Reimagining Mercury Retrogrades

No more Merc RX histrionics please. It’s going to be okay.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I am not a Mercury retrograde (RX) doomsayer. So much of the narrative around this thrice annual event is a bit dramatic. When you account for Mercury’s shadow phases, where the events and topics of your specific retrograde start building up, breaking down, and resolving, you can see that each of these period is a few weeks long. Mercury will be doing RX things for 20 weeks out of the year, each year! Compound that over a lifetime. That’s no insignificant amount of time. So instead of prescribing a specific remedy for Mercury RX, I want to take this opportunity to reframe Mercury RX in general.

It’s time we find a way to function within Mercury RX periods with less histrionics. My reimagining of Mercury retrograde is less about avoidance of decision making, and more about intentional decision making. When Mercury turns within, we are also invited to turn within. I agree that the outward and functional Mercury retrograde advice is important. These are the things we have all heard and try to heed. Review! Cross your T’s and dot your I’s! Don’t call your ex! These are all great ways to either avoid or abate those miscommunications and crossed wires. But life must go on. People need to sign leases. People need to interview for jobs. People need to travel. People need to pay bills. Conversations will need to be had. Life won’t stop on Mercury’s dime

So, what is my more soulful take on productively working with this energy?

Think of Mercury retrograde as a quieted planet, energy directed inward, the mind tending more to internal landscapes versus external ones. This sets Mercury retrograde up in a much more positive way than the “Mercury is asleep at the wheel” take. There is an unmanifested brilliance of Mercury turning within that allows us to imagine plans that we can use later. It allows us to unfurl some of our more hidden thoughts, to ponder, ruminate, and make decisions with a full body YES or NO. This clarity is possible because we have accounted for our intentions and the energy we bring into life’s forked roads.

Yes, the big decisions, the triggering emails, the miscommunications will come. But instead of approaching it from an avoidance mindset, or even a fix-it-all mindset, what if there were more…