It’s vague. It’s inconclusive. It’s Mercury retrograde. I’m definitely feeling it, as I sit in this hotel room in Washington DC, waiting for a client to get back to me and tell me what she wants. She doesn’t feel comfortable telling me on the phone, but she can’t bring herself to write it down, either. Meanwhile, I’m putzing.

Mercury will be retrograde all through the first half of June, so there may be a lot of people going around in circles (or in more loosely defined shapes). Loose ends will dangle everywhere. Focus will be evasive. Time will be slippery. Instead of getting to the things on our lists, we will find ourselves cleaning out drawers, sorting through miscellaneous objects, musing over photographs, resurrecting old to-do lists and wondering why we never got around to doing these things.

When Mercury is retrograde, stick to words that start with “re”. Now is the time to rethink and redo. You can replace lost items, reupholster the furniture, revamp your wardrobe, regift everything you got for your last birthday, renew your vows to your lover, and rekindle your romance. And while you’re at it, you can reschedule all the things that you originally planned to do during this time. This will probably keep you busy till June 19, when Mercury goes direct again.

I think I will take a break for lunch now that I’ve written three paragraphs. I plan to resurrect the remains of last night’s restaurant dinner, a perfect Mercury retrograde meal.

Whoops. What happened? A whole day has gone by. I’m just kidding, I know what happened. My client called, having found a safe place to talk. But this illustrates the braided quality of Mercury retrograde: start one thing, put it aside, start another thing, put it aside, go back to the first thing.

The news right now is full of Scott McClellan, former apologist for the Bush administration, saying that much of what he said back then was a pack of lies. Whoops, first he was a believer and now he’s not. Very Mercury retrograde.

McClellan was actually born with Mercury retrograde, and this can give a strong tendency to second-guess oneself. My sense is that he probably spent a lot of time feeling flustered about the information he was giving out, and asking people, “Are you sure about this?” In his birth chart, his Mercury in Aquarius opposes his moon in Virgo, so he would have been working against his own gut instincts. It’s probably a great relief to him to tell the truth, not to mention being quite lucrative at this point.

It’s not easy to listen to that still small voice of truth right from the beginning. Sometimes it’s just one thread among many, and not the strongest one. It’s more advantageous to go along with the party line until one can cut a book deal, refute it all, and make a fortune.

Mercury is retrograde in its own sign, Gemini, and at the new moon on June 3, it will be joined there by the sun, the moon and Venus. And so there will be a lot of chatter. Other people may decide to come clean about things that they did, or saw, or wondered about. The presidential candidates may all find themselves blurting out things they didn’t expect, and that could be fun for all of us, even if we don’t watch late night TV.

Barak Obama has a worrisome accident-prone aspect at the new moon: Uranus opposing his Mars. It makes me uneasy when people compare him to Robert or John Kennedy, but I do think he’s a survivor. The birthtime of 1:06 pm has been floating around, and if it’s true, Venus anchors a protective great trine in his 8th house (the house of death). And I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that any would-be assailants will be too disorganized to get it together, with Mercury retrograde.

I expect Hillary Clinton to start running out of steam, since the south node in Leo will be crossing her Saturn, close to this new moon. The new moon occurs in her 12th house, which is traditionally the house of secret enemies, and I think Hillary has had a lot of them, all through this campaign. This is a country in which everything is prettily packaged, glossy, digestible, and easy to forget, and Hillary is none of those things.

And if the country was charmed and seduced by Bill Clinton, it was shamed by Hillary. This doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the stuff of our dreams. On a deep archetypal level, I think people are afraid of the Vengeance of the Wronged Wife. The Furies are deeply embedded in our social psyche. And so even when her words are smart, sincere and compassionate – and they are – she’s still the subject of a certain amount of public aversion.

I’m in Washington DC, and so I’m in a city where truth always has a price tag. Sound-bites, opinions, concepts and beliefs are weighed and measured, bought and sold. Sometimes these have very little to do with what’s going on beneath the surface. But in June, these things won’t lie tranquilly until the pundits serve them up. They’ll jump around, stretch into odd shapes, turn inside out. We’ll recognize truths, lose sight of them, find them again wrapped in different forms.

What can we do? How can we anchor ourselves in all the verbal confetti of June?

This is a good time to retreat. It’s the time to get away from the rattle of endless campaigning, the mindless bonhomie of advertising, the social patterning that keeps us all in our places. Take a minute, take some space. With Mercury in Gemini retrograde at the new moon, your mind is ready to trace the line of truth to its source. Patiently, you can unknot the tangle of assumptions, stereotypes and lies.

So wander around a little. Go into the unused rooms of your mind, especially the ones you left behind long ago. Poke around a little. Take your time.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com