After the full Strawberry Moon yesterday in Capricorn and because of Mercury moving retrograde in Cancer for the next 24 days, I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Though I’m a highly sensitive, emotion-prone, body-aware Pisces, I am not witch. I wish I was. I have my incense, a coconut-wood necklace from St. Croix that helps ground me, and a few crystals that do whatever crystals do. I have my belief in our connections with and throughout the Universe and my belief in a Cosmic Consciousness Soup. But, I’m not particularly good at follow-through.
I never finished reading any of the books I’ve ever purchased on birth charts. Then there was the $3000 course I started on herbal medicine that went unfinished after 4 weeks. My interest in space and constellations only goes as far as my subscription to Astronomy Magazine and downloading a star gazer app every now and then.
Otherwise, I rely on other witches.
My mother wasn’t a witch, but when I was growing up, “Mercury is in retrograde” was stated frequently in our house. That was her explanation for any kind of inexplicable thing. She blamed Mercury’s backward (seeming) transit like others blame solar flares, El Nino, and our global collective consciousness.
Since we are not witches, I follow That Glasgow Witch on Instagram. Her calm Scottish accent caught me a while back and I’ve followed her ever since.
Yesterday, June 29th, she lit her incense and a candle. In her gentle Scottish accent, she shared bits of her life. Then she said:
The full moon illuminates what we’ve built, what we’re carrying.
We ask: Do the structures that I’m holding still fit inside the life that I’m building?
Mercury asks us to reflect upon our foundations in our lives. Our work. Our home. Our responsibilities. The roles we’ve carried. So we ask oursevles, is my heart still in this? Is the path I still want to follow?
There’s much more to what she said, and I do recommend checking her out of you’re into that kind of thing.
I felt compelled to post the comment: I needed this right now.
You see, over the weekend, I made the decision to ask my landlord to free me from my studio’s lease. Monday, he agreed. Clint’s response to my text letting him know was, “I feel lighter.” That goes for both of us.
The closing of my space was set in motion months ago. Probably longer ago if I’m honest. I knew last year that I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up emotionally. But I hung on. I didn’t want to look like a quitter. I didn’t want it to be a failure. I wanted to make people happy. I wanted the place to be what people wanted it to be.
There came a point, too early on, when what I was doing at the wine shop was for everyone else.
I lost my reason. I lost my why. I lost any ability to feel fulfillment.
I lost my ikigai.
The transition from wine shop to creative studio was my last valiant effort. But too many factors pushed against me. I felt like a salmon spawning upstream. The signs from the Universe that I usually listen to were beyond annoyed with me. It took water damage from the recent rain storms for me to finally make the decision.
I wrote the email, let Clint see it, tweaked it one more time, and then pushed send. It felt good to do. There was never a point where I wished I could take it back. That is another sign.
Last night, June 29th, the night of the Strawberry Moon in Capricorn, I slept hard and had many dreams. At 6 AM I woke up later than usual. Even Clint slept straight through the night and woke up at 5 AM. We slept in like it was a Saturday.
Do the structures I’m holding still fit inside the life that I’m building?
When I signed my lease back in 2023, I knew I wasn’t going to renew it. This space was always temporary to me. At the time I was going hard on French lessons with the honest-to-god belief that we could maybe move to France. I wanted to build a little part of Paris for myself right here in Petersburg.
But, soon after it opened, I was hit with the harsh reality that Petersburg wasn’t the place for that. To salvage it, I changed it. In one of my notebooks, I have the pages where I wrote the timeline for my Grand Pivot.
By March of this year, though, I knew it was over. What am I building now? Who am I building it for? And for how long? The answers: I don’t really know - it’s muddled and convoluted. It’s confusing and not really what I want. I can’t keep this up much longer.
Yesterday, Monday, I taught an AM Yoga class and then an evening meditation class. Afterward, I sat quietly and looked around the space. I get so much comfort from the blue on the walls, the soft orange glow of the chandeliers, the warmth of the browns in the wood of the bar, the red of the velvet couch.
I realized that I had been trying to keep it going simply because I liked the feel of it and the look of it.
But if creating spaces is my magic, then I can recreate this, or something like it, somewhere and somewhen else. These colors. This warmth. This energy. These colors are who I am. The element that will change is the where. The container of the container.
Is my heart still in this? Is this still the path I want to follow?
As Mercury transits in retrograde, moving through Cancer, I’ll use that time to contemplate what Cancer represents: home, belonging, emotional roots. I’ll take the next month to think about why I built the shop/studio in the first place and then into how I can apply that in a way that better suits me and my life trajectory.
Throughout July, I will dive deeper into how the space I created made me feel, why I created it, and what I was seeking. I’ll inspect the emotional truth underneath it all.
Yesterday, I asked Claude to create “a progression of daily prompts” for the next month that help me ponder questions related to the Full Moon in Capricorn and Mercury in retrograde.
June 29: What am I grieving about the structure I just released? (Not the decision itself. What did it mean to me?)
It was this question that helped me realize that the colors, the textures, and the energy of the space are a comfort to me. This space is who I am on the inside. It’s a visual representation of those things that make me who I am. I hurts me to close it, to release it.
But I know I can recreate it because it is me.
June 30: Where do I need to be more honest about what I actually built vs. what I told myself I was building?
What I built was too big for one person to manage. What I told myself I was building was something I thought I could do on my own.
I haven’t read through all of the questions for the next month, but I’m interested in where they go. Claude broke up the sections into:
June 29-July 5: Initiation & Release - Full Moon in Capricorn + Mercury stations retrograde
July 6 - July 11: Excavation & Memory - Mercury retrograde deepens - moving backward through Cancer
July 12: The Cazimi-Turning Point - Mercury is at exact conjunction with the sun - the heart of the retrograde
July 13- July 22: Integration & Understanding - Mercury retrograde continues, but the direction is shifting toward wisdom
July 23 -Mercury Stations Direct - The retrograde ends, Mercury begins moving forward again
July 24 - July 29: Emergence & Momentum - Post-retrograde shadow - integration phase
and finally July 30 - July 31: Anchoring - Moving out of the shadow, moving forward into August
I’ll share this process with you. We’ll see what arises.
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