on the upcoming mercury retrograde
Hi everyone,
It’s been a minute, so a quick recap: I put the newsletter on hiatus when COVID started. Back in late March and early April, when no one was sure how long this was going to last and we were absorbing new information every hour, pausing all paid subscriptions and taking a beat seemed like the most humane option.
But now, as of mid-June, it’s clear that the pandemic isn’t going anywhere. In the meantime, a revolution has begun - quite literally in the middle of eclipse season. The universe waits for no one.
Every writer I know has been struggling to find the balance on the scale. From the folks in my writing group to conversations on Twitter, all of us are asking: how do we work right now? Alternating between the fallow fields of quarantine and the electric, pulsing streets of protest can leave our creative flows in a funk: where to direct or channel the energy? What energy is even worth channeling right now? What voices are needed, and why - and why didn’t the Black voices that media and publishing are so interested in now mean anything to them before? Does my book release even matter? How do I manage expectations of my productivity now, versus what those expectations were even six months ago?
I don’t have the answers. Just a white lesbian here, trying to write but mostly trying not to “doomscroll,” as Karen K. Ho helpfully put it. But what I can offer, in part, is a bit of insight into the coming astrology, in the hopes that it helps you, wherever you are in your corner of the world.
Today’s letter focuses on the upcoming Mercury Retrograde. Whether you need to rest or move, to get loud or listen, to lean into the fallow time or put down your fear and pick up a pen: please accept this bit of medicine for your creative spirit.
With love,
Jeanna
A Letter on the Upcoming Mercury Retrograde in Cancer
June 18-July 12
Normally, I would try to assuage your concerns about Mercury Retrograde. We have three every year! They only last for a few weeks! It’s a normal, regular, predictable part of the universe’s cycle. Hell, this year? The upcoming Mars Retrograde is what we REALLY need to be concerned about. (More on that in a future letter.)
But this feels different. This isn’t just about your phone accidentally dropping in the toilet or waiting at the airport as your flight gets delayed for the third time (can you even remember what that was like?). This isn’t even just that it’s a Mercury Rx in the middle of eclipse season, which would be noteworthy on its own. It’s a Mercury Rx in the middle of eclipse season and a plague and a revolution and murder hornets and and and. The invitation to review our ideas, our writing, and our intellectual lives comes as #PublishingPaidMe trends, spreadsheets of Condé Nast salaries circulate, numerous media heads step down, and somehow, we are still in the same year as American Dirt. More books about anti-racism and the legacy of slavery and bigotry are on the New York Times Bestseller list than ever before, which is both encouraging and also deeply sad. Everywhere, there is the conversation about hiring more Black writers, about giving folks more money. Meanwhile, the question remains: where is the structural change? How fast can it happen - and will it happen and really take root?
With Mercury Rx, we enter a period of intellectual slowdown, where we are all collectively being called to revise our relationship to our communication, ideas, and words. For some (white) folks, these weeks will bring a much needed, and probably public, check and balance, as the retrograde delivers the accountability and consequences to folks who speak into conversations that are not for them.
These weeks are about reflecting and reviewing how we learn, how we think, how we process. In Cancer, this energy is about considering the emotional impact of our intellectual inputs and outputs. What are the best ways to deliver information, on individual and collective levels? What is the felt effect of our communication?
Mercury Rx supports unlearning and unpacking harmful and oppressive ideas and ideologies around police brutality, systemic racism, and white supremacy. In Cancer, it absolutely demands that we dismantle the white supremacist Enlightenment commitment to a certain kind of masculinized reason as superior to feminine feeling: the assumptiveness that pits logic against emotion, that we must somehow do the intellectual work without understanding the emotional, generational harm and trauma. Both. This retrograde demands that we do both.
For writers and those of us who were trained in literature, who have degrees in English Literature, this is also about considering what we were taught was capital-L literature. This is about looking at the history of English Literature itself as a program with an explicitly colonialist commitment and legacy. This isn’t just about introducing women and queers and Black and Indigenous and diasporic writers into the “canon”; this is about looking at the canon itself as a concept designed as an oppressor, that the project of making an ultimate list in and of itself is an impossible project that itself can never be queer or inclusive in principle.
Whether your work in the coming weeks is pulling you toward the individual or the family or the collective, whether you are resting or writing or caretaking or sign-making: take care of your heart and your mind. Rebuke the binary ways of thinking that would contain the creativity and imagination you are capable of.
Writing Prompt Horoscopes for Mercury Retrograde in Cancer
If you’re an Aries Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your fourth house of home, roots, and natal and chosen family.
What worldview did you unconsciously inherit from your parents and caregivers? What did they teach you to value? What are you unpacking and working to change about the home you want to create for yourself and your loved ones, moving forward? What conversations are you having with family right now that feel nourishing or challenging? What boundaries do you perhaps have to draw to honor your own self and space?
How do you write about family? How do you write about lineage? Which parts of your tradition and legacy feel important to keep, and which are you recreating for yourself?
If you’re a Taurus Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your third house of writing & daily ritual, local neighborhoods, and siblings & friends who feel like family.
Has your writing traditionally integrated or focused on your local neighborhood? If not, are you feeling pulled to write more locally, about what’s going on in the world?
Review your writing rituals. Whether or not they’re daily, review your schedule and if it’s working for you. Be gracious with yourself: the plague revolution timeline has been rough for sustaining any kind of creative energy. But check in and see how you can realign your work with your present environment and your needs. Also: maybe even redecorate your writing desk!
If you’re a Gemini Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your second house of money and material resources.
Are you making money in a way that feels aligned with your values?
Your primary retrograde task: review your budget, your bank account, and your credit card bills.
If you’re a white person, how are you being invited to embrace wealth redistribution, and how can you use your resources to help others do the same?
If you’re a Cancer Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your first house of self and identity.
How have your ideas about yourself and how you move in the world been changing?
Review your social media platforms. Are you expressing yourself in a way that feels authentic? And by authentic, we are not talking about the way “authenticity” gets sold - the oversharing, the constant updating, the opening up parts of your life that are perhaps best kept private. Authentic as in, a way that is aligned with who you are in this moment, who you want to be in this moment, in a way that sets you up for future growth and success.
If you’re a Leo Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your twelfth house of the subconscious and hidden life.
How are your dreams lately? It may be time to start a dream journal, or at least to start journaling more than you have been. How can freewriting help loosen and unclog some of those sticky subconscious thoughts around self-sabotage and self-undoing?
This Mercury Rx is reviewing the part of your chart that has to do with institutions, and can relate to people who have been incarcerated as well as injustice in social systems. Does this relate to any intellectual work you’ve been doing - reading, speaking, writing?
If you’re a Virgo Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your eleventh house of community, friendships, hopes, and dreams.
How are your relationships getting sifted at this time? What friendships are you currently reviewing and perhaps taking out with the trash? Are you reinvesting in your communities? Are you helping educate those around you?
Are you allowing friends, community, and/or chosen family to show up for you - to nourish you and show you grace and love? Where do you have difficulty accepting gifts of time and care?
And your hopes and dreams: what of those? Are you blocking off the time for yourself to review what you still care about, and also what hopes are emerging for yourself? Are you allowing yourself to hope?
If you’re a Libra Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your tenth house of career and public image.
What realizations have you had about your own career trajectory over the last few weeks, and what emotions has that brought up for you? Sit with those. Honor the space and time you need.
Have any of your career goals shifted this last year, or even over the last few weeks? How so, and why?
If you’re a white person, how are you being invited to reconsider your public roles and truly take a backseat? To de-platform? To use and redirect your professional connections and network lift up others?
If you’re a Scorpio Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your ninth house of religion and spirituality, travel, publishing, and education.
Very fundamentally: what do you believe? What is your relationship to religion, to magic and spirit? Did you grow up faithful or atheist or something syncretic, knit together over time? What beliefs have you formed for yourself in adulthood, and are they still serving you? What do you believe is possible, when it comes to a spiritual realm? How do you engage with it, when it comes to your writing, journaling, teaching, and communication?
What are your publishing goals for the summer? Have you revised them in the wake of the pandemic, the protests, or your personal life? What feels valuable for you to pursue, and what could use some tinkering?
If you’re a Sagittarius Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your eighth house of mental health and anguish, grief and loss, and shared resources.
What grief are you processing, have you been processing, and how is your writing - whether public or private - helping you?
What resources are you being called to share with others? What resources - material, financial, and emotional - do you need in order to thrive, that others might share with you? How are you reviewing your relationship to those needs, to your comfort or discomfort with relying on or collaborating other people?
If you’re a Capricorn Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your seventh house of committed partnerships, romantic and business alike.
What partnerships - romantic or business - are you being invited to review? These could be spouses, partners, literary agents, and long-time editors alike - folks you have legal contracts with. What hard conversations might be needed?
Alternately, what appreciation and emotional care might you be able to show or even ask for?
If you’re an Aquarius Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your sixth house of daily work and health routines.
What writing projects are you revising right now? (Retrogrades are great times to revise existing work.) What stories are you picking back up after time away? What feels energizing? What feels like an obligation that you can perhaps let go of?
How have your work rhythms changed over the last few months, perhaps impacted by your physical health or simply the shifts in your environment? How are you practicing self-care? Reconsider, review, and revise your daily routines. Over these next few ways, find new ways to prioritize your body and mind’s needs.
If you’re a Pisces Rising, then this Mercury Rx in Cancer invites you to review your fifth house of creativity, pleasure, sex, and children.
After months in quarantine, how are you learning to creatively pace yourself? How have your creative rhythms shifted? Journal your thoughts and feelings about the shifts, or lack of; about the synchronicities between your life and world events, or about the seeming dissonance between the two.
Review what you need to feel creatively satisfied - which might mean productive, and might not. What worked for you in January probably isn’t working for you now. This is a moment to check in with yourself in a spiritual, holistic, deeply emotional way.
If you have children, or are involved with children in a regular way, this is a good time to review your commitments to them and your feelings about how they intersect with your creativity and feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.
Lastly, a few announcements!
First, the next newsletter - on the next two eclipses, coming June 21st and July 5th - will be for subscribers only. You can subscribe below. If you’re a Black writer, please reach out to me directly (jeannakadlec@gmail.com) for a complimentary subscription.
Second! There are so many Black astrologers in the industry, but now, as ever, I cannot recommend the work of Mecca Woods, Janelle Belgrave, and Diana Rose strongly enough. Get readings with them; you will LEARN about yourself. Buy Mecca’s book. Listen to Mecca and Janelle’s podcast. Get on Janelle’s newsletter! Diana is currently taking a social media break, but be sure to sign up for her Patreon. And if you’re looking for a practitioner who is more ingrained in tarot, akashic records, and energy work modalities, Tatianna Tarot is the gold standard (Instagram here).