On Being No One
By
Sarah Varcas
After three weeks retrograde Mercury stations direct at 2:52 pm GMT on 11th February, in the second degree of Aquarius, remaining there until 15th. This is a degree of unexpected surprises which throw us off course. We thought we knew what was going on then discover a whole other angle we’d not taken into account. We were certain we had everything in hand then find out we need more hands than are available to keep all the balls in the air! This degree keeps us on our toes, reminding us we are not the final arbiter of what happens, even in our own life. More powerful forces are at play which can disrupt our neatly made plans and one of the most liberating qualities we can develop is the ability to accept this fact and receive the unexpected like an old friend, long gone and deeply changed since we last met, but nonetheless familiar at its core.
Mercury in this degree may bring unexpected news or unanticipated events. But it may equally signal reawakened memories and unforeseen shifts of attitude which seem to change the landscape of our lives overnight. Mercury in Aquarius cannot think inside the box no matter how huge the box may be. All containment feels like deathly restriction. In this sign Mercury demands the freedom to indulge the impossible and imagine the unimaginable, for only in doing so can it discern the path ahead.
Mercury’s retrograde passage, through Aquarius has encouraged us to loosen our identity and allow something more formless to arise. It has invited us to release labels, to be something apart from what we believed into being, something far more boundless and real. All labels limit to some degree. All identity imprisons in the end. Mercury has exhorted us to step aside from ourselves in recent weeks to discover what lives beneath the conditioned and created self. We have had a rare and valuable opportunity to discover how we create identity and to allow ourselves, even just for a moment, to be something other than who we thought we were. Now, at this point in Mercury’s cycle as it prepares to move forward once again, we must pick up our identity, zip it back up and experience it more consciously from the inside as we go about our everyday lives, increasingly aware of those qualities and experiences with which we choose to identify and those we choose to set aside.
Between now and 15th February we are well placed to review those identifications and decide if we’d rather drop any in favour of something more supportive and useful. Mercury helps out by highlighting where we are limiting ourselves unnecessarily, which is where the surprises come in! For we may well discover that the very person we thought we were is the very thing preventing us from discovering who we are in actuality! When it comes to the most deeply rooted beliefs about ourselves it often takes a wrench to free us up enough to objectively rethink them. The wrench itself may feel deeply uncomfortable, but if we can accept it as a nudge to loosen up and consider whether we may in fact not be who we thought all along, the outcome can be pleasantly surprising!!
Between now and the beginning of March Mercury retraces its steps back to its original retrograde degree, giving us more time to digest its teachings from this cycle before it begins a new one. Its primary message, if we remember nothing else, is that we are not who we think we are, whoever and whatever that is! Beyond the trappings of identity and the limitation of labels lies something always present and forever unchanging: our very essence, the life force in all its glory, flowing ever onward and outward, sustaining and connecting all things. When we can move beyond identity and rest in this space of pure potential and unbounded completion we are no longer something but everything, no longer separate but part of and containing the whole. From this space we can pick up and put down identity as necessary, not be driven to become simply because we cannot tolerate the void of not doing so.
Mercury in Aquarius will always have some surprises up its sleeve. Stationing direct in the 2nd degree, these surprises may be bigger than most and a lot more enlightening! The more open we can be to the wisdom of the unexpected the more deeply we can drink from the well of divine knowledge which knows us each as perfectly whole and in need of nothing more. Embracing this knowledge as our own we can pick up identity and put it on, fulfilling it as the moment requires, before putting it back down to return to Source where we need be nothing and no one. This is where Mercury in Aquarius is happiest, for in being no one it can be anyone, and so can we.
Sarah Varcas
