to be a bloomsday prepper
I recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, a novel on the nymph-goddess-witch who was exiled to an island and had an ongoing romance with Hermes, messenger god of the gods before she ended it because he was just there for the goss.
Hermes is the clever, cunning god in Greek mythology, adopted in Roman myth as Mercury.
Mercury, planet of commerce, communication and commute, is back in its home sign of Gemini. The Sun is now in Gemini, approaching a conjunction with Uranus tonight. Maybe a epiphany is breaking through, another ‘aha’ that feels new, revelatory, a U-turn in your perception. I’m not sure if you’ve been noticing fresh energy sweeping in this week, or if it has felt more of the same.
OG queer planet, Mercury also rules learning, math, craft, skill, youth.
To be young is to be willing to learn and try again.
Gemini is actually one of my favourite zodiac signs. I know astrologers aren’t supposed to name their biases, but to pretend like we do not move through the world with our personal filters (slash chart) as the way we are relating to life… ‘tis a lie.
Gemini teaches me the importance of paradox, contradiction and holding them lightly in both hands with amusement.
Gemini’s capacity to hold multiple perspectives with deftness is, an ode to its ruler Mercury who was the only god who could move between worlds as the messenger, as pyschopomp of the living and the dead to translate messages with precision.
When I was in primary school, my first email address was i_luv_talking@hotmail.com (now defunct aka don’t email me there, hit reply to this one). I would get in trouble for talking. I would try to matchmake my classmates by teasing them mercilessly till they were blushing, and then I would be whipped by a long cane in front of the whole class for causing a scene (aka, speaking my mind like a regular child). Schooling in Malaysia, suffice to say, is not for the faint of heart.
Cue: this is why I do what I do…
Healing the traumas of yesteryear!
Mercury holds the keys to the doors.
(of delight or despair?)
Where doors have shut, and are ready to be opened again.
What happens when you begin to change your perception of the thing: an idea, a person, a place, your past, the parts of you that had to die for you to stay alive. Your world re-orients around itself. Nothing outside of you has changed, but your perception has.
This is Mercury’s gift.
And this is what I am interested in - for our perception to begin encompassing wider terrains for hope, beauty and generous possibility.
To be a bloomsday prepper instead of a doomsday prepper.
Bloom-strolling instead of doom-scrolling.
We include the mind as a powerful part of our experience, because the mind is where our perceptive awareness lies. Where we go to make meaning of what we are experiencing in the here and now.
The key is in carving new neural pathways for the mind to perceive differently, and for this to change how we experience our everyday life.
By simply shifting your attention, even for two seconds.
Instead of fixating on the singular sensation of your mind racing faster than a peregrine falcon, see if you can allow your attention to disperse around your environment.
Notice something round.
Notice something square.
Notice something round AND square.
Then notice how moving your attention elsewhere lifts the gravity ever so slightly.
If it feels like playing a child’s game, Mercury will be happy.
To break the patterns, you have to connect different patterns, and draw different squiggly lines.
Lines that make no sense, lines that defy logic, lines that your rationale mind cannot immediately grasp.
As the Sun travels through Gemini for the next few weeks with Mercury by its side, pay attention to how you are disrupting patterns of how you experience your life (as good, bad and all the nuances in between)
Draw new lines of possibility, lean in harder into who you are as your superpower, and be open to look a fool trying and learning and trying again at this thing called Life.
You hold the key, simply choose the door.
My books are open for a chat and disrupting the loop of over-thinking because your body doesn’t feel safe to be in the here and now. I’d love to guide you through the threshold of your own underworld to call parts of you back to life.
Rachel x
venus day soother:
listening to the bioelectric activity of a living plum blossom tree
