Retrograde travel

I came across this very interesting post on Aquarius Papers which mentions the benefit of travel during Mercury Rx periods. This is really interesting as we are conventionally advised against travelling during Mercury Rx due to the higher potential for delays and missed connections.

This is what it says about Rx travel:

I have found that as long as one is flexible, retrograde travel is actually a good thing. So is research, reflection, review, rehearsals, and returns from the past. It’s also a great time for reconnecting with old friends, finding people and things thought lost, It’s a great time to explore possibilities, as long as no definitive decisions are made, since they are usually modified or reversed later on.

Interesting, since I’m travelling tomorrow (later today rather) - and am timing my connections with plenty of time to spare - back to my old university to submit a thesis that took 6 years to write (feels like a lot longer!). Given the current AUT action boycotting assessment, the marking of my thesis might actually be delayed, but since it’s Merc Rx, I’ve learnt not to panic.

The second interesting thing is, one of the job applications I mentioned was to this old university of mine, and I had hoped to attend the interview during the period of my visit, but I think my application got lost in the mail. Again, because of what I’ve learnt of Merc Rx over the years, there’s no use fretting about it. Maybe it’s for the best, maybe something else will work out later.

Of course, I’m looking forward to seeing old friends again too.

I guess the thing about driving in reverse while looking through the rear-view mirror is that one arrives in old places with new eyes.

Reference
Wilkinson, Robert. Aquarius Papers. Accessed 21 March 2006.

 

Mercury Rx in Pisces, March 2006

As I’ve mentioned, Mercury is in its detriment in Pisces, and as it moves backwards in the watery sign, it will find it difficult to maintain its need for rationalisation and logical communication. Mercury learns in Pisces to communicate intuitively. Mercury retrograding in Pisces must learn to give over to intuition. As astrologer Kim Marie, writing about a 2000 retrograde in Pisces, puts it:

This is one of the hardest signs of the zodiac for analytical, left-brain Mercury to pass through, and then for it to be retrograde can get really confusing. It asks us to entirely let go of excess fluff in our head and let our intuition take over. Mercury is comfortable only when it can be rationalizing, making lists, analyzing all the details. So this retrograde tends to make us doubt ourselves. Answers just won’t come no matter how much we dwell on the issues in our head.

What issues we will have to dwell on will depend on which area of our charts Mercury is passing through and the aspects it makes. However, in general, every Mercury retrograde will go over part of the sky it has recently covered, so this retrograde in Pisces goes over ground covered from 16 February to 1 March (see Aquarius Papers). According to Aquarius Papers, this retrograde is

a degree of “The Harvest Moon Illumes A Clear Autumnal Sky,” showing that we have reached a consumatory moment, and it ushers in a period of reaping what we have sown, or failed to cultivate. It will show us the “power of creative visualization by which great dreamers transcend outer reality” and promises “a complete dominance of circumstances” if we know how to use the promise of this period. It’s a threshold of harvesting what we have efforted toward up to now, and seems to indicate that by late April we will have the seeds of a new era showing strongly in our lives.

In my case, the period of 16 February to 1 March saw the completion of a six-year long PhD thesis, the tentative introduction to psychotherapy and the sudden clear-minded recognition that I had to take my own future into my hands if I was going to break a present impasse. The retrograde period itself saw the premature end of formal therapy due to cash flow crises, and cash flow crises! But also the beginnings of self-therapy by way of blogging, and several new job applications…

So, in effect, Mercury retrograding in Pisces allows us to revisit issues through Piscean means. I’ll quote again from Aquarius Papers about the current retrograde period:

It’s a time of examining subtleties, ghosts from the past, thresholds of fulfillment that have led us to a culminative moment in our lives and affairs, and the power of creative visualization as a means to transcend outer forms. Through seeing what’s ending and the seeds of future cycles of development, we can come to a thorough dominance of our circumstances. We will understand productivity and creativity from new perspectives, and some will come to a “self-consummation which is successful beyond any possibility of measure.” Trust what is at a threshold of fulfillment, and by late March you will see your inner wealth, and what can protect you as you move into new life phases and activities. Much will be shown the next three weeks [of the retrograde] that will lead us to different visions of motives, self-undoing behavior, and sorrows that are common to the human race regardless of time and space distinctions.

I’ll report back from the end of March!

Next post: either Merc Rx in my fourth house of Pisces, or Merc Rx and world events. My Mercury mind is too busy navigating the fog to decide at the moment….

References
Marie, Kim. Astrology by Kim Marie. Accessed 14 March 2006.
Wilkinson, Robert. Aquarius Papers — Global Astrology. Accessed 14 March 2006.

 

Wading through quicksand

I am aware that I have been anticipating blogging about Merc Rx in Pisces for a couple of posts now, but as it is with me and Merc Rx in general, I feel like I’m wading through quicksand. I don’t know whether it’s just the low energy of the period, or that all that negotiating between missed appointments and lost communications has drained my energy! Maybe a bit of both.

I’ll get to it in the next week.

 

It’s started — problems on Blogger

Minutes after my first post on this blog, I went to my other blog and had difficulty publishing a new post. Ironically, this one isn’t affected. Basically, I couldn’t access my blog from any browser. A 403 error message saying I’m forbidden to access this server would pop up. A glance at the Blogger forum revealed a whole chorus of posts from frustrated bloggers experiencing the same problem.

One user’s observation struck me:

From: boonspot
Date: Mon, Mar 6 2006 5:44 pm

seems like the problem commonality is on blogs that are published on the 1st of March 2006. (03/01/06). I guess if you have a blog with an entry on 03/01/06, your blog would most probably have this problem… Anyways, I can publish/republish my blog now, but still unable to open it up on IE.

Interesting. Merc rx began in Pisces on 2nd March. Yes, I do have a post on 1st March. I haven’t written about the shadow period. Will do soon. In the meantime, hmm.

 

Why I am blogging about Merc Rx

If you google ‘mercury retrograde’, you will tend to get many similar explanations — I will collate some of these in future posts — mainly that it refers to the planet Mercury appearing to move backwards in the sky when viewed from the earth. This phenomenon occurs on an average of three times a year, for about three weeks at a time, and these periods tend to see a spike in incidents of miscommunication, electronic failure, transport delay, missed appointments and so on.

As someone who not only has Sun but two other planets in Gemini (ruled by Mercury), and whose midheaven is on Virgo (also ruled by Mercury), the retrograde period is often the bane of my existence. At the same time, Mercury retrograde periods are also known to be useful for reflection, introspection and going back over old material — revising, rather than writing new material, as it were. Currently, Mercury is retrograding in Pisces, and far from experiencing any of the usual mishaps with lost emails and adminstrative blunders, I find myself starting a blog on my meditation experiences. I am also considering starting another blog to do with my professional career. Now, I’ve always toyed with the idea of blogging, but just never found the time, the motivation or the energy to get started properly. And all of a sudden, I’m on the verge of three! It got me thinking about the retrograde period and whether blogging is not at the moment my way of revising old material and revisiting some aspects of my personality. I have both Sun and Mercury in Gemini and so far all of my writing has been driven towards the professional field, never did any writing for myself, not even a personal diary during my pre-teen years! Maybe the time has come for me to give it a go — if I’m honest, outside of my career, I never believed I had anything important to say.

So the blog is for me more than anyone else, but if anyone else gets to see it and wants to share, great! I like the format, the easy archive, and the potentiality for an audience, both of which paper diaries don’t easily afford, unless one is Prince Charles and sends them round to 100 of one’s friends. At any rate, after so many years of word-processing, I don’t seem to be able to articulate my thoughts in longhand anymore!

As I’ve stressed in the disclaimer below, I am not an astrologer. I am only a novice and I don’t know if I will ever pursue astrology to a higher degree and be able to read complex charts. For now, the simple stuff is good enough for me. I’m learning everyday from some really good and interesting astrology books and sites. What I aim to do in this blog is to recount and reflect on my own experiences during particular retrograde periods. It seems like a realistic enough project to embark on. Mercury retrograde periods are of a reasonable length (3 weeks) and recur reasonably frequently (about 3 times a year) to monitor its influence. Unlike lunar transits of 30 days, it is not too frequent to keep up with, and not too lengthy like the outer planet transits, spanning years, even generations, at a time. In addition, its effects tend to be externally visible to a degree — while you could doubt psychic change, say with Pluto transits, it will be hard to think of a computer failure occurring only in your imagination, unless you were truly masochistic or plain bored.

My long-term aim is to build on my knowledge of Mercury retrograde through the act of building up the archive that is this blog. Some areas I hope to explore are other individuals’ Merc Rx stories (if you consent to share them) and the implications of Merc Rx in specific signs and in aspect to key planets. Given my piecemeal astrological knowledge, the process will take a while, but I’ll try and stay the course. If nothing else, I’d like a fuller picture of the phenomenon, one that doesn’t simply write off its effects as petty annoyances.