2025 Mercury retrograde in Aries and Pisces: How to survive and thrive

Ahoy, star seeds! The first Mercury retrograde of the year is upon us, and this one is going down — or slowing down, in the insolent, fire-breathing sign of Aries and the idealistic, hallucinogenic tidal pools of Pisces.Our planet of the mind and the mouth, information and slander, connection and communion, stations retrograde on Saturday, March 15, 2025, at 2:46 a.m.EDT at 9°35 Aries.On March 29, Mercury slides into the pools of Pisces.Mercury will remain retrograde until April 7, at 7:07 a.m.

EDT, when it will station direct at 26°49 Pisces.The planet will clear its post-retrograde shadow, or retroshade, on April 26.Mercury is named for the trickster Roman god of thieves, messages and merchants, a wing-footed, loose-tongued psychopomp who escorted the dead to the underworld and carried messages near and far, high and low.In astrology, Mercury governs cognition and communication, how we gather, process and disperse knowledge, and exchange ideas with others.When a planet is retrograde, its energy works in the opposite direction, not necessarily against us but certainly not as a trusted sidekick.Because Mercury governs the mind, its retrograde triggers challenges in organizing, expressing and creating order.An astrological PSA: Planets do not ever move backward in space; they merely slow their proverbial rolls, a deceleration that looks like a reversal from our vantage here on beautiful, broken planet Earth.Retrogrades invite us to lean hard and clean into the prefix “re”: reimagine, revise, repent, reflect, review, renew, reconcile, resolve and reorganize so that when the planet moves forward so, too, can we.This summons to reflect and restrain is especially arduous when Aries is at the helm or manning the engines.

This sign only knows one speed (faster) and one direction (forward).Mercury in Aries is the mind on fire, an energy that makes this retrograde unhinged and impulsive, and we earthlings vulnerable to flying off the handle or shooting off a...