Lynn Serafinn's Cosmic Journey

Mercury – rising, retrograde or runaway?

…a completely random blog post that has nothing whatsoever to do with work, business or anything serious…

Well, Mercury is back to his old tricks again.

Do any of you remember back in February when there were so many problems on the Internet? Those of you who are on Twitter might remember when it went crazy for a few days. Well, as it turns out, the planet Mercury was in retrograde back then (retrograde meaning the time when it appears to be moving backwards from our vantage point on Earth). It seems to be a widely accepted explanation that when things like this happen in cyberspace, poor Mercury frequently gets the blame, especially if it is retrograde. In fact, every time I hear someone going through some sort of communication breakdown, I also hear people asking, “Is Mercury in retrograde again?”

So is there anything to this Mercury stuff, or is it all a story we use to explain away our own frustrations with technology?

Well, this morning I woke up and my coaching website was completely GONE! No website, no email, nadda. I had arranged to have it transferred to a new host, but somehow it got pointed to the wrong nameserver. It took a few hours to sort that out, and when I did, my website was still not online. I couldn’t get through to customer support for the longest time. Then, when I finally did, my cordless phone started to beep and it went dead just as the tech support guy told me the very last thing I needed to know in order to get everything fixed. He told me that my current hosting package was not compatible with the format of my old site, so I ended up having to buy a whole new hosting plan. This meant I had to upload all my files to a new area, which took hours to do. The site was finally restored around 8pm. after about 10 hours of confusion.

In between trying to sort all that out, I was also trying to send out a newsletter via my autoresponder. But for some inexplicable reason, my email delivery programme wouldn’t save anything, and it kept wiping out my newsletter every time I tried to send it. This went on for hours. My newsletter eventually got sent out around 3pm, whereas it should have gone out at 9am.

Hmm… suspicious.

So after all that, I Googled “Mercury in Retrograde 2009” and sure enough, I found out that Mercury went back into retrograde YESTERDAY, and he won’t be turning back around until 29 September.

The coincidence felt pretty convincing, I have to say, but I was still curious to find out more. So I thought I’d have a look at my own astrological birth chart to find out more about the planet’s influence.

In astrology, Mercury is the “ruler” of communications. Hence, it is logical that Mercury is also the “ruler” of our interpersonal communication via the Internet. Mercury is also traditionally known as the “messenger” of the Greek gods, because he transits the most quickly of all the planets across the skies (being the closest to the Sun). He is believed to race through the ether literally at the speed of thought, and thus is able to carry celestial and cerebral messages without the limitations of time and space. This is why, in addition to verbal communication, Mercury is also the ruler of mental swiftness, intellectual abilities and intuition.

In my chart, Mercury is in my 7^th House, which, according to my horoscope programme, means that my chief asset is my “ability to establish contact with other people and communicate with them.” It also says that I am “simply curious about the minds of other people and interested in their thoughts and how they function.” Well, heck, that is absolutely true. My teaching, my coaching, my workshops, my writing (hmm… my Twittering and blogging…) all of these things express my ability to contact and communicate. I think that is why I can have so much fun online, whereas a lot of other professionals I know find it draining.

I kept reading my chart to find out more about Mercury’s influence in my life.

My Mercury is in the same sign as my Sun (Aquarius), which means that I am “a clear thinking person, very open to new and exciting ideas” and that I am possibly “connected with awareness and consciousness” in my professional life.

Wow! That is completely true. I always looking for new and exciting ideas, and everything I do has to do with awareness and consciousness. In fact, the workshop series I am delivering over the coming year (more about these another day) are all aimed at cultivating awareness and consciousness of both Self and environment.

Lastly, I thought I’d look up one more aspect, and found that Mercury had a very strong “trine” (90 degree angle) with Neptune. My programme said that this means:

“You have a very refined mental sensitivity which may be expressed through some form of imaginative and creative work. You possess a wonderful intuition, but formal learning and dry facts do not interest you. You can be quite a perfectionist and are very good at spotting mistakes and errors. You have a talent for creative communication – as a writer, in advertising or the media, or as a general part of your work.” (World of Wisdom, version WOWUSSP2000).

Again… wow indeed! I am a writer, I am in the media (I’m on the radio THREE times tomorrow, in fact), and I actually spend about half my life doing online promotion. Even when I was a musician, I was always the one in charge of communications and promotion. It comes naturally to me. And “dry facts”… puh-leez! I used to rebel in school when the teachers taught by rote. I cannot stand “memorising” things, and “facts” simply go out of my brain (I do still, however, remember birthdays and phone numbers from when I was a kid… go figure).

About the intuition thing, well that is something I have been cultivating more and more over the past few years. I continually reflect back and see how many times in life I underestimated my own intuition and more “mercurial” powers. I think Mercury has become an increasingly powerful paradigm in my life.

Reading all this led me to reflect upon my recent experiences at the One World Festival in Bath last month. When I wasn’t teaching a workshop myself, I was a participant in several interesting workshops. The two most mind-opening (and mind-blowing) were some “Rebirthing” sessions I did, and a short course in palmistry. The Rebirthing course is a whole other story,  so I’ll leave for another day, but the palmistry course was a real eye-opener about the way the body mirrors the inner Self. Little did I know before I took the course that traditional palmistry is based upon the planets and their influences upon us.

AND… you guessed it… Mercury appears again in palmistry. The “pinkie” finger is traditionally called the “Mercury finger” (palmist Johnny Fencham calls it the “Antenna Digit” as it is all about picking up signals from the cosmos). The length of your Mercury finger reflects your intellectual and communication skills, and a collection of vertical lines running upwards beneath it can indicate tendency towards a “healing” profession. While this is a gross over-simplification of the many subtle aspects of this very intricate art, the point is that my own “Mercury Finger” is quite long, and has these “healing lines” beneath it. Again, another Mercury link.

So what is the answer? Is there really a link between my technological toys going crazy today, and Mercury changing its direction just a few hours earlier?

Well, at a completely intuitive level, I’m inclined to say yes.

But then again, being the “open minded” Aquarian that I am, I am ok with not needing a “logical” explanation, and I am fine with all of this not having to make any sense whatsoever. I find there is a beauty to seeing it all as some sort of delightfully random cosmic dance.

Of course, I am quite sure that this perspective might be very irritating to some of my more rational readers in cyberspace. And if that is the case, I think I’ll just blame it on Mercury for now.

…And if tomorrow I end up sending you a blog post that was really meant to go out last week, at least you’ll know why.

nnifareS nnyL–

P.S.:
Please be sure you catch my show “Lynn Serafinn’s Garden of the Soul” tomorrow night at 6pm UK/1pm Eastern. My guest is the fabulous Jennifer Louden of Oprah fame. She’s going to tell us all how we can “Have a Blast While Changing the World”. If you miss the show, you can always download the podcast on demand at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Lynn-Serafinn

Tags: astrology, communication, ENJOY, Entertainment, fun, Lynn Serafinn, Mercury, technology