Emerging a Winner with Merc-Retro

7.31.06


First off, in case anyone missed it—Mercury returned to direct motion this past Friday (Jul 28).

Before you start shooting out important communiqués or zooming off to your next destination, though, remind yourself it takes several days for Mercury to get fully back to his normal forward-moving self.

I received a lot of reader email on my 'An Alternate Take on Mercury Retrograde' post. Apparently, my words spoke to a lot of you folks, many of whom are sick and tired of the hysterical overhyping that makes it sound almost unsafe to leave the house during Merc-retro.

To that, I say, Bah, humbug. As long as you're aware of the common effects of Mercury retrograde, you can behave more conscious… and nip many of those possible problems in the bud before they manifest.

These past few weeks, I faced a couple of potentially menacing irruption myself, the worst of which was a (surprise!) malfunction by my brand-new laptop on the morning of a deadline I had for a special one-off romance scope in FAMOUS (coming up next month). I'd gone to bed with my work mostly completed, with the intention of making one last review of it when I awakened and then sending it off to my editor. But as I roused my computer from its hibernation, Windows refused to boot up—instead, all I heard was a ceaseless spinning of inner gears, without any sign of silicon-based life appearing on the now-terrifyingly-dark screen.

Would I be forced to recreate a couple days' work on a special assignment within a matter of a few hours… or to beg for an editorial extension, after having been clearly informed how important it was for me to hit this deadline?

Here's where one might ordinarily throw a screaming ruckus, push every possible escape button on the machine, and, if nobody else was watching and the anger had gotten sufficiently out of hand, hurl the fucking useless piece of techno-crap across the room with sado-masochistic glee… though still, I'd have to come up with some reconstructed astro-words to file with the magazine, and pronto. Getting upset would only make it harder to focus on super-hasty horoscope manufacturing, should I discover the data unsalvageable.

Calmly, as the laptop's inner gears continued gyrating to nowheresville, I decided to unplug its electrical connection, in hopes of running down the battery power until it turned itself off. Then, I left the house and went to my yoga class, hoping against all hope that the trouble would fix itself.

Hope—and calm thinking—won the trophy. I got home from yoga, and my computer was out of power. I plugged it back in, and it booted up. My work was safe, I sent it off to the magazine, and I took the rest of the day off from computer-related activities.

Let me repeat my number-one piece of Merc-retro advice which, after this go-around, keeps proving itself wise: Many 'problems' will fix themselves, if we give 'em their due time and space and psychic patience… while, too often, we cause the worst problems through our own reckless, disgruntled attempts to solve 'em.

We must be kind and forgiving toward our machinery, our tools of transmission and vehicles of transport, during such times. They, too, suffer as we do from planetary reversals. They, too, find their endemic emanations intruded upon by alien frequencies. They need the room for adaptation and transliteration, or else they crash. Are they 'dumb dead objects of utility and therefore contain and are infused with nothing', or is this a sign of their brazen soul-filled personalities?

I heard from several of you who were born while Mercury was retrograde, and thus have Merc-retro natally in your charts. Without exception, each affirmed my assertion that individuals with natal Merc-retro actually feel more at ease when transiting Mercury goes retrograde… as if the world, which (as one reader put it) 'talks backward to begin with', finally starts speaking their language. The rest of us may lose something in the translation, but the Merc-retro natives flow better than usual.

I promised you a check-in on how well my plans to fill this last Merc-retro phase with productivity turned out. And the news, folks, is good. During these past few weeks, I…
-reorganized all the files in my office;
-installed new phones in my home;
-got my new laptop all set up with the requisite software;
-set up a new backup system with external hard drive on my computers;
-had a difficult but necessary conversation about sensitive personal business;
-created timelines for lots of future work projects;
-and (here's the most exciting item) booked my flights for trips to New York (Sep 06) and Australia (Oct 06).

Interestingly, though I was super-successful at tackling the detail-oriented tasks I'd been putting off for months, I had a much more difficult time than usual sitting down and writing. I met all my deadlines, but had less desire to write beyond the bare minimum requirements.

And now, here's hoping I'll soon see an upswing in creative energy for additional writing, since I've got so many ideas up my sleeve that haven't yet made it to the page or screen. The fact that I have a new laptop and a clean, organized office space in which to work should make it much easier, right? Ready, set, back to the written word…