Retrogrades

In astrology, Mars isn’t known as the red planet that may or may not someday sustain human life. In astrology, it’s about forward momentum, our sexuality, our capacity for aggression and competition, for achieving our ambitions. It governs surgery that involves knives, weapons, war. It’s about action. Every two years, it turns retrograde, when it appears to be moving backward relative to the earth. In a very real, personal sense, this retro period slows down our lives.

We encounter delays in areas that are important to us. Our physical energy may not be quite up to par. Our ambitions may be thwarted by circumstances.

On April 17, Mars turned retrograde in fire sign Sagittarius, and won’t straighten out again until June 29. If you know your time, place, and date of birth, get your free birth chart here to find out where Mars in Sagittarius falls in your chart. Here’s the link for finding out what the houses mean.

The best way to deal with this retrograde is to go with the flow, as stymied as it may be. During a retrograde in 2005, a month after my dad had died, I was stopped for speeding and got a ticket, my first in years. I tried to explain to the cop that my dad had just died (sob stories sometimes help!) but this guy wasn’t listening. My ticket cost me nearly $200 and time in an online traffic school.

A few days before this Mars retro, Rob got a speeding ticket on his way to teach a yoga class and is now taking the very boring online traffic course that saves you money and points on your license. The message with Mars retro is TO SLOW DOWN and if you don’t do it willingly the universe will do it for you.

This Mars retro will be combined, starting April 28, with a Mercury retrograde in Taurus, the second Merc retro this year, which lasts until May 22. We’ve written about Mercury retros before. But the gist is that communication goes awry, travel is screwed up, computers crash, appliances die, and it’s a time that favors revisions, reconsideration, rethinking.

Fortunately, this year’s presidential election in the U.S. doesn’t happen under a Mercury retro, as it did in November 2000. Astrologers back then were predicting chaos and, sure enough, at 7:49 p.m., NBC decided they had enough data from exit polls in Florida and Tom Brokaw called the state for Al Gore. With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it meant he had won the election.

However, shortly after 10 p.m. – less than an hour after Mercury had turned direct – Brokaw backtracked and said that George W. Bush had won the state and the election. We all know what ensued after that – the endless dispute over the chads on Palm Beach County’s ballot and the eventual decision by the Supreme Court that Bush was the 43^rd president of the U.S. Welcome to the global world of a Mercury retro.

Mars, Mercury. Our physicality and the way we communicate. When they go dormant, we feel it. But our experiences of these retrogrades depend on how we act and react, how in tune we are with ourselves and the larger world.