Mercury Retrograde in Virgo: August 23-September 15, 2023
VIRGO All those chunks of dirt around your body, pulling you apart and having you run here and there to meet new demands of identity- where is this cosmic trickster taking you? Are you being pulled apart and into an experience of greater autonomy within the mucked-up emotional body? How will you spread dirt over your legs, bathe yourself within the somersaulting, filthy mishaps and allow your ability to articulate it all, make you into the greatest pillar of ‘dirt charisma’ in existence? As the column of soil roots down vertically through your body, you know you’re on a path to right destiny. Look at the myth of Demeter roaming the earth, but employ the trickster’s wisdom: instead of having her wander in rage & grief, rewrite it so that she’s full of mirth, joy and love for everything. What emphases would you change? This is your dirt homework these three weeks- “finding the right emphasis.”
LIBRA Where do you look for inner messages in your solitude, where the balance of perspectives blurs into a smudge on the canvas of your thought initiation? Those flickers of inner discursiveness may feel like they’re leaving a stain on your vanity, the tumbling inner critics letting you know in your deepest recesses that your sense of justice may not be objective, but full of nervous system gunk-n-jabber? Luckily this is just the catalyst to wipe the dream space clean- those flickers of “what ifs” and “you’re wrongs” becoming like matches, igniting you into renewed thoughtful action. As the poet Hafiz once said, “Throw those ladders like tiny match sticks with “just” phantoms upon them who might be trying to scale your heart. Your love has an eloquent tone. The sky and I want to hear it!” All the inner jibber-jabber is what you’re gestating this period to then be able to offer out to the world in your elegant way.
SCORPIO The trolls like to have a party with you as you discover those in your circle might look stubbier, chubbier, pricklier, earthier, mirthier and all-around *different* from your distorted vision of how this might all socially look. But these aren’t your enemies—distortion in full force, yeah, why not! The truth and inherence of these new-old-primordial friends may reveal itself in due time, as a trickily cosmic surprise. Was it all a grand deception in the most smashingly spectacular way, or were these your real people? No matter. At the core abides your ability to tap into the most primal sources of power of your associates, regardless of their destination in your life, and to recognize that sometimes the most grungy, cranky, unsavory appearances are only having fun with you if they’re distracting you, while also pointing at deeper sources of your personal and social power.
SAGITTARIUS Where you wish to look maximally efficient or relevant or right looks mainly messy, in the trenches, sullying your ego but coaxing you toward soiled sublimity. “I move dirt like no other!”, you can shout now. There’s a reminder to you here that these chunks of soil- activity in the world on which your feet walk, toward the others whom you serve- carry relevance beyond any dogma. Each morsel, microbe and mycelium is symbiotic: how can your perspective become symbiotic with the many shifting codependent components of this world you walk on? It doesn’t erase your individuality to get symbiotically dirty, to go for the nitty gritty, to roll up your sleeves and help with gusto- or even fall on your face with joy! Let the world see your wounds with joy. Let us see how you’re a work-in-progress, letting your perspective soften into all these moving parts of the world, charging up our hearts with your dirty enthusiasm!
CAPRICORN It’s easy to fret over the changeability of big and small structures. How expansive concrete slabs or dirt mounds become as communication barriers in our world; how you move between them. Can you move between communication barriers and expand yourself? Your agility? The obstructions appear painful in their tendency to fill, or clutter, the open horizon on which you wish to build your foundation. In truth, they’re tests of your vision- how delicious would it feel to puncture these illusory walls knowing that, for a time, their illusion safeguarded sacred knowledge? Whatever scabs and scrapes you gained while running into obstacles of your building, love them, for they are marks of your adventure and your newfound capacity to see between perspectives.
AQUARIUS Slowed communication on the tracks of intimacy, like tar, has you forward-stepping and backtracking in the dark, getting gunk on all sides of your close conversations, verbal & nonverbal. What can rolling through sticky tar do for your innovative visions? It could be that your field of innovation itself is undergoing a putrefaction; a process whereby ideas feel lost at first to the stickiness of the underlayer. Words and glimpses of the whole system become ghostly echoes, a haunted recording in the bedchamber, ideas eroticized through their vibrational softening and their process of becoming less certain. There’s a paradoxical “certainty of uncertainty” only discovered through an intimate encounter with the unknown, boldly, willingly letting your sure systems enter a dream state and invert themselves. If you embrace this process, you may emerge from these three weeks with a renewed, matured sense of your innovative ideals.
PISCES Attempts to find the other may feel like two people on separate boats. They reach out to each other as the boats drift in opposite directions. Words of love, service, tries, tactics leap through the air, messengers to the beloved and to the key people in your life, even as you feel far away. The painful tenderness of aloneness or the feeling of “adrift” may sting- but how does your heart, in all its layers and capacities, including its foundation as a boat- how does this heart support all the mobile expressions of its feeling and its love? Remember, that heart has so much love to give, it sometimes must pivot, back off, gain panoramic views, backing away as the preparatory period for launching its hues of love. How, too, will the wide expanse of the air, where all your sound waves go, provide your heart with kindness, care & insight? Take care that what goes out there comes from your curvy creativity and what comes into your heart sanctum resonates well to that.
ARIES Put on a face that has soot all over it. If anyone knows how to spit dust out with gusto, it’s you. The many masks you wear, the changeability between the hairy and the hairless, and between going headfirst into your world and being led- these are among your under appreciated virtues. With flexibility and aesthetic boldness both, you’re willing to let evolution experiment on you. Though it may seem there’s buggy dirt in your craw, can you accept the challenge of joyfully donning the many masks? What’s needed at this moment and what spittoon can hold the dirty truth that must be spoken and can only be uttered by you? Some things are best said when wearing a fierce, fearsome outfit that helps those around you discern what’s healthy and what’s toxic. You, of all people, know that spitting away the soot of delusion and misfired agreements isn’t the same as insulting others in a mean-spirited way, but you still may shock others by stepping into that boldness. Remember what it’s in service to: how you and all of us adapt to the moment that wears many faces and how we clear away delusion.
TAURUS What’s rolling through your creative state, making all the bright lights of inspiration panic over new perceptions? Flickering lights become disorienting with different rhythms, saturations and photoperiods as seizures of mischief orbit your world. While you may prefer things to stay the same, these shifting lights of the creative spark, so volatile, with the capacity to excite, overwhelm, disorient and burn, represent opportunities to articulate your talents as the muses descend upon you in a new way. See each disorientation and communicative “WTF” as an initiation into a yoga of creative fire, inviting you to deepen into a furious dance with masterfully articulated movement.
GEMINI An awareness of a massive, strong column descending deep into your roots wobbles back and forth dowsing for pains, or for what sustains you, making the gums of your soul bleed. There’s an “ouch!” involved in probing or new information about what sustains you; a deep-throated gravity that brings up all the people tucked deep under the blanket. The dowsing rod of dancing communications, talking underwater, singing to you your song of nourishment, may feel as a heavy thump or as a broken dam making all the sweat, tears, blood, saliva, sexual fluids run everywhere. Find those people, inside and out, who love your fluids. They may be new to you as you tend to make everything into wind- but these are other ways you can relate, both to others and to your inner sanctum, by going down and by letting those new searches and forms of discernment descend into you, earning the courage of your curiosity by paying out your ‘feeling pangs.’
CANCER How will you welcome a review of old ideas and a few new ones? Knowing there’s not only the options of “in the sky” and “on the ground” but, for you especially, also the many kinds of movement in the sea. You may be called to teach others how to walk the sideways crab walk. Binaries bedamned, your hurricane emotions flare up and boil in the face of the illusion of only two possible perspectives; in the face of others remaining in the dry, dehydrated realms. Or, you may find yourself softening the relationship between an idea’s pragmatic relevance and its emotional weight, between the ground and the water. Can you shake it all up and keep the conversation swimming, or sideways-crawling, into the most emotionally useful positions? The frustration presented by limited perspectives shows your call to rise and cry celebratory; to hydrate the earth; to remind yourself and others of the stormy chaos and well water from which all good ideas swell.
LEO The turntables of what you have to offer move and reshuffle and you may feel, initially, alone among these seemingly solid vendor stations and bits of currency. The ‘shrinking’ feeling of you becoming smaller and descending toward the ground or fading from view, may only be a trick to tune you in to each aspect of your formidable body- what it loves, what it stores, what it offers. Your many forms of currency move and burn through the hustle and bustle. The money and pressures placed upon your self-worth are only tests of your ability to review the insight that intuits what makes the hassle worth it. In fact, all that outside busyness or self-doubt may be a con- contra the genuine ability of yours to circulate your charisma in a way that inspires you more than all the junk out there. See all these phantasms of commerce, insecurity, growth, shrinking & networking, as the beautiful music your soul is busy polishing and radiating out to the world.
