A couple of times a year, the planet Mercury goes retrograde. This means, as seen from Earth, Mercury seems to go backwards in the sky, relative to the stars. Many times people are less than pleased when Mercury goes retrograde, and become frustrated with how others don’t seem to understand them. Communication seems to somehow become inside-out and backwards.
Its a time when we can become more introspective, to do art, poetry and music. However, as Mercury is in Aries and going retrograde, it’s important that when we choose to become introspective, that we do so without frustration over how our efforts at communication may be seeming not to connect. The Aries drive to explore and innovate that we feel can be utilized by going deeper into ourselves; so we really know that we understand, perhaps outside of a cognitive and linear kind of understanding.
And along with this, Mercury will be again conjuncting Jupiter, and opposing Saturn. So there is a feeling of wanting to move ahead with hope and joy, and simultaneously being somehow held back- to try to bring things into balance. Sounds like the budget fights in Washington, doesn’t it?
The release of this retrograde energy, of which Trickster Astrologer Caroline Casey says is like “drawing back a bow-string,” is to practice fierce art. To delve deeply inside to find how we might more effectively communicate with one another without being attached to the way we communicate. If one way doesn’t seem to be working, to try something else, and to decline to fall into the trap of having to be “right.”
Again, patience is a watchword here, in the midst of all this intensity. Patience while we attend to how the process is unfolding, which it finally will, around April 23rd, which is when Mercury goes direct again.
©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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