Mercury enters Leo at 8:13 am EDT Thursday with an emphasis on knowing what you think. Choosing to be fully present to and conscious of what you are thinking is easier said than done. As evidence, please consider how you many times in your life you have been compelled to ask yourself (after some unexamined thought has manifested into unpleasant reality), “What was i thinking?”
The implied objective of Mercury’s movement after Thursday will be to spare yourself from having to go through such bewilderment ever again — or at least for the next few months.
In order to attain that objective, you will need to cultivate awareness. It begins with where Mercury has been and for how long. It continues with understanding how that recent history is being expressed around and through you right now. It concludes with knowing how the innermost planet’s expression on Earth is almost certain to change real soon.
Like a sailboat making progress against uncooperative winds, Mercury has been tacking back and forth through the waters of cardinal Cancer since May 31. Think about that a moment. Normally the speediest planet clips through a sign in about two weeks. Taking over two months to traverse one-twelfth of its annual appointed rounds is not normal for astrology’s emblem of your mind.
That means your mind has, in all probability, been through some abnormal paces since you flipped your calendar over to June. The key now is to see that as a good thing. There is recent evidence right here on Planet Waves of just how good it has been.
Last Saturday (in her blog titled “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”), Maria Padhila demonstrated how an already gifted writer’s mind, which has mastered the bounding main of emotional Cancer, can produce some of the most profoundly moving prose since William Faulkner confounded the world on his way to eloquently accepting the Nobel Prize for literature.
Once you have read (or better, re-read) Maria’s masterpiece, please tell yourself two things. First, tell yourself “This is what two months of Mercury through Cancer looks like, if put to creative use.” Then tell yourself that your own experience has been just as valuable, worthy of retaining, and putting to your own creative use (not limited to writing), now that Mercury is about to move on.
Before any object or astrological point sheds the raiment of a sign nearly traversed and moves on, it must first move through the final few ‘anaretic’ degrees. The anaretic degrees combine a fine, tasty distillation of an object’s passage through a given modality with the stale dregs of the process. In your own experience that translates as an intense few days before the Mercury shifts to Leo, another subject addressed on Planet Waves over the weekend by the inestimable Judith Gayle.
In her own blog from Saturday last (appropriately titled “The Shift From Here to There”), Jude stitched together a pattern of recent events that perfectly fits Mercury’s anaretic period since the weekend. The thread she used was a metaphor of clutching and shifting while driving up a steep road. It probably fits your life, inside and out, right now. The important thing is to realize that the mental terrain will change on Thursday, and you won’t pick up on that unless you are conscious of what you are thinking.
Once into Leo, Mercury will occupy the realm of the Sun, as opposed to a nine week journey through the Moon’s Cancer home. That’s a big shift with its own good news and bad news. The good news is that Mercury is never far away from the Sun in both reality and astrology. The bad news is the same. It’s like trying to find the actual planet Mercury in the sky, where it’s now appearing on the eastern horizon before dawn with Jupiter and Mars.
Anybody who has tried to see Mercury, even under ideal viewing conditions, will tell you the problem is its proximity to the Sun. It’s difficult to discern its little reflected spark from the huge glowing source of daylight — the symbol of the consciousness you typically embody while out amongst them in the light of day. Metaphorically, however, that is precisely what you will most need to do after Thursday.
It will be important to discern simply being conscious from the more intentional, individual and specialized process of thinking. The two separate levels of sentience will need to know where one ends and the other begins, and keep track of each other as well. After weeks of water, water, everywhere, your mental environment is going to be a lot different. If thinking becomes lost in the glare of consciousness, you will be setting yourself up to wonder just what it was you were thinking after, as Maria might put it, finding yourself off the road.
It may seem like a lot of trouble to go to, but you have not been through this sort of astrology recently, if ever. You can think of it as the Sun and Mercury learning from each other and teaching each other inside your head. You may also think of it as the sort of team driving you might have done when you were younger and driving when you should not have been. However you think about it, get into the habit of being there and aware of what you are thinking as you are thinking it, and you will not regret it.
Offered In Service
Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.
be: Your meditation upon the equinoxes and solstices gets better with additional thought. Thank you again for renewing that connection.
Carie: So grateful to have you back. Such a bonus to have you bearing such glad tidings of renewed connections of your own (with a fond adieu to Mercury’s voyage through Cancer so eloquently captured).
Chief Niwots Son: If my words be timely, it is only because your own combination of presence and perspective ha brought them into relief. Thank you so very much for your contribution once again.
Jann: As a fellow “lert”, please allow me to thank you for how you have furthered our connections to the liminal ambience of these few days on the cusp.
Harry Cook, a wise Episcopal priest (and my homiletics instructor) once observed that the two of us needed a support group called “OTA” for “Over-Thinkers Anonymous” to assist us in not endlessly analyzing.
Your instruction, Len, to separately track consciousness and thinking are also wise words for this “O-T”. Being alert (conscious) to that “devious phenomena” is also the means to silence that 800 lb chattering grasshopper that lives on my right shoulder. (Thanks to Chief Niwots Son for a great quote and description of “O-T”.)
I shall endeavor to be alert since the world needs all the lerts it can get.
Much gratitude, Len.
JannKinz
“It will be important to discern simply being conscious from the more intentional, individual and specialized process of thinking.”
Ah, separate consciousness from it’s contents. I once read a Tibetan text by Longchenpa, in which he defined the thinking mind as a “devious phenomena.” Our entire culture is based on worshiping this deceitful tendency, the ills effects of this religious devotion are seen in and around us daily.
After my mind experienced a near drowning in Cancer I’m ready to dry it out in Leo, maybe let it get a tan before it conjuncts my natal Uranus, which is when things will get really weird, or I’ll have a profound breakthrough.
However it all falls out, your words are timely Len, they provide both orientation and guidance with gentle grace.
Listening to Aniron helps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXRitieTc4Q
Ah Len. So that’s it. Are you feeling it? That connection to the universe, the goddess, the god, the divine? That unexplainable shift in consciousness that takes your heart and soul away from every day life into a realm wherein you feel SO much. It is deep, weepy, emotional, sensitive, expansive and quiet. I t is the darkness and the warmth of the earth. The deep night skies and the flowing waters.
In my every day life I do not feel it most times but sometimes, some days, I feel it intensely and today is one of those days.
Love, passion, inexplicable energy. I miss the days when I was unattached and unencumbered so that I could just go out and touch this and hang out with others who felt the same and do ritual. I miss those times.
This depth of feeling can cause me to be out of touch with my daily requirements and the shift to that otherness makes it hard to be real in the here and now.
In “the Mists of Avalon” the character expresses that longing she has when she is separated from Avalon and the Goddess. I miss those times back when I was in my 20’s and I could just go with a group of women and dance; spiraling in ecstasy and joy as one with the universe. Marriage and children have kept me busy and I live in my Virgo rising mostly so I usually remain efficient, rational, the worker. Today, with the cloudy, rainy skies I am feeling that shift, that calling again and it weighs on my heart.
Those who have felt that calling know the heaviness, the deep feelings that are so much they well over and spill out in tears or joy and reverence. I feel Her and She calls to me for the first time in YEARS. I had forgotten this feeling. In the rush of life, the responsibilities of family and marriage I had forgotten Her touch but today She calls me and I am overwhelmed. I am, again, one with the universe and all is well.
That is Mercury in Cancer. Thanks, Len.
be, strawberry, and nilou: Thank you so very much for your kind words and valuable contributions.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be cavalier. It’s been a doozy of a day. With this Vesta New Moon on my Mars, sextile my Uranus & trine my Eris, it feels like there’s been a lot of fires to tend today. This is obviously an important piece, though, and I look forward to pursuing the idea of Mercury’s energy as challenging to sort out from solar consciousness.
Thank you for this today, Len
A timely reminder for me that the mind can think the world in so many ways; with perception, with discernment, with knowledge, belief, faith, trust. So many options!
with gratitude
nilou
I’ve been feeling what I think for so long, it’ll be odd to have to start thinking it again.
I hadn’t realized it had been over 2 months Len. Thanks for making me aware that Mercury’s stay in Cancer was a swimming endurance test for him. What a guy! He’s had his work cut out for him, at least here in the U.S. Things like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post yesterday, and all the news about our personal messaging being retained by our government, and now those intercepted messages between our government’s enemies causing high alerts. . . even more “profoundly moving” stuff to think about.
Yesterday Eric made me think of how the solstices and equinoxes, which have enduring influence for months, are connected by the cross-quarter days such as the present Lammas. Although technically I suppose it would come when the Sun is at 15 Leo, the chart for today’s New Moon at 14+ Leo is close enough to made me realize how they (cross-quarter dates) keep the solstice/equinox themes connected. Using Mercury as an example, today he is at 27+ Cancer (tomorrow on exact Lammas he will be at 28+ Cancer) and that is very close to where Ceres was at the June Solstice, 29+ Cancer. She was trine the Moon at 27+ Scorpio and also (for the chart drawn for Washington DC) the ascendant at 27+ Pisces. There has been much discussion recently regarding hungry children and how much and (or if) in what way the government should intervene in this problem. Mercury was very active in this process led by Ceres and the Moon.
Today’s Mercury is opposite the U.S. Pluto (27+ Capricorn) and quincunx the U.S. Moon (27+ Aquarius) in the Sibly natal chart, just as Ceres was in the Solstice chart. Looking ahead to the Libra Equinox in September, the Moon will conjunct the south node in Taurus and oppose Saturn conjunct the north node in Scorpio, while Ceres will trine the Moon (+ SN) and sextile Saturn (+ NN). Ceres (food) looks to be acting as facilitator between the opposition of Moon (families) to Saturn (government), while at the same time she (along with Saturn-NN-Venus in Scorpio) forms a yod to the still retrograde Uranus (breakthroughs) in Aries. Her role in September will continue the thread from Solstice through Lammus and then onto Equinox that Mercury’s long stay in Cancer (and future trine to Uranus mid-August when he’s in Leo) keeps connected. I’m sure there are other threads just as connecting between Solstice and Equinox too.
I guess it hasn’t just been an endurance test for little Mercury – swimming non-stop for two months; he had a definite mission didn’t he? Just like you, Maria, Jude, Amanda and Eric and all the rest of us. Carry on!
be