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What’s important this week may not make its nature known until much later. We’ll be pushing our personal agendas all right, but making progress on them is not the main point. We don’t have the cosmic support to force anything into being. Too, an element of the unforeseeable — even inexplicable — is very much at work. So go about your business and follow your impulses. Just drop attachment to any particular outcome just now.
The main reason for our obscured vision is Mercury having drifted back into Pisces for the final full week of his current retrograde. Mercury rules what goes through our minds, what and how we communicate, and how we get around. It’s hard to get a handle on anything when he is in his most vague and diffuse mode, in the all-connecting waters of Pisces.
It’s hard to get around, too. Commutes and travel are prone to the weirdest snarls, especially with Mars, the planet that rules our internal drive, also being retrograde and in the opposite sign, to boot. Anyone get caught in the epidemic of pre-rush hour traffic jams last week? Or getting lost? The weird wrong turns I’ve made since Mercury returned to Pisces have added an hour at least to my total drive time. One of them unspooled into the astrologically appropriate phenomenon of a GPS announcing turns a block past the intersection.
Hang on to that image, and learn from it. The tools that, logically, should guide you are not reliable in this atmosphere. That goes as well for rational thought, for memory and even for what you think is knowledge. I’ve been double-booking without any inkling that my usually-accurate mental picture of my calendar is missing the bottom half. Yes, these retrogrades are making direct contacts to my chart, but I’m not alone in being affected. Everyone is, in some way, and that includes you.
Mercury retrograding in Pisces is about as nonrational and nonlinear as it gets — and calls for exactly that kind of approach. d Instead of scheming, planning, projecting, pushing and expecting, ask for help. Sit quietly every morning and empty yourself, even for only a minute or two. Call in whoever or whatever energies you trust and ask to be led in the most beneficial direction(s). Hand over the reins for your day. Trust that life is unfolding as it should when traffic makes you an hour late, or appointments cancel, or you can’t get online. The delays and snarls and breakdowns have benefits, even if not immediately apparent.
You are not in the position to see what is most important. You may think that having a certain meeting is the point of your day. It may be that asking for directions and smiling at the person who gave them was your true mission, and has more far-reaching consequences than arriving on time at that appointment.
This state of confusion has another benefit. “Out of chaos and confusion comes clarity,” a law professor of mine used to say, and that is exactly what’s on the way. We have every potential of stumbling on additional information about situations from when Mercury first covered this territory at the end of March and beginning of April. And whaddaya know, retrograde Mars is in the position to help us work with and fix the nuggets we encounter.
Two other factors are helpful to keep in mind this week. A dynamic configuration is in place involving Chiron, representing our abiding wound as well as the challenge to settle fully into physicality; Mars, the ruler of our drive and ambition; and the North Node of the Moon, which represents the collective as well as the direction in which we are heading. The North Node is the stress point, and the pressure on it is encouraging falling into old behaviors, particularly old ways of thinking and talking — part of the reason for racism, women’s issues and beliefs from decades past suddenly being so omnipresent in the news.
This is an uncomfortable mix of energies. It’s stirring up inadequacies, anxieties, control freak tendencies and ancient bad, bad feelings, especially about the self. If you have been suffering emotional meltdowns, please consider how you have been interpreting the events that triggered them. Listen to the words you are saying to yourself, and especially about yourself. Odds are off the charts that you have been reading situations in the worst possible light — not because the other person intended that (odds are also off the charts that person would be stunned and confused by your reaction, by the way), but because the situations have awakened primal feelings in you.
You can’t reason yourself out of this. Reason isn’t working, remember? The part of you where these feelings live isn’t susceptible to reason, anyway. These kinds of beliefs and responses come from a time when your brain had not fully formed; they are that ancient. You can’t talk sense to a four-year-old (or a baby). Instead, treat yourself firmly but kindly, lovingly and compassionately … and then radiate that back out.
Meanwhile, as ancient traumas are provoking ancient responses, the Sun is moving across the degrees that will come into prominence in June and September, when change agents Uranus and Pluto have the first two of the seven showdowns happening between now and 2015. The clash will unleash explosive, impulsive and unforeseeable events, internal and external.
The Sun’s travel across these points is another round of preparing. We won’t have the leisure required to think rationally then; we will simply act and react. Use this time to get ready. Look at the Mercury and Mars retrogrades as filling in information that will be necessary and useful and pointing out what to fix and what to make more efficient and effective. Look at sorrow, pain, weepiness or tears that crop up as signals of self-wounding patterns and thoughts. If you can’t shut down the inner criticism, ask for help. Here’s one request, to get you started: Show me another way to look at this.
More in my extended weekly forecast, my short weekly podcast and forecast for last week’s Aries new moon.
I’m taking questions from callers on the Be The Light radio show Tuesday evening from 10 PM – midnight EDT — or, good news for you folks on the West Coast, 7-9 PM PDT. Listen online!
© Kathy Biehl 2012. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.
Astro-Insight 