Let’s just say I’m looking forward to a few weeks off from work.
Even when you love what you do, stepping away for a bit can be good medicine. Life moves quickly, and sometimes the only way to hear your own thoughts again is to step out of the current for a moment. A little quiet. A little space. Time to reflect.
Interestingly enough, the timing lines up with Mercury being in retrograde. Most people think of Mercury retrograde as a nuisance—lost emails, delayed flights, technology acting strange—but for some of us it works more internally. It slows the mind down and asks you to look again. Old conversations resurface. Patterns become clearer. Things that didn’t quite make sense the first time around sometimes reveal themselves more clearly the second time around.
My relationship with Mercury has always been an interesting one.
My own chart leans heavily toward Scorpio: Sun, Venus, and Mercury all sitting there in the same deep water—what astrologers call a stellium, when several planets gather in the same sign and amplify its influence. Scorpio energy has never been particularly afraid of shadow. It tends to look directly at the things most people would rather avoid, especially when it comes to relationships, emotional truth, and the psychological currents moving underneath everyday life.
With the Sun there, identity itself tends to be shaped by transformation and depth. With Mercury there, the mind naturally notices what lies beneath the surface. And with Venus in Scorpio, relationships are rarely casual experiences—they ask for honesty, emotional intensity, and the kind of understanding that only comes from being willing to look at the deeper layers of connection.
And with Mercury there in particular—the planet that governs the mind, perception, and communication—the instinct is often to notice the subtext of things. Not just what is said, but tone, symbolism, placement, and what might be left unsaid. Scorpio Mercury has a way of reading the emotional and psychological undercurrents beneath the surface.
There is also a certain power in that placement. Mercury rules communication, and when it moves through Scorpio the words themselves tend to carry weight. They’re rarely casual. They come from somewhere deeper, shaped by reflection, emotion, and lived experience. Scorpio Mercurys often have the ability to take experience—especially the difficult or transformative kind—and put it into words in a way that resonates with others.
Which is probably why Mercury retrograde tends to feel less like chaos to me and more like clarity.
Retrogrades slow everything down just enough that you can look again. Sometimes what you see the second time around is the difference between the work itself and the way people respond to it.
When someone writes from lived experience—especially experience that involved pain, healing, and genuine inner work—the words carry more than their surface meaning. They are the residue of the process that produced them.
Anyone who has done real inner work knows what I mean.
It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t performative. Sometimes you bleed a little on the page. Sometimes you cry while writing. Sometimes you go to places inside yourself that you would have preferred to avoid but know you can’t if you want to come out whole.
When I finally wrote about that kind of experience, the symbols I used—fire, rebirth, the goddess—weren’t aesthetic choices. They were shorthand for transformation.
And this is where something interesting sometimes happens.
People encounter those symbols and respond to them. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes creatively. That kind of response can actually be lovely. In fact, it can be deeply moving to see your words echo somewhere else—to realize that something you wrote meant enough to someone that it stirred something in their heart and mind.
But context matters.
Symbols that come from sacred or deeply personal work carry a certain gravity. When those same symbols are placed right alongside something impulsive, crude, or lacking in awareness, the contrast becomes revealing.
The sacred and the sensual are not mutually exclusive. In fact, throughout history they have often been intertwined. When held with knowledge, growth, and spiritual awareness, the union of the two can be profoundly transformative—something closer to the tantric understanding of embodiment, where physical experience and spiritual insight deepen one another rather than compete.
It was a somewhat crude awakening, but revealing to see the disparity of the two placed side by side—imagery drawn from transformation and reflection sitting next to something far more impulsive and instinctual in nature. Without restraint, discretion, or reflection, instinctual urges lose their depth and collapse into something careless. What could have been meaningful becomes empty, often leaving the people involved with the quiet feeling that something essential is missing.
And sometimes, with a little distance, you begin to notice something else as well. You start to see the difference between where you were coming from and where someone else might still be in their own process.
You notice patterns—not as judgment, but simply as observation. Different levels of reflection. Different stages of awareness.
And it can make you pause and wonder what exactly resonated with them in the first place.
Was it the meaning?
Or was it the glimpse of a kind of embodiment they may still be learning how to grow into themselves?
Because sometimes people are drawn to the energy of transformation before they are ready for the work that makes it real—the discipline, the reflection, the commitment that real change asks of us.
And that is part of the human journey too.
That realization used to make me angry. Lately, it simply makes me clear.
Because once you’ve done the work—once you’ve sat with the shadow long enough to understand it—no one else’s use of the language can actually cheapen what you experienced.
They can borrow the words.
They can echo the imagery.
They can place something sacred next to something crude and not even notice the difference.
But they cannot replicate the transformation that gave those symbols their meaning in the first place.
That work belongs to the person who lived it.
Finally, sometimes hearing another person’s truth can be difficult—not because it is meant as an attack, but because it touches something uncomfortable. In those moments, the reaction often says more about what the words revealed than about the words themselves.
You may still feel a little disappointed when you realize that not everyone is ready or willing to do that work for themselves. And if someone needs a little of your wisdom along the way, you can offer it. But that realization doesn’t have to require a response.
It doesn’t have to become a back-and-forth, and it certainly doesn’t have to turn into a competition over meaning.
You simply keep showing up and doing the work. Because this life is the path—the place where we learn, grow, and slowly awaken.