Mercury turns retrograde on Saturday, and the week brings a second celestial shift: Scorpio season begins Friday, the same day Venus meets exactly with the sun. Mercury retrograde and Scorpio are both frequently maligned, according to Sheridan Semple, creator of the Astrology for Real Life Method, who argues in her latest column that each is widely misunderstood. Rather than treating the retrograde as a harbinger of doom, she suggests it can be read as a chance to loosen the grip people keep on their routines.
Semple writes that when Mercury retraces its path across the sky, it should not serve as the scapegoat for every mishap. Instead, she frames the period as an opening to give the brain's right hemisphere some airtime, noting that people spend so much time moving quickly and climbing the ladder that the creative side is left gasping. She argues creativity is a primal human need, evident in how often people rearrange furniture, deliberate over outfits, or turn a simple Halloween costume into a full theatrical production.
She recalls childhood art class as a favorite, describing free time spent with fingerpaints, crayons, glitter and clay, and the smell of Play-Doh. Growing up, she writes, people get serious and abandon such pursuits, often steered by well-meaning adults toward real jobs and activities. Semple says a small piece of her dies when she turns her back on what she calls her heart's joy.
For those unsure where to begin, she proposes starting small, with paper and a colored pencil, or a guitar and YouTube, during the three weeks of the retrograde. She notes her own office holds abandoned watercolors and photography projects, and that losing interest does not stop her from exploring new directions. She also plans a mini writing retreat, writing in the mornings and working in the afternoons, taking advantage of the slower off-season.
Semple writes that the start of Scorpio season can help anyone feeling intimidated, since the scorpion is unafraid to explore what lies beneath the surface, including creative parts people have stuffed away. Scorpio, she writes, thrives in the right brain and finds the left brain boring, craving intense feeling and the juice of life rather than emails, unless they are sexy poems from a lover, and having little use for a router beyond using ChatGPT to mine its emotional abyss. As Venus meets the new Scorpio sun, she describes a union between the light and the goddess, both creators themselves, with the sun generating life in its radiance and the goddess having created heaven and earth on her first day on the job. She intends to lean into that energetic boost, giving her deepest desires room to breathe and grow without agenda.
