Astrological Repair Manual

It’s getting pretty warm now, so close to the Sun. Things are heating up as far as
cycles go, too. We’re at Mercury, dealing with a function that may seem very cut-anddried,
but certainly is not.
Mercury: Intelligence, Concrete Thought, Perception, Communication. All these
things can seem so normal that they hardly need comment. But comment I must since
they’re all ripe for illusion and disarray!
As I’ve affirmed before, none of these astrological functions stands alone; they all
work together. If we use our free will to hide, subvert or bury any of them, we open the
floodgates to problematic living. That being true, our intelligence and our different ways
of communicating certainly shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. The first function that will
help Mercurys' functioning is the planet we just left—Venus. Feelings and values are the
perfect complement for intelligence and communication.
Wonder why they seem to be at odds so often? Check your culture; look closely at
the social environment these functions develop within. From where I’m sitting in the
United States, I must admit that this country’s culture has been very unkind to a smooth
marriage of these two functions for far too many years. I’m sure that the situation is
similar in most cultures around the world. It hasn't always been this way. I know that
there were times and social situations when it was different, families and groups within
which it is different, and I predict that the whole world will get it right eventually.
Since the two planets are physically close, and since their cycles are similar in
duration, one could wonder deeply at the rank perversions heaped upon using them
together.
To cut our feeling from our thinking is a crime. Yet one of the most valuable uses
for astrology is to hold our various functions and their proper relationships up to us in a
symbolic mirror. We can See what should be and, most often, find the best way to iron
out persistently irritating wrinkles—those warps of function induced by family, culture
and the press of living in a world changing faster than it ever has before.
I mentioned the phenomenon of “retrogradation” before—the apparent backwards
flow of a planet’s function. I pointed out that I hate that word “retrograde”, but I haven’t
come up with a suitable alternative yet... I also pointed out that, when a planet is doing
“that”, it’s a time to focus on the function's meaning in an internal way, to ponder the
depth of the function in our lives, to let the function dive into our unconscious. Then we
can return with fresh energy for the journey.
Mercury does this internal journeying about every three months; it lasts for about
three weeks. This Mercury Retrograde period has gotten some of the worst astrological
coverage! What’s been said has had a quality of “negative truth”—an inappropriate
reporting of only the undesirable aspects. The real problem is that this “negative truth” is
touted as the Whole truth. Just because many people suffer from erratic thinking during
these periods, just because they are forgetful or can’t concentrate on what they think is
important—these things are no reason to blame the planet Mercury or to make a baldfaced
assumption that Mercury Retrograde is somehow automatically a bad time, to be
merely suffered through.
Think about this:
People are told that they have an opportunity, every three months, to use their
perceptive qualities to find fresh and highly individualistic solutions to things that may
have been causing some bafflement in their lives. These people believe what they're told,