Mercury stations Direct

Mercury stations Direct

15th PDT 13:21 / 16th AEST

Following a three-week retrograde which took Mercury from Virgo’s 21st degree back to its 8th degree, Mercury stations direct. During its backslide, communication breakdowns were compounded by anxiety. The counterintuitive remedy for our frustration: is patience, and a willingness to relinquish control. Our inner critic had to be silenced by asking the perennial question: Is our problem REALLY that deep?

Taking ourselves less seriously has been our operative task of late. To embrace Mercury in its trickster guise. To pull the mask off the villain to reveal (gasp!) our own face, and to laugh at that. When did we lose our sense of humor? When did cringe conversations, missed appointments or broken appliances become misconstrued as threats to our safety, capable of unraveling our self-confidence? Humans have a real knack for inventing things to be worried about. It is a wonder that anyone out there still has a regulated nervous system!

Coupled with the lessons imparted by Venus’ retrograde, we are waking up to the fact that “keeping it all together” yields a special kind of exhaustion. It is an exhaustion rooted in an intolerance for imperfection, one which goes far beyond a desire to keep up appearances. This exhaustion stems from a need to legitimize ourselves as a person of value – a person with UTILITY. It is assumed that the more we know, the more experience we have, the more skills we build, and the safer we’ll be navigating a disorganized world. Yet there are no prizes given for having the most superior superiority complex. Retrograde Mercury invited us to discover that fixating on the minutiae will hardly ever make us better communicators or happier people. By getting lost in the details, we lose perspective entirely. Indeed, if “getting it right” comes at the expense of our peace of mind, we might now be willing to get it wrong.

Mercury has one final retrograde this year, arriving December 12/13 in the sign of Capricorn. In the coming days, there is housekeeping to do: stifling identities to shed, resumes to be pared down, and opinions you no longer care to align yourself with. This is a good time to consider whether you still want to die on that hill (you know the one). Especially if you have the option not to die on any hill at all.

Written by Nyssa Grazda