Yipppeeeee! It’s my favorite time of the year, when Mercury goes retrograde and we all stick our foot in our mouth while graciously accepting responsibilities and entanglements that we would never otherwise be foolish enough to get ourselves into.

What is Mercury Retrograde you ask and why would something “out there” affect what happens in our lives “down here?”

Mercury, the fleet-footed God of the ancients, is the planet in our solar system that rules communication. He can get the point across quickly and smoothly with no confusion. Of course, that is when he is moving forward and he has his groove on. (So to speak.)

In a retrograde period, which happens occasionally throughout the year, we have a cycle of a few days or weeks when observing Mercury in the night sky would show you that it is apparently moving backwards in its orbit. This is an optical illusion caused by the difference in speed between the Earth’s rotation around the sun and that of Mercury.

While Mercury is appearing to us to be treading backwards on his path (something that all spiritual seekers can sympathize with) we down here on Earth, living under the influence of this motion, tend to experience some baffling and frustrating phenomena.

Yesterday my laptop computer which had miraculously lasted for five and a half years finally pooped out, not surprising at all since 5 is the number of completion. It had had the flickering screen, jam-packed memory, battery that wouldn’t hold a charge and overheating fan-thing going on for a couple of years. But I had learned how to combat and adapt to each of these inconveniences quite well. Yesterday it decided that there is never a power cable plugged in, even when there IS a power cable plugged in. I did discover that this was reparable by placing a very heavy dictionary on the connection part of the cable to torque it up a bit, but after just a few hours of that I realized I just needed to break down, clean out my savings and buy a new computer. So I type to you on it now….a desktop, I have decided to hate laptops for eternity.

So this is my Mercury Retrograde experience for (more…)

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Since it is winter and many people are thinking about snow, or the lack thereof, I thought that I would put together a short primer on Snow Magic for all of you. Keep in mind that you really can have too much of a good thing and that you should always be careful what you wish for.

Bringing Down the Snow

Ingredients: an ice cube and a sharpish knife

Begin with the ice cube in your less dominant hand and the knife in your dominant hand. Shave the knife across the top of the ice cube so that you get a bunch of flakes (like trying to scrape butter off of a stick that is still too hard to spread on toast.)

Now that you have the hang of it, begin in the east (element of air for most) and work, scraping those icy, snowy flakes to the ground around you, in a clockwise circle until you reach the point of manifestation in the north and then close the circle.

While doing this action say (out loud or to yourself): I make manifest the snows of winter, a bright white powder, decorating the world with its insulating beauty, bringing joy to my world. I invoke the snows upon the mantle of the Earth goddess, a blanket upon her, though white and cool, resulting in less than six inches (one foot, two feet.) May these snows come down here at my locale within the next twelve (twenty-four, thirty-six) hours. (Now fill your hand with ice shards and toss them before you three times, saying….) I invoke thee, the snows of heaven, once, twice, thrice.

And now believing in your heart that it will truly be so, say: This is (more…)