Mercury is never more than 30 degrees away from the Sun. That’s unique among the planets — all the others trek much further astray from the great ball of fire.

And if you know just a tad about Mercury and Sun’s roles in the birth chart, you can begin to appreciate the importance of our smallest, fastest planet.

In a nutshell, the Sun is the core of your identity, an expression of your essential energy. It is self-awareness and will, an urge toward Being Yourself, the drive to create a space for yourself, for your uniqueness, within the sphere of the world.

Mercury is the way you learn, know and communicate. Mercury trolls the environment for useful information that helps you know how to be, move, speak and act in the world. And then, in turn, he helps you communicate back out to the world. Mercury resides in the in-between spaces, the open space between you and me — and it’s what gets tossed back and forth in that space. It’s how I throw the ball to you and how you catch it. It’s how we know what we know, what we do with it, how we transmit it. Mercury helps us exchange and connect with the people around us — or not. But it’s not the relationship itself — that exists elsewhere.

The fact that Mercury is always close in to the Sun means that our ways of learning, knowing and communicating have a direct and real bearing on who we are and how we’re perceived in the world — whether that’s really who we are or not.

Consider a person you greatly admire, or someone who gets on your nerves. What it is that you love or loathe? Chances are, the way that person thinks and — especially — communicates is among the top attractors or detractors. People who speak haltingly, rudely or sloppily give the impression not just of speaking that way but of being that way. On the other hand, people who communicate with charisma, charm, kindness or other such qualities attract us because we believe that is who they are. And, in a way, it is.

In turn — in the true spirit of exchange that characterizes Mercury — the way someone speaks impacts the way we feel about ourselves in their presence. The charming person draws us into her orbit, makes us feel good being around her, makes us feel more important or loved or wanted. The rude person makes us feel unwanted or unloved — and, given enough time, power or both — diminishes our self-esteem.

Most importantly, whether you communicate quickly, lovingly, charmingly, rudely, whatever, that habit informs your own sense of self — your own Sun — whether you’re aware of it or not. (Much Mercury energy happens under the radar, so be careful what you say, and how you say it!). Learning, knowing and speaking are so ubiquitous that they can hardly help informing who we are.

An example: I was telling a friend a small story about my toddler the other day. Part of the story had my little boy banging on the door of our home office yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” trying to get my husband, Alan, to come out. The office is two doors down the hallway from the room I was in, but in the interest of brevity, I just said, “Alan was in the next room, and the baby kept banging on the door.”

Over the next day or two, I realized that the memory had shifted so that, even in my own mind, my son was banging not on the office door — as he actually had — but on the bedroom door, which in fact is “the next room” in real life. I had spoken a small and presumably harmless lie, and the lie became truth in my mind. Just like that, even though I consciously knew the truth.

What do we become when we speak? Do we speak from what we are? Or do we become who we are through what we speak?

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