Standstill

For the first time since I began writing this blog, today I felt at a standstill  about what to write.  Usually I have one or more ready ideas that just flow out .  But today I am stuck. Then as I am an astrologer, or cycles scientist as I have started to call myself,  I decided to find the meaning of this inertia in the movements (or lack thereof) of the planets.

When I look in the ephemeris I see both Mercury and Mars apparently slowing down to the place in the zodiac where they each will go forward.  Mercury is beginning to station at 24 degrees of Pisces today, will  move forward on the 4th, staying at 24 and 25 degrees until the 12th of April when he gets to 26.  These next 2 weeks are the standstill part of the cycle known as a station.  A station is where a bus or train is parked and does not move.  So with the planets.  Mercury rules communications, travel, writing, negotiating, contracting, selling, talking, moving from place to place and thinking. Mercury was the swift messenger of the gods.  His natural speed is over 1 degree a day when he is in top form, where he likes to be.

With Mercury's speed being slow, ours words and movements are apt to be slow to non existent.  Why? Well we are picking up information from one spot in the zodiac. Pisces is the sign of the poet and musician and dreamer.  The information gained from Pisces is of the more subtle kind;  seeing visions or images while walking, or listening to music, or evoked by feelings. If those 2 degrees of Pisces are important to you as seen in your natal chart, then this time can be quite significant in identifying an aspect of your self that you might have glossed over when Mercury is at the faster speed.  The dreamlike quality we are experiencing now will disappear, as Mercury slowly  picks up speed and returns to the sign Aries on the16th of April. So enjoy it while it lasts and don't try too hard to fight the natural course of things.

The same is true for Mars.  He is backing into 4 degrees of Virgo now, will gradually back into 3 Virgo, station there, and begin to move forward on Saturday the14th.  Mars does not get to 5 degrees until the last day of April.  This is another case of a planet at a station. Our energy, will and drive is at a standstill.  We might have a newly formed plan to fix an old unresolved issue with a male friend, or health regime program  that we have been wanting to try, but there has likely been little or no will force available to make it happen.  
Such is the case of the cycles of the planets.  Knowing what they are doing is meant to be an aid to us;  not as the cause of our adventures or misadventures, but as markers of phases of time.