Once place. One copy. Post one place let the software take care of the rest — even if it means getting kicked off twitter for “inauthentic behavior.” Is Mercury still retrograde?