Mercury's Backstroke
Summer of Wands Day 11 of 93
Summer of Wands comes to you from solstice to equinox. Start here for more about the Summer of Wands.
We open each day by following the light of the Sun and/or Moon out there, and close it by noticing our own fire in here.
Follow the light ☀️🌙
The Sun is in Cancer and the Moon is in Capricorn. The Moon is waning, two days past her Full Moon in Capricorn, and Mercury has turned retrograde through Cancer's own waters until July 23.
Daily astrology
Two days past the Full Moon in Capricorn, we're still finding our footing after a culmination around structure, achievement, and where we hold ourselves accountable. Jupiter's new arrival in Leo widens the horizon just as Mercury turns to swim backward through Cancer, the sign it will retrace until July 23. This isn't a period for moving forward so much as circling back — toward questions of who feels appreciated, what care actually looks like given and received, and where the line sits between showing up for others and running yourself dry.
The last times Mercury Rx was in Cancer were June/July of 1993, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2019, 2020 (and now again in 2026).
Daily prompt
Where have you been giving more than you're receiving lately? What would it look like to name a boundary you've been avoiding?
Daily tarot
A weary stillness meets a will already in motion — the same static feeling that comes right before you realize you already have every tool you need to act. This Mercury retrograde period isn't asking you to sit in the apathy; it's asking you to notice what's been offered and overlooked, then reach for the resources already in your hands.
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✦ Who Am I?
your authentic author, writing by her own fire
This season Jupiter returns to Leo for the first time in twelve years, and it will meet my own lights. My lights, my Sun is in Leo, and so is my Moon, in her balsamic phase. That's the fire underneath these words. This is your authentic author, writing by the Leo hearth each and every morning.
Everything I create here comes out of the lens of my lived experience watching the sky, and living a human life underneath it. I’ve made one full trip around the Sun fifty-two times, and I’ve watched the Moon go dark and fill back in more than six hundred and fifty times.
I’ve shown up in this space every single day for over three years in real-time. I pick the day’s aspect the morning it goes out. By today, I mean this present moment of our one wild and precious life, and post it between 6 and 7 every morning, eastern time. I hand-pick the thumbnail every morning, or create one myself when nothing I find says what I see in my mind’s eye.
The words come through me and my clear channel.
Let me be real about the tools, because you deserve to know. The way an earlier generation reached for a dictionary or a thesaurus, or traded the stone and chisel for a pen, then pen for a typewriter then a word-processor, I’ll sometimes reach for a tool of the times to find a sharper word or a fresh way to say a thing the planets have had me say a hundred times before. The cosmos repeats its patterns. Now and then I get tired of repeating myself. But this is handmade. By me, the human. The thinking is mine. The heart in it, energy that fuels it, and the fingers typing are mine; any tool I may use just helps me find them sustainably to do this on the daily. If modern tools offend you, move along with no hard feelings. I’m not the author living in 2026 for you.
Here’s what’s actually there:
Astrology
My great-aunt read charts in the 1980s and gave me my first reading at seventeen. My astrology learnings have evolved to years of formal training, and far more years of watching the sky do what the books promised, and what they didn’t.
Tarot/Oracle
I read tarot and divinatory systems out in the wild: at private events, fairs, festivals, and local markets, in my own 10×10 booth, since 2022. Hundreds of readings, maybe thousands, on the spot, intuitive, no artificial intelligence. You earn that fluency sitting across from a stranger who seeks something in the now, and no book or bot can hand it to you in that moment of human presence. It is the truest energy exchange I know.
Yoga
I'm a registered yoga teacher, 200-hour certified, 500-hour complete. I rarely cite certifications, as I don't need an authority's stamp on what I know, and I would never claim something I haven't learned or lived through experience. I name this one because 500 hours is a long, embodied apprenticeship, and it's accountable. This is a real, named human who does her very best to walk that eight-limbed path carried by the ancients.
Reiki
I’m a Level III Reiki Master in the Usui tradition. I name it because there is more than the brain and the mind in everything I do. I also speak energy.
Psychic and Mediumship
I’ve trained in this work too, because much of what moves through these posts doesn’t come from logical analysis.
Why trust me?
But here’s the real reason to trust me, if you’re going to. The list above is true, and it’s the smaller part. What I’m actually offering is the living human heart behind it: the electrical charge when the heart is in coherence. But also the heartaches, the grief, the changes I’ve walked all the way through. A machine may pose as human emotion but has never cremated her mother, grandmothers and grandfathers, a 40 year old best friend; never sat with a loved one through the hospice kind of death; and never lived the other living deaths that come in the thing we call change, the ones that arrive as a marriage ending, friendships that fade, a home or a place you have to leave, a self you outgrow and bury while you’re still breathing. These are the deaths many humans attempt to control, grip or grab or graha. In yoga we aim for aparigraha, non-attachment. There are many other ways of saying this across millennia of belief systems but no one else has lived mine.
This started, and it remains, a daily devotion, first to myself and my own personal growth. I put it into this form here, if any of it ripples out to you and your benefit, what a gift that is to both of us!
More behind the scenes
What you see here in The Summer of Wands is the storefront. There is so much more whether you join my community called ChESOTERIC, originally titled “Chesapeake Bay Esoteric” (the watery area where I call home). It was born out of the handmade, real-person booths described above, out of wanting to keep talking with the people I met long after the festival packed up and the tent came down. It’s where the daily work opens up: a community of fellow seekers noticing the astrology and tarot in living symbols each day, along with a growing library on energy and healing offerings. It’s a place to meet with me and the other esotericists out on the road.
Or just the two of us
A community isn’t everyone’s way in, and that’s fine. I also work one to one, over Zoom. After a quieter spring I’m opening my calendar back up, so there’s room again. We don’t pick from a menu of offerings. You choose an hour, you bring what’s actually present, and we see what wants to come out of the chart, the cards, the moment. Sometimes it’s astrology. Sometimes it’s tarot. Sometimes it’s just two humans and the energy exchange of what meets us.
What’s next
So that’s some of who I am. One human, watching the same sky you’re watching, putting words to it every morning and trusting them to find whoever needs them. If that’s you, I’m glad you’re here!
We’ll meet again tomorrow, in the morning light.