Mercury Retrograde

I like this explanation from Rob Brezsny on Mercury Retrograde, sort of puts it in to perspective. Uh-oh. Mercury is retrograde. You know what that means: garbled phone calls, fouled-up travel plans, missed deadlines, embarrassing slips of the tongue. Right? Wrong! It makes me sad when the sacred art of astrology is turned into just another excuse to be superstitious. Using half-baked horoscopy to justify self-fulfilling prophecies is astrology abuse in the extreme. Sorry to get so riled up. I'm a little sensitive about this. I truly love astrology's power to enhance our willpower, and it bugs me when it's ignorantly invoked to accomplish the very opposite. Mercury does not mean communication snafus are inevitable. Rather, it tells you this is a propitious time to refine the ways you exchange information . . . and to concentrate harder on saying what you mean and meaning what you say . . . and to meditate on how to improve the ways you connect yourself to the people and resources you need and like. Some people say that when Mercury is retrograde, as it is now until October 9, it's a bad time to begin anything new. During one such period two years ago, an acquaintance of mine decided to delay accepting a dream job offer as editor of a magazine. By the time Mercury returned to normal, the magazine had hired another applicant. I wish I'd have known, because I would have told her what I'll tell you: Some of America's biggest, most enduring Fortune 500 companies began when Mercury was retrograde, including Disney, Goodyear, and Boeing. My deep skepticism about big corporations notwithstanding, the fact that their founders had great success in launching them during Mercury retrograde is a telling statement about Mercury retrograde. In my understanding of astrology, there's no such thing as a bad astrological aspect. It's true that some may be more challenging than others, but every one of them presents an opportunity. Having said that, I don't regard Mercury retrograde as being dauntingly challenging. If you fear and expect it to be, you may tend to be slightly more attractive to disruptive events. But then that's true about how every superstition works. P.S. My general approach is to consider anomalous, one-of-a-kind cosmic events as more likely to be fraught with uncertainty and requiring special vigilance. But the Mercury Retrograde is reliable and predictable, always coming three times a year.