Today Mercury stations direct in Leo at 1:40 am EDT. This officially begins the last phase of a long spell of inner planet retrogrades dating back to November of last year. We still have Mercury’s echo phase to work through before we’re in completely fresh territory for all three personal planets (Mercury, Venus and Mars), but at least as of today, they’re all in forward motion. Hallelujah.
On a personal level, this signals a time when we can begin moving plans and projects forward — though for a few days at least, it’s still best to move slowly and carefully. To paraphrase Eric’s metaphor from Monday, keep your headlights on at least through the weekend — and notice if someone has forgotten to turn on theirs.
It’s like what your mom always told you when you were still a young, novice driver and wanted to come home late on New Year’s Eve: you may be sober, but what about the drivers out there who aren’t?
In other words, how do we deal with personal crises when they spread to other individuals and through groups and entire communities? The degree of today’s Mercury station, which is at 2 Leo, has an apropos Sabian symbol given the news events that have marked the last few weeks. (The Sabians are a set of channeled symbols.) I’m going to begin with the keynote Dane Rudhyar gives it in An Astrological Mandala rather than the symbol proper: “The spreading power of individual crises through a collectivity.”
We’ve seen how this works — or doesn’t, depending on your perspective — with the two mass murders in the U.S. during this Mercury retrograde. With 12 dead in the Aurora, Colorado shooting a couple weeks ago and seven dead (including the gunman) in the shooting at the Sikh gurdwara (place of worship) in Wisconsin this weekend, we’re seeing personal crisis ripple out many ways. For some, this is a time of grief and numbness. For others, a call to arms to protect the misinterpreted right to bear arms. Yet others take this repeated pain and try to have a different conversation — one about protecting life, or about creating peace.