It seems we are surrounded by an ocean of sound and noise. Social and political concerns pull at us like the unyielding tide, and we navigate the news and what seems like daily incursions on freedoms and principles. We are living in a period of massive upheaval with breakdowns, breakthroughs, and revolution (Uranus) being empowered and compelled by underlying archetypal processes of change (Pluto). “Nobody told me there'd be days like these/Strange days indeed/most peculiar”. Thank you, John Lennon.
On December 21st we enter the season of Capricorn, which marks another turning of the great wheel of the year as the Winter Solstice.
Oh, Mercury retrograde... attitudes in response to this regular phenomenon, coming up August 30th to September 22nd, range wide: worry-bead clicking, cautious planning, liberal scapegoating of this wily god for what goes wrong, and then there’s the annoyance all these views incite, which leads to writing-off and ignoring the retrograde altogether. Now this is not to say that things don’t go wonky when Mercury goes retrograde, they certainly do, but literalism and causal thinking have done a number to the way we think about this aspect of Mercury’s cycle. I therefore want to bring some reconsidered reflection to Mercury’s retrograde.
The Saturn Neptune square is one of the significant transits of the year. Their cyclical meetings combine somewhat opposing needs of individual form and union through dissolution. So we find that together they have much to say about the relationship between our dreams, idealizations and reality. The myth of Ariadne, the Cretan princess, gives us a powerful way of imagining into this archetypal dynamic and how it moves through us.
