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| The E-Mail Astrologer, copyright Sherrie Nist, 2008 |
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| As Above, So Below Mercury Retrograde (written during Mercury Retrograde) by Sherrie Nist By the time you read this, everything should be back to normal (relatively speaking). Mercury will have gone direct, and all those misunderstandings from screwed up communications that occurred between February 21st and March 14th will have cleared up. What am I talking about? The dreaded Mercury retrograde, of course! The planet Mercury goes retrograde every three months, for a period of three weeks at a time, and the notion that ANYTHING requiring communicating with another human being MIGHT run smoothly goes right down the drain, with a huge sucking sound that is a harbinger of how the next three weeks are going to go. What does Mercury (or any planet) “going retrograde” mean? It sounds like I’m saying the planet goes backwards, but anyone who has ever taken a science class knows that planets don’t travel in reverse. However, from our earthly perspective, they sometimes APPEAR as if they were. It’s an optical illusion. It’s like when you are zipping along the freeway, and you pass a slower moving vehicle, while you are leaving the slower car in your dust, it LOOKS like it is going backwards, but you know it’s not. Appropriately enough to this analogy, Mercury also rules transportation, and under a Mercury Retrograde, many people drive like idiots (including myself, I’m sure), causing increased amounts of fender bender accidents. Every accident ANY car of mine has ever been in has occured during a retrograde Mercury that was making a direct aspect to something in my chart (Mars is usually involved because it rules accidents). For some of these accidents, my car wasn’t even moving, and nobody was actually in it!! Once, from the lobby of the restaurant where I worked, I watched (in disbelief) a woman, in our large parking lot that at the moment had a total of five cars in it, back her rental vehicle right into MY car, which was sitting there minding it’s own business. It was the only car in the row. Another memorable Mercury retrograde car accident occured on the off ramp of the freeway. This time I WAS in the car, but the car wasn’t moving. There was one car ahead of me in the line-up to exit, and when it’s turn came to pull out, it moved backward instead of forward, while all I could do was watch (this time in horror) as it backed right into me and smashed up my front end. I don’t have a vehicular incident EVERY time Mercury goes Retrograde (thank god), but when I HAVE had accidents, Mercury retrograde has been the case. Far more common is communications difficulties. If there’s a way for things to get messed up, they will. I had to put together the March issue of WCC under Retrograde Mercury. It was a nightmare (this description fits the fact that Mercury was in Pisces; nightmares are Pisces material). Several regular columns never made it into the issue, for various reasons. One of them was not for lack of trying; the writer was having problems with her internet server; she kept resending it, but I never got it. That was aggravating enough, but my communication problems didn’t end there. Regular mail was an issue also. I had to send something to a customer 3 or 4 times before it actually arrived. the address was correct, the postage was on the envelope, but it never arrived. The letters weren’t coming back to me, so I only knew to resend when my customer would call and inform me of it’s non-arrival. I was sure she must have thought I was lying about sending it, but I wasn’t. It was about a printing job; I wanted that! Finally my customer received it, and one of the letters WAS sent back to me. Things continued to get worse. I wasn’t getting voicemail messages that people swore they left for me. Then one day I got 28 messages, dating as far back as 3 weeks previously! By this time my voicemaildial tone that alerts me to messages was not functioning properly, and I notified the phone company. They called back, said they checked it, and it was fine. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. I’m waiting till Mercury gets back to it’s shadow point (the degree and sign where it first retrograded) to make another stab at having it fixed. I can’t tell you how many stories I heard during this time period about computer problems. The communication function of computers, and the ability to gather information are Mercury things. Computers themselves are Uranian, and Uranus was at the same degree of a different sign when Mercury first retrograded. Anyone with a planet or angle at that degree of any sign probably had some unexpected surprises relative to their computers during this period. Is Mercury retrograde ALL bad? No. It’s a good time to go back and review old business and redo if necessary. Any of the “re” words: review, redo, repair, reschedule, return, replace, remodel, etc., are constructive uses of Mercury retrograde. |