Mercury Cycles

Mercury ends his retrograde in Taurus today, and even now, though technically still "moving backwards," he's gone as far as he'll go, a pause before allowing communications to flow in the way we modern folk prefer.

In the midst of this retrograde, I sat in a hotel room on Cape Cod on a gray and rainy weekend. Standing on an Atlantic beach with a sharp wind blowing in my face, while enlivening, can only last so long ... my plan had been to catch up online, holed up with hot tea and chocolate. But wait! The hotel's router self-destructed the evening before I arrived, and wasn't fixed until the day I left. Sigh. Mercury retrograde.

And yet ... those gray, chilly days proved to be a turning point, a time of reflection when every book I picked up fell open to the words I needed to read. Hauling my laptop into a coffeeshop in Provincetown (thank you, Wired Puppy!), I checked my email, chatted with a few friends, downloaded some podcasts, and drove back to my quiet room.

My work with the Moon is attuning me to cycles ... her cycles, of course, but I find myself paying more attention to rhythms of all kinds. That particular evening, I learned that Mercury retrogrades are part of a cycle! Who knew! (and yes, a 'duh' is in here too)

When you get a moment, but definitely before the next Mercury retrograde, go listen to Episode 8 of the podcasts available at Astrology for the 21st Century. This insightful astrologer (who has a very soothing voice) turns our anxieties about this "difficult" time on their pointy little heads and situates Mercury retrogrades within the cosmic messenger's ongoing cycle of waxing and waning.

The midpoint of each retrograde is the nadir of Mercury's cycle, the "New Mercury" point when seeds are planted. The midpoint of each direct cycle is the "Full Mercury" when what we planted bears fruit. So the re- things we are told to do during a retrograde––reflect, revisit, revise––are not what we're forced to do because direct motion isn't happening, but opportunities to seed something new.

All the retrogrades this year are in Earth, and this one trined over my Moon, Mars and North Node while opposing my Saturn, asking for a review of how I'm working my life plan and how I feel about it––exactly what the broken router in Truro led me to.

My favorite metaphor from the podcast is about hand stitching. A straight running stitch goes fast but is weak; there's no reinforcement. Backstitching adds the strength needed to keep the bits together, and retrogrades are all about the backstitching. The stitches I set in Truro might be wobbly, but they're there; I hope they hold!

(rain photo by Massimo Catarinella, quilt photo by Arria Bell, Wikimedia Commons)