By Amanda Moreno

Mercury is clearly still retrograde. I say that, tongue in cheek, because my words are still not working. Any time I get more than a paragraph into anything, I get restless and angry and flustered and the flow just ends. Chalk it up to the added stress of Saturn squaring my natal Mercury as well, possibly?

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

Or perhaps it’s the result of two and a half weeks of spontaneous releasing rituals that have brought up stuff I could have sworn was healed; energy and spirit attachment work; new frontiers in the realms of relationship and kink; and the realization that I have exactly no space in my life for anything to go wrong.

Well, except there apparently is space. I have had no choice but to make it, and to give myself the silent alone time that my soul has been demanding, with lots of gratitude that those to whom I’m responsible understand that my path is…weird. Being able to write about the experiences I’ve been having, however, still seems a ways off.

I’m pretty clear that public expression is part of my path, particularly in the form of writing, but there are more Leonine forms as well. New layers of my own Mercury complex, however, are being revealed all of the time. Mercury is tied intimately into my karmic patterns with both planet and house heavily emphasized in my chart.

I’m familiar with patterns of having the wool pulled over my eyes by loved ones, of trusting their words only to experience epic betrayal — or betrayal that is small but stimulates the deeper wounds — but I’m just recently beginning to tune into and work on the patterns that point toward imbalances in my own words and expression. There are, of course, subtleties and paradoxes galore.

I’m reminded of the beginning of my work in graduate school five years ago, as I first began to experiment with ritual. I had felt a huge lump of fear come up during a dream-tending session with a mentor and decided to amplify the fear in order to get to the bottom of it. I uncovered a major fear of losing control, in the sense of going insane, as well as a fear of being left completely alone in that insanity. So I figured I would do a ritual to release the fear. I sat down on my couch one night, in a very loosey-goosey ritual, said some words to release the fear, and called it good.

Two weeks later I found myself in my own personal little nightmare in a situation where I had lost control, experienced something awful, and then was pretty much abandoned by friends and family-of-choice as I dealt with the aftermath. The fears that I released essentially came right on back so that I could live through them. All in all, I learned a lot about self-reliance and my unfailing belief in love, but it was a really harsh lesson. A lesson that to this day makes me really think about the words I use in ritual (what if I had said “letting go” instead of “release”?), as well as things like containers and intention and all of that good stuff.

Now, fixation and compulsive distrust in words can definitely be a problem for a third-house Libra Pluto person such as myself, as fixation can lead to inertia among other things. So I look to the polarity — Aries and the 9th house — to provide context for ways to reframe. Finding an overarching paradigm and belief system (9th house) in which to orient my personal experience (Aries) has been key.

These days, when it comes to ritual I think more about the container and intention than anything else. Because I have participated in so much spontaneous ritual as of late, I’ve been forced to rely on that belief rather than fixate on the words I use in the rituals, as they’ve taken place very much in the moment.

When it comes down to it, as you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read my writing before, I believe in love. I believe that love is what ties us all together and that love and gratitude are the best containers for any transformation, large or small. My experience shows me that looking for love in everything is a powerful antidote to all that ails, even though sometimes it’s hard to tap into. In this way, intending to do ritual, writing, teaching, or whatever the case may be in the spirit of love and for the sake of the highest good usually helps me to stop fixating on the words I’m using, or a fear of being misunderstood or having something come back to me in a way that is…well, nightmarish.

Still, though. I have a reverence for words and a respect for their power. Language is such a beautiful thing. Words are archetypes all their own, and the way they are strung together provokes a magical sense of meaning that goes far beyond their concrete definitions. Being able to tap into that flow is one of my favorite experiences. I look forward to it returning.