Retrograde to the Basics

I just saw on Instagram (there are the pictures!) that Mercury is retrograde in Gemini from May 29 (today) to June 22, 2021.
That matches up pretty well with the month I set aside to do Picture-Free Blogging.

I'm always saying I don't belieeeeve in astrology, and I don't.
But I do find it soothing when it fits my needs---which it always does, if you twist and turn it enough. It's endlessly mutable.

Sometimes it fits specifically well.
In this case, it matches my feelings about putting down my camera/phone and focusing on words:

"You could be going back to the drawing board...
Although we're conditioned to gather and disseminate information and go, go, go 24/7 — as fast as humanly possible — the planet that rules all that mental energy and communication [Gemini] actually urges us to take the occasional time-out from that exhausting pace."
--via Shape

There is so much coming at me, at us all––this past year of shutting down, and these recent weeks of opening up––it takes a lot of energy to take it in and process it.

After work yesterday, I went to IKEA for the first time in more than a year, to look for a duvet cover to replace the one I washed with an ink pen and then stained with wine.

Sitting in their cafeteria alone, eating dried-up salmon balls and mushy broccoli––(they're not very busy so the food sits in the steam table too long)––I felt a wave of tenderness and sadness.

Tenderness, that so many people have made such heroic efforts to take care of one another---even efforts on the part of corporations like IKEA count.

Sadness, that we've lost so much--some, simply the natural passage of time.
I felt the absence of people I've been to IKEA with--my father, who liked the Swedish meatballs there and has been dead four years now--and the loss of people I don't even know, for instance, the mothers of two people who died of Covid.

And the young woman who was murdered on the corner next to the thrift store this week. 

Not that I went to IKEA with her. 
She was a sex worker who regularly came into the store for tiny little clothes.
She was rather a pain to deal with because she was always scattered, high on something. I liked her a lot though––she was perky and bright, like a little bird–– and I always gave her stuff for free.

After she was killed (no one knows why--anything from totally random to something to do with business), it turned out all the cashiers gave her stuff too.
I'm glad there was that tiny kindness in her life, anyway...

I am tenderized by small acts of patience.
The worker who assigned me my table, at a good distance from others (Covid-saftey measure) sweetly explained how the system works--though he must have said it a million times already.

We are being humans together, sometimes better than other times.

I bought a duvet cover in neutral colors: beige, cream, soft blue & gray.
It looks great next to my white walls. Calming.