Time Travelling
Musing on time travel as the multiverse conspires once more to shift its space time disco through our lives. Perhaps it is the glut of spare days or the slower pace that immobility affords but my forward motion has stilled. In its place are long moments of contemplation, an abyss of ideas that I have until now simply leaped over in my hurry to get to the imaginary line I have drawn in the future.Proprioception is a new favourite concept only recently introduced to me, by my ankle and my cat familiar when we simultaneously lost ours. It was explained to me by my neighbour / vet / all round wise woman as your body's ability to know where it is in space and time. This is communicated to our brains by the relative position of our joints and their response to our idea of where we are, what we want to do and where we want to go. It calls in our nerves and reflexes to orient us in the here and now. When it fails, we stumble or we fall.As humans we have an awfully hard time staying present. Our minds bounce us between past and future like a ping pong ball, seduced by the idea we can change either by our thinking. We abdicate the power we hold in the present to the illusory lure of time and control.A retrograde operates on similar principles. Although the planet in question appears to be going backwards, it has merely slowed its orbit allowing the markers around it to zoom past it. It is the same if you watch cars racing or birds flying in formation and is purely a function of your perception: your idea of where those things are and how they move relative to you. Not one of them travels backwards.Thus by its very nature, a retrograde forces us to slow. No matter the opposing imperatives and how much we rail against it. Freshly leaping in Aries we may be but Mercury's quarterly backing up of the cosmic truck will throw a regulatory spanner in our spokes. It invites us, four or five times a year, to actually effect change in the present by revising our past.And as any time traveller will tell you, nothing is set and everything can yet be changed.Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect but perhaps the Universe doesn't insist on it.~ Edward M LernerArt 'The Persistence of Memory' by Salvador DaliWords c. Kerrie Basha, 2018