Mercury Retrograde in April 2018 – How Has Yours Been?

by Robert Wilkinson

Over at the FB astrology site “Anything Astrology” someone asked the question “How’s everyone making out so far with this Mercury Rx?” As usual, there were some interesting comments.

People griped about many of the usual things, like unexpected moves, electronics dying, reversals in relationships, flashes of insight from the subconscious mind about things previously veiled, unexpected expenses, unexpected car problems coming to light (I speak specifically about that in my book A New Look at Mercury Retrograde), and the unexpected return of people that weren’t welcome (Mercury RX square Mars and Saturn!)

One classic Mercury retrograde manifestation involved was someone had just planted her garden, and then an unexpected hard freeze happened, meaning she would have to re-plant her garden. I had already thought about that during the past few weeks’ numerous freezes across the US, since this is planting season in many places currently having tornados, furious storms, sleet and snow. Of course this means that thousands of gardens will have to be re-planted, as per Mercury’s quality of having to undo to re-do, or having to do it two or even three times. And of course, a freeze kills fruit tree and bush blossoms, so it probably won't be as fruitful a season as it looked like before Mercury began slowing down a few weeks ago!

As an aside, that happened to my garden twice when I lived in New Mexico. While I try not to plant during Mercury retrograde, some years it wasn’t possible to plant far enough out or wait until after the retrograde. I remember one year thinking I had outwitted Mercury retrograde, since I had planted about a week before it went retrograde. So of course, right as it went RX an unexpected windstorm came through with gusts up to 60 mph, and it literally ripped ALL the branches and leaves off my plants! As you can imagine, I waited a while before planting again!

Anyway, back to the “Anything Astrology” thread. On reflection, I realized this retrograde had interesting manifestations. As I offered there, Mercury, ruling my 2nd house, while retrograde brought me money a) from the past I had forgotten, and b) from a totally unexpected source due to an article I wrote (Mercury). While my writing schedule (Mercury) got totally scrambled due to personal priorities, so far it's still working out, as long as I'm flexible (Mercury RX).

I didn't go on trips I thought I would, no matter how many times I tried to reschedule them. I tried to contact old friends, only to find that their phones weren't working, or their message service wouldn't take a message even after 5 tries over several days. I wrote articles I didn't have time to post due to the need to post other timely articles. I found out that I must do my taxes at least 2 months before I would ordinarily do them (oh joy!). I unexpectedly discovered that a long-time friend of the site was making a visit to a town near me, but of course nothing is firmed up about a meeting, since it is Mercury retrograde!

I’ve had video conferences unexpectedly end because of equipment malfunction, and one phone call turned into a Marx Brothers routine when the other person answered just as their answering system kicked in, and so there were two voices at the same time, and no way for me to get out of there without hanging up and calling again. Then the next call went out as they were calling me, and neither of us could answer the other call since both rolled over to voice mail. I finally got through, but the person on the other end of the line was immediately called to do something so we had to postpone our talk.

One very peculiar thing that happened involved my word processing and blogware software. I began doing a musical tribute, and found that the previous year’s tribute had all busted links! So I had to re-check all the links, found all the you tube videos were good, and tried to fix the code, but for some reason I couldn’t use my usual word processing commands, since each time I did it made my links unusable by removing good code and inserting unwanted code. (It’s complicated….)

It seems that if something (which I still don’t understand) happens, it inserts some code I don’t want it to and creates a “veiled link” that won’t work because it scrambles the you tube link. It displays perfectly but won’t work! That’s pretty retrograde. So I used one of my techniques to “trick” my word processing program enabling me to cut and paste entire good links directly into the code, and so didn’t have to create them from scratch.

That worked fine, until I went to insert the article into my blogware program for posting. At that point, I found that the entire first half of the musical tribute had different code I had never seen before inserted into the links! I still have no idea how that code got to be there. So I redid it on the blog platform, line by line, until it finally displayed as it should. That meant an article that usually would have taken 15-20 minutes at most wound up taking me an hour and a half to complete!

As I also noted in my book, often unresolved problems from the past come back up during a retrograde, and miscreants are busted during retrogrades. My experience of this retrograde also involved a recent conflict I had on a FB “astrology site” which was toxic with sexual putdowns and violent sexual imagery. I kept pointing out that what was posted was not astrology, and finally sent a private message to the moderator. Then, instead of anything productive occurring, somehow the aftermath involving my offline comments to the moderator turned into a discussion about my “lack of enlightenment” and some ugly personal attacks by two “mean girls” of that site who came over to troll me.

Shifting the focus from the main point to an off-topic misdirection and misrepresenting what was said is another classic Mercury retrograde manifestation. I also found out from many of my internet friends that you came, saw, and left that site in the past due to nasty people there, so again, revisiting the past often happens during a retrograde, when hidden things come to light!

On a final note, now that the Inferior Conjunction is past, Mercury has already begun to speed up. From this point it will increase in speed until the Superior Conjunction a few weeks down the road. So prepare, get ready, finish your research and rehearsals, and prepare to spring forward pretty much any time you want, since we already have some extremely favorable tides coming this week.

© Copyright 2018 Robert Wilkinson

Comments

[bomega]

This Mercury retrograde took place in my eighth house, stationing directly on my natal Chiron. It made hard aspects to my natal Sun and Pluto, and easy aspects to may natal Jupiter and Venus (and Neptune).

It started out consisting of profound sublime breakthroughs, up to and including the Inferior Conjunction. However with the square to Mars Pluto, there was definitely a major bump which was painful, sort of traumatic, and grueling, but I just made it to the other side of that.

I have sensed the speed picking up since the Inferior Conjunction, and while a part of me isn't quite ready for that, the reality of my life is that I don't have the luxury of waiting to be ready anymore. So now I'm hoping to cash in on the sublime parts of the earlier part of the retrograde.

I have had some weird computer issues and problems on the internet, but each instance of that showed it self to be an important serendipitous lesson that I couldn't have ignored even if I tried. Surprisingly my old car that is overdue for repair has been reliable. And hopefully I didn't just jinx myself by saying that. :)

[Terri Moore]

The mercury retrograde happened in my 6th house, which is very sparsely populated - nothing there, really.
A couple of health issues I had been having have rolled back, which is nice but I won't hold my breath :)

A more interesting little incident concerned my playlist, which takes me on my commute to and from work in Joburg every day. Now, since I don't trust the algorithm for the shuffle function, I arrange all my songs in alphabetical order of title, regardless of artist and album - this allows me to listen to every one of the songs I carry with me. Well, around the start of Mercury Rx, I was at the end of the 'C's and starting the 'D's. After the Easter break when I started commuting to work again, my playlist had retrograded back ti the middle of the 'C's. And I didn't notice.

I'll have to work out what I'm trying to tell myself by noting the song from which this retro-jump occurred, and the song it jumped to!

Love,
Terri in Joburg

[Terri Moore]

..oh yes and I got thrown off Twitter this Mercury Rx, too!

That's certainly no loss to me!

Love,

Terri in Joburg