Mercury, the planet governing communication ad travel, is moving ‘backwards’ from June 15th until the evening of July 9th.

I suspect that in these modern times, Mercury’s energy has a far greater effect on us than it did the ancients. Do we even notice when Venus moves retrograde, for example, or Jupiter? Generally, no. But when our computers seize up, our cellphones spit static, or our summer travel turns into a nightmare of missed connections and lost luggage, we definitely know that the great Mr. M. is sending out oppositional energy.

As a Virgo with Mercury as my ruler, I often feel particularly out of sorts during this time. In fact, it used to drive me nuts. Stark raving bonkers. But in the last few years, I’ve managed to find a pathway through these times that is usually productive, and rarely as frustrating.

Share the secret? 🙂

I use the RE-words as my guide: Lord M’s reversal is a perfect time to REflect, REvise, and REstore. Seriously, it is that simple. Of course, I am always prepared to also have to REdo, and REturn. But that can happen any time (it just feels more stressful during a retrograde).

In the past I’ve revised the book I was working on.Sure, new ideas and concepts formed, but since they came about as a result of taking another look at what had already been done, it was part of the REvision.

I’ve found myself covering ‘old’ ground with friends and loved ones — things that might have ended up in an argument, but instead we tried to REveal deeper layers to reach a more completely understanding. (Sometimes we did, in fact, have those arguments. But it seems that we ended up getting to a better REsolution.)

This time I am going to REstart a major project: cleaning up the nearly 10gb of data — TEXT data — on my hard drive. It’s been collecting for years and is a jumbled mess. I’m going to use the next three weeks to REview the data, REorganize it into more useful categories, and REstore my usual tidiness to my computer.

And, just in case, I’ll be backing up all of my changes as I go along: Just in case the Darling Mr. M. decides that what I really need is to REformat and start fresh.