by Robert Wilkinson
The current and previous Mercury retrogrades have accompanied many anecdotes about how it worked in others’ lives. Today I’ll share some strange retrograde occurrences.
This one was strange from the onset! I had to go somewhere to pick something up curbside. I went the most direct route, and found myself waiting for a train to pass a crossing. It looked like it was moving along, and then suddenly stopped with the last car literally one foot past the road, but the gates were still down and the lights were still flashing. I waited there 10 minutes, then asked the guy behind me if he’d back up so I could go a different route.
He did, but as I was backing up a traffic jam ensued at that crossing so I had to wait for about 4 other cars to decide which way they were going as they were backing, turning, and creating a jam at the intersection. Then as I finally was able to move forward, another vehicle jumped in front of me and began to swerve all over the road at about 10 miles per hour. This was about 10 am so if he was drunk I really wanted to stay far away!
I then found the road I was taking northwest would not get me over to the road I was trying to get to so I could go southeast. So I turned east, took a route I’ve never done before, which went find until I found myself at the final approach to the store. I had never been to this store before, and thanks to weird internet directions, wound up in a store complex on the west side of the freeway when the actual shop was on the east side.
Then I got to the other side, but wound up on the wrong side of a 6 lane intersection with no way to get across. After a number of right and left and right turns, I finally found my way to the right corner, but couldn’t find the shop since its sign is done in some avant-garde lettering which is not easy to read. I finally figured it out, but what should have been a 20 minute drive there wound up taking almost an hour!
Here’s another classic! My wife’s driver’s license expired some months ago, but our state gave everyone a 6 month extension since their offices are closed except for appointments which must be scheduled at least a month in advance. She finally got an appointment, and needed to assemble a bunch of paperwork in order to get the type of license which can be used for travel. She got directions from the internet, but found out “you can’t get there from here.”
She wound up driving around the MVD office complex about 4 times trying to figure out how to get into their parking lot. It seems some directions are less helpful than others! She finally found the single entrance to this giant square block complex (which must be approached from one, and only one direction), went in for her appointment, submitted all the paperwork, had everything completed except for the final “enter” and the entire computer network went down. Not just at our location, but everywhere that database is used, which is the entire nation!
She waited, because she hoped it would come back up and everything could be completed. However, after about an hour she figured out she could be waiting in that office until 5 pm with the system never coming back up, so she told them to make her another appointment, and came home. She’s still wondering if anything will get done any time soon.
Previous retrogrades have yielded many interesting events. During one such time, in a FB group dedicated to pop astrology 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, and unexpected car problems coming to light (I speak specifically about that in my book A New Look at Mercury Retrograde!
One classic Mercury retrograde manifestation involved a person who had just planted her garden, and then an unexpected hard freeze happened, meaning she would have to re-plant her garden. This happened in April 2018 during planting season, when there were numerous freezes across the US, including tornados, furious storms, sleet and snow. Thousands of gardens needing to be re-planted is a classic Mercury retrograde of having to undo to re-do, or having to do something two or even three times.
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!
Other events from past retrogrades: 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).
A couple of retrogrades back brought a return to writing my book about finding your Beloved in your life, where I made more progress in 3 weeks than the previous 6 months! As you might guess, I haven’t had time to work on it since then, but have done needed revisions on another book which I’ve been trying to republish for over a year. Talk about retrograde!
In past retrogrades I didn't go on trips I thought I would, no matter how many times I tried to reschedule them. The November 2019 retrograde had me going on a trip I had to postpone in June of that year, and another unexpected trip got scheduled to do something I really needed to do in 2018. One retrograde I found out I had to do my taxes at least 2 months before I would ordinarily do them. Other retrogrades I found out I was owed much more of a refund than I thought. Again, Mercury rules my second house, so resources often show unexpected returns when Mercury is 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. That happened twice in the last retrograde. In one instance, my next call to them 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 retrograde occurrence 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 seemed that if something (which I still don’t understand) happened, it inserted code I ddidn’t want, creating a “veiled link” which won’t work because it scrambles the you tube link. It displayed perfectly but wouldn’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 A New Look at Mercury Retrograde, often unresolved problems from the past come back up during a retrograde, and miscreants are busted during retrogrades. One retrograde a while back involved a 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, the aftermath involving my private comments to the moderator turned into a public discussion about my “lack of enlightenment” and some ugly personal attacks by two mean people on that site.
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 later found out many of my internet friends 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!
During the Summer 2020 retrograde, my wife decided to repair an outdoor stone tile table she meant to do for many months. It went well, she laid out the tiles for the proper spots, got the right adhesive and grout, and it looked great! However..... We who live in the desert southwest often find ourselves praying for rain since there’s almost none out here. For a month, right up to the day before she worked on sealing the tiles on the table, there was no forecast of rain for that entire week.
So she went about sealing the tiles and grout, knowing it must dry for 24 hours. Of course, with no warning we had a thunderstorm that night which lasted for hours! So it had to be re-done, AND when she went out to look at it the following morning, another tile from another part of the table had fallen off. The table is definitely a retrograde project!
I’ll leave you with one of many classic anecdotes of Mercury retrograde events which I gave you in my book A New Look at Mercury Retrograde. From Chapter 2:
One client told me (after several days where we kept missing each other just as Mercury was about to go stationary direct) about something that had happened to her earlier that day. She had been in a store next to a busy intersection, doing some shopping. Someone walked into the store and bellowed, "Who owns the green Volvo that just hit my car?"After no one answered, he yelled it again, and a person paying for something at the counter said "I have a green Volvo, but it's parked right over ..." stopping when he realized his car was not where he parked it on the street. He ran outside to see it sitting it down the block.
What had happened (talk about retrograde!) was that his car had slipped its parking gear, rolled backwards down a one way street, crossed the major intersection in reverse, hit the car of the man who was so upset, then wheeled itself backwards into a new car lot! Nobody got hurt, but the vision of a car rolling backwards down a one-way street is a classic Mercury retrograde picture!
On a final note, the 2000 US Presidential election was held just as Mercury went stationary direct in late Libra, just like this one. I have no doubt there will be as much confusion, as many delays and legal challenges, and as much acrimony in coming weeks as then. We can only hope that we don’t wind up with as much chaos after the dust settles!
I’m sure there are ten thousand more strange Mercury retrograde experiences out there. One thing is for sure: many things don’t turn out as expected, but it can bring some delightful roundabout experiences teaching us to reflect, take a new point of view, and adapt to a different flow. Even though we all make plans, sometimes we have to do things in a different order, or wait for a new time. And if something is postponed it clearly conforms to the retrograde quality of the moment, and so it’s futile to try to “push the river.”
On October 25, we had the Inferior Conjunction and Mercury will gradually begin to speed up until it goes stationary direct on November 3. So while you’re looking back, remember that you’ll soon begin to have opportunities to hear your inner voice and know things you haven’t known before now. Until then, enjoy the favorable aspects in play as we rock on down to the Great Compression beginning the Grand Mutation in Aquarius launching a new 200 year period in history!
Copyright © 2020 Robert Wilkinson
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