Mercury Retrograde Starts Thursday!

It's striking that all the Mercury Retrogrades this year are in fire signs. This time, starting Thursday, November 24th (2:19 am est), Mercury spirals back (to our eyes) in mutable Sagittarius at 20 degrees. It's a particularly rousing retrograde, with Venus at the beyond mysterious Galactic Center, a source of creative chaos to spin us in new, expansive directions. On top of that, the Moon's North Node is also in Sagittarius, for a pull toward the visionary, spirited values and animating our lives fully.

This retrograde will last until December 13th or 14th (in some places), and the shadow period until January 1st, 2012. To ring in the auspicious new year, Mercury crosses the 3 degree threshold, the farthest point tracked back in the retrograde period.

This comes at the holidays, when many travel out of family duty and nerves are already frazzled. If delays are possible, bring a book, game or your laptop and fill those waiting hours with mental adventures. This retrograde cycles back burning ideas, that might've gotten buried under everyday responsibilities. Pay close attention to what inspires you, especially what sets off a domino effect of realizations. Sometimes Mercury retrogrades are experienced as a mental vacation, a breather from scanning the horizon for the new. In Sagittarius at this retrograde, the visions are as likely to come from a lifetime of inner journeying, as they are from actual physical travel.

I'm taking off on a mini road trip, and will see my handful 3 year old niece Goldie. She's a little Sagittarius-Capricorn cusp baby, and I know I'll love being around that fully on, engaged mind. She can't sit still to watch a movie. That's the key to this retrograde -- coming back to the sparks, the origins of your inspiration, and a direct engagement with life, the natural way of the very young. This mentally alive Mercury, in its re this or that (revise, revisit, remember, re-do), can reorient the mind toward actual experience, and letting life itself show the way forward.

Mercury Retro in Real Life More on fated events, orchestrated chaos, perceived delays (real or not?) of this infamous, and often misunderstood, planetary cycle.

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