April 11th, 2024
The Chariot VII
Week 8
Bonnie Tarantino
I’ve got nothing…. Sometimes I just don’t’ have it.. I am not inspired. I feel the writer’s block. You’ll see when you read on. This is a choppy one. I actually started three essays on the Chariot this week and all of them ran right off the road into a ditch.
And that is a big part of The Chariot energy. How is your timing? Can you wait for the right moment or are you too impatient? Can you feel when things are lining up? And can you do this in the middle of Mercury in retrograde after a full lunar eclipse?
I know mercury in retrograde is hard to accept as an excuse for my bad writing, for people not showing up and for your computer crashing right before a big presentation, but maybe this explanation will help. Mercury demands a better explanation, which is one of its superpowers. Mercury is the ruling planet of the mind and intellect and governs all forms of communication, the flow of intelligence and the quality of communication.
So although I feel my writing sucks this week, I am going to try and explain Mercury in retrograde and connect it to the Chariot in reverse. Our planet moves about 1,000 miles per hour around the sun. Mercury, on the other hand, moves 107,082 miles per hour around the sun. That is 107+ times faster. What this means is that Mercury laps us every four months or so. Now, no one likes to be lapped! Think about it…. You are running around a track and on pace with someone, and then they take off. 8 minutes later, you feel them whoosh by you. This often causes us to reevaluate our condition. Now, when Mercury laps us, it actually looks as if it is going backward, like it is doing a double take, because Mercury has a different elliptical orbit than us, meaning it is slanted differently than ours, so as it rises up and away or down and away it actually looks like it is going backward. One way to explain the feeling this disturbance creates is to recall a time you were sitting in your car, and the car next to you slowly pulled through an open parking space in front of it. Do you know that feeling of thinking you are the one moving? You know how you jolt? How, for a moment, you feel like you are the one rolling back. Then you slam on the brakes even though you are already in park. Once you realize the car next to you is the one moving, you calm down and give yourself a moment. A weird moment. This can happen as well if you are sitting on a train and the train next to you begins to pull out. That is basically what it feels like on our body when Mercury whips on by us. It has a way of causes us to slam on the breaks. It taunts us, it peeks its head out and says…. “Hey… Try again! You can do that better.”
This double take creates an energetic disturbance that causes all sorts of annoyances, especially electronic complications. It is that paper jam feeling. This dam program will not run feeling. Ultimately, you turn it off, try again, slam on the brakes, and unplug it. But no one likes to go back and repeat what they are doing or slow down and go about it a whole different way. We especially hate it when we are on a roll. The gift of this is that we often find a new way and often an even better way to do something we only thought we could do one way. The power of Mercury, as it books on by is that it forces us to refine the system we are in and reveal where it needs an upgrade. That is why everything takes two or three times when Mercury is in retrograde. Passwords get reset and thus protect you; you make another you-turn and realize the restaurant you really like just opened a new branch; you forget your phone and have to go back home even though you are already running late. You get to work only to realize a plane hit your building, and you were spared. Mercury in retrograde is Karma’s greatest tactical maneuver. It just loves to run the Chariot right off the road to protect you, refine you and get you where it wants you to be ultimately.
The truth is that even with going 1000 miles per hour around the sun and not even feeling it, we are going even faster than that every second of every day in our spectrum of thought and action. We get an incredible amount done in a day. Our domino effect line is so long that if we have to back up or redo something, we often have to send out 5 text messages to keep everyone and everything else lined up. The technological chariot we have climbed on in this century is changing, upgrading, and revolutionizing so fast that we now live the equivalent of 10 years in one.
And we all know that the faster you go, the harder it is to stop on a dime. But a well-oiled Chariot can. So how fast can you pull back, consider different options, listen to what people are telling you, see the detour signs along the way? In contrast, what does it feel like to have an open road? What does it feel like to move like a sleek sports car around a sharp curb and keep control and your eye on the destination? When the chariot arrives in your life, everything glides easily, fits perfectly, and feels good. You lose a sense of time and space as you manifest, manifest and manifest and you enjoy. In no time at all, the chariot can catapult you to your next level of experiencing life so you can experience life fully, learn, and grow.
The chariot is not just a sleek sports car; it can be a great big family car as it is governed by Cancer which is all about family, creativity, and emotional intelligence. The Chariot also falls under the moon, which has to do with respecting the ways of the sacred feminine and understanding cycles. For a moment, think about how emotional you get when you can’t figure something out or can’t get what you want done because of a stupid machine or voice activation system or how you feel in traffic. Interestingly enough, people are far less affected by traffic now because they are listening to books on tap, listening to podcasts, and talking on the phone with their best friends in California. All forms of communication that are open and clear are the gift of Mercury’s hard work to put the Chariot safely on route. (Till you drive into a dead zone.)
The Chariot is basically fueled by emotional mastery and always has plenty of room to take others along. If you think about a time in your life when you were really making things happen all around you, look at how many people you took with you for the ride. Also think for a moment who came into your life and swooped you up into their good fortune and hard work. The Chariot is like a big wave; it lifts up everything in its path and takes it straight to the shore.
But as for me today, my surfboard has bounced away from me a bit, my wheels feel a little stuck in the mud, and my navigation system keeps saying, “Go back to bed,” so I am going to stop spinning my wheels now, give my keyboard a rest and let this essay be what it is….for now.
