wherefor art thou?

Last spring, through the stress of the end of the school year, I took a lot of evening and night rides on the windhorse. Maybe you remember my incessant rambling about Venus. I'd shed the stress of the day by climbing on and riding west into the sunset or the setting crescent moon, watching the evening colors morph around the sparkling planet until all was dark on the backdrop.
I've really missed her in the evening sky this spring. I did some searching around to find out when she’d be back this year and was amazed that it wouldn’t be until late June. By then, the sky will have lost its spring clarity and will have accumulated its summer haze of humidity. She has the brilliance to cut through it all, but she will still be inhibited.
I’m embarrassed to say that I kind of expected her to appear every evening in the middle of March just like last year, and add an extra element to the gorgeous sunset. It occurs to me how short-sighted and insular my thinking is. Here I am, traveling around the sun at 365 days per orbit, the days here being measured by revolutions of my own planet. These are the occurrences that I use to measure time. So I figure if I travel out of sight of Venus, when I return to where I last saw her, she should still be there, right? As if all she ever does is hang around up there in the evening sky and wait for me to come orbiting back around. What really happens though is quite different. She is up there doing the same thing as I am, but going about it quite differently. I’m not even sure she uses days to measure years, because in fact, her day is longer than her year. She orbits faster than she rotates. But that’s not all, while I watch her set in west behind the sun, she watches me rise in the west because she actually spins backward from my perspective. For all I know, to her, North could be down and South, up. I don’t even want to figure out how many of our separate orbits we’d have to go through to match up the locations on March 23, where we found each other last year on March 23, for instance. Maybe we could calculate it and use that to define a common “year” between us. Like an Indian raga, we could do our measurements by the least common denominator, and thus measure time.
Well, all this rambling thought goo, just made me notice how often I do this with everything and everyone around me. It is darned inconvenient when everyone’s own life patterns, personalities, moods, and circumstances don’t remain constant so that when I get through the spectrum of my own patterns, personalities, moods and circumstances, I can return to find everything just as I left it, no worse for the wear, and everyone happy to see me back. In reality though, we are network of individuals, a soular system if you will, each orbiting and spinning at his/her own speed and direction. Any one encounter, interaction, transverse, alignment, eclipse, etc., is not a result of the effort or circumstances or location of any one of us at a given time. But it is a snapshot of the current motion of every one of us at a random moment.
This makes life incredibly difficult and rewarding and exciting. What good would it do if everyone around me were the same next time we gather? I wouldn’t be the same, and would therefore perceive my change and project it on them.
I wonder if when Venus returned to her March 23 position this year, she looked up and thought, why is he not there? Just as I did when I looked up on the same day. We were miles apart. In late June, right after supper, I’ll look up and see her again, and she will see me. But we won’t be anywhere near where we were when we saw each other last year.