Trust matters when Mercury is retrograde. This is a time we have to have faith in each others’ good intentions, because it is so very easy to misconstrue. When Mercury is retrograde, our mental functioning effectively turns inside out, so that the words we say and hear actually travel along different pathways in their swift journey toward our grasp than they normally do. Meanings can be missed that way.

A good way to learn to adapt to Mercury retrograde by using this time to be with yourself, take stock, turn your attention inward, where it naturally wants to go now anyway. Re-read old journals, old poetry, remember the ones who have gone before.

Exploring your family’s genealogy is easier than it has ever been, online; websites like ancestry.ca make a fascinating retrograde Mercury pastime.

I found some poems I wrote almost exactly thirteen years ago and I’ll type in here. These poems feel like a very retrograde Mercury discovery for me, as they speak to me exactly what I need to hear now, and also what I am learning from other sources. It’s a nice mental completion, a filling-in-of-the-blanks, or like shining a flashlight on the dark side of a globe to reveal its full round shape.

A Retrograde Mercury period can be a period of profound mental growth, if we are willing to allow that; of course, it is always a choice. We can use the time to endlessly wank on facebook or pick arguments or curse about defective technology or make dire predictions about what’s going to happen. Those are also easy pathways to take during this retrograde period. If that’s what you want.

Me, I’ll go the other way for a change, and see what happens. If the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same things and expect different results, then the definition of sanity is to continue to seek alternative ways to generate the results we want. Mercury is the messenger; it’s also the magician, if we create our reality with our thoughts and expectations (and we do, but perhaps not precisely in the way everybody thinks).

These untitled poems were a part of a daily project I did for a year and a half or so when I channeled a little poem every day. Channeled meaning I listened for the words rather than thinking of them, and they came in a steady stream. Earlier tonight I found a little notebook that started with these:

1.
Singing new and freshly born
weeping from your mother
Swimming from the waters warm
your sisters and your brothers

Let this be the brand-new day
you called for in the night
when lost and lonely was your way,
both past and future bright

A blink ‘tween wakings was the lull,
a break to cleanse your mind
a time to languish, briefly null
and, briefly, deaf and blind

Yourself you are again, as ever,
never more to lie a seed
in soil; wind and weather
have strengthened heart and eye.

2.
Shrieking echoes in the night
sobbing pain and soul’s delight
no difference is there, one from each
Though one would, high on soap-box, preach
its prescription for the world
to always laugh, be never hurled
from center into pain so deep
its only exit is through sleep.

Pain and joy are twinned like brothers
one cannot exist ‘thout other
to accentuate its state
What use ’tis to resist or hate?
There is no fate nor destiny
to overcome your need to wait

3.
This universe unfolds as planned
and none can hurry god or man
Your heart’s a rosebud, tender, growing
never shrinking, never owing
ought to others of its bliss

A heart’s an end, each in its own
self, and owes its duty only
to the children lost and lonely
waiting to be called to light
by heart’s desire shining bright

The unborn seek a home in thee
you can be more much more, you see
Those shining stars, these faerie sprites
shall live in thee, thy heart’s delight

4.
Faith is not forever lasting
sometimes feasting, sometimes fasting
when your smile from heartlight grows
then shall abundance freely flow

Cycles are a part of life, not free
can you be from all strife
until the day of earth ascending
planetary force transcending

But now is when you needs must live
and in this moment shall you give
a meaning to your rocky way
you stumble here and now, today
because you close your eyes and dream
of times not yet, of might-have-been

If y’all like these, I’ll post the rest during this retrograde period.

Cheerio, and happy Mercury juju to you. No photos this time, Mercury prefers words!

Fire: creativity, inspiration, excitement, energy, motivation, expansion
Earth: usefulness, substance, beauty, organization, containment
Water: flow, changeability, impressionability, mystery, solubility
Air: information, communication, ideation, abstraction, relation

To understand a sign or a planet or a house, look at its elemental rulership or association.

From this we can know that Uranus, ruler of Aquarius, has a fundamentally abstract / mental nature. It isn’t a ‘thing’ in itself; it is the idea of a thing, such as the abstraction of freedom. Aquarius’ nature is expressed in symbols, abstractions, representations. The sudden changes and revolution it famously brings are generated by ideals and ideas of a new and better way. There is always a new and better way.

Aquarius is the fixed phase of the air element:
Fixed: stable, unchanging, pure, timeless

Therefore, the ideals represented by Aquarius are the ones we would recognize as timeless, universal ‘truths held to be self-evident’. Ideals like ‘freedom and justice for all’ are Aquarian. Love is an Aquarian ideal. The great love stories, grand epics, archetypal symbolism, the old tales oft repeated all are Aquarian.

Violence and war (in the name of belief) is an unfortunate and too common side effect of Aquarian revolutionary idealism.

Aries is the cardinal phase of the fire element:

Cardinal: beginning, birth, emergence, initiation

Aries is the sign of self; that which is born into awareness, that we think of as ‘me’.  Anything that bears the Aries signature shoves its way into reality in a heedless rush. Its imperative is to exist, no matter what, and it will brook no opposition.

Yet it’s truly innocent in the manner of all brand new things; from its point of view it is simply bursting forth into life from what it perceives to be a void. From nothing emerges something, but the reality into which it emerges is crowded with pre-existing life.

Competition and struggle is the Aries way because there are about a billion things trying to come into existence in any given moment. Life is profligate. Competition doesn’t have to mean war or battle, though; it is most simply the drive to happen, to surpass one’s limitations, to succeed in existing and creating a space for this new self.

Uranus’ ingress into Aries in late May is going to bring about some very unexpected (and quite likely frightening to many) and radical changes; Uranus will be squaring Pluto over the next couple of years, and it’s in a brand new cycle. Great changes are afoot.

We each are the possessor of a unique, great big smart brain full of ideas. We have the power and the choice to choose which ideas we apply the power of our desire (Aries) to. What do we want to believe in? The inevitability of war and conflict, or the power of love to transform the universe?

Fact: the last ingress of Uranus into Aries was at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Fact: Uranus and Pluto were in square to each other then, too

There is a battle underway, all right. It’s happening primarily in our collective heads; there are no possible winners, and the losers are everybody as long as we keep up the fight. The only possible path through this crisis that doesn’t involve more of the same old boring bloodshed is this: that we each, and all, drop our arms and surrender our defenses, make a choice to open our hearts to the grand ideal of Love and learn to listen to the planet. She’s talking to us now.

This is one of those channeled, deep, talking-to-me-as-much-as-anybody-else type pieces that tend to baffle the part of me that just isn’t that smart yet (partly why they get filed away for so long). As much puzzle as poetry, it can take me years to own a particular piece. When I do get it, though, they tend to make a profound kind of sense.

While there are a lot of levels, verse 2 of seems appropriate for this global warming conference in Copenhagen.

Your Suffering Savior

Feel your feelings,
live the tale as it unfolds inside,
find the powers that can heal and help
you and yours to open the doors,
and find the locked one
Go patient and slow for she is shy
and terrified of sensory input
and she delicate beyond belief.
She needs that you go slow
That’s the only speed she can sustain
as she clambers gravid
from her scattered tombs,
graves, barrows and
watery deeps
so cold,
stone
bone
alone

chorus:

Won’t hurt, can’t hurt, how could it hurt hurt
Being what you’re feeling, feeling what you are
Won’t hurt, can’t hurt, how could it hurt hurt
show your inside outside, follow your own star

Born into a world of pain, lied to taught to be ashamed
feeling lost and different, none of us the same
our parents they were lied too, they’re not the ones to blame
no one to point the finger at, no one we can name
the buck stops here, the time is near, we’re going to end the game
chorus:

We are taught that we are bad inside, sinners one and all
Twisted wrong and dirty, we all hide inside walls
We’re taught not to trust anyone, ourselves the least of all
afraid to do just as we feel, we live like plastic dolls
This sickness real it’s time to heal, it’s time to heed the call
chorus:

We’re taught that we are born in sin, evil Satan’s spawn
and we’re taught that we’re God’s children and He loves us right or wrong
tied up in contradiction, can’t tell where we belong
It’s time we opened up to feel our inner truth so strong
We have a choice, we hear a voice, we recognize its song
chorus:

You, me, we are connected, inside we are the same
we don’t have to play this old separation game
We’ve all got a direct line to our Source that needs no name
we don’t have to buy those lies like sheep docile and tame
God’s not above but in and of, a picture with no frame
chorus: