Mercury Retrograde in Aquarius: You can trust the lightning

from left to right, these are the Tower cards from tarot decks: The Fountain, The Collective Tarot, & The Wild Unknown. underneath sits my self healed smoky quartz.

​at the beginning of this week i knew i had to write about the Tower card in relation to the current Mercury Retrograde, but i didn’t have it in me just yet.  this morning i woke up from a night full of dreams about my Ancestors & my Mother & Myself, & i knew it was time.
 
i don’t know about you, but this Mercury Retrograde is making sure i take care of certain threads of unfinished business.  & more than anything else, i am being asked to practice what i preach about being gentle with myself, meeting myself where i’m at, curling up with my own empathy & compassion when all i wanna do is berate myself in submission to keep trudging along.  but i know better.  trudging along is not the same as moving forward.
 
as i set up my first proper altar over the weekend, i was awash in thoughts of my own healing, feeling grateful that i am still here, that i am in a new city making some kind of life, & trusting that the life that loves me back is steady femmeifesting.  & then the image of the Tower card flashed through my mind, “trust the lightning.”  interesting.  i thought about writing it then, but had to make sense of all clothes & papers & makeup on my bedroom floor before dinner, so i decided it could wait.  & then all the things happened. 
 
monday morning started with a fight with Panda that escalated to “i want to live with my dad!” & “leave the room before i start yelling!” & i felt like shit all day.  i wanted to reach out to friends, but my phone is out of business.  so i sat in my insecure feels all day, wondering if my decision to move us thousands of miles from Panda’s only reference of Home was selfish, & completely wrong.  i revisited the events leading up to our departure, the betrayals, the trauma, & how my trajectory was only set to repeat more of the same if i stayed there.  & the rest of my week has been consumed by setting up reliable transportation for Panda to & from school, navigating this new city in new ways, dreaming about my Mother & trying not to cry, preparing & eating food, going to work & caring for babies, all the while not being able to check in with friends & loved ones through text because my phone is out.  it feels like all my energy was spent before the day even had a chance to begin. 
 
& yesterday, i felt it so strong while trying to dip a tentative toe into the ocean of grief that’s always in spitting distance, right before i fell in & spent the rest of my day wresting & surrendering to the waves.  i gave up & told my sister, asked her to buy us a pizza because i knew we had to eat & i would not be able to cook or anything.  thankfully, she did.  i did all the things i know to ground & anchor myself here.  i cried & prayed & smudged & burned candles & watched shows & drank tea & took medicine for my headache & made sure Panda knew i was safe & that we ate & named my feelings as best as i could.  i opened my bedroom window because i wanted to crawl out of my skin so i could breathe.  i kept reminding myself, even this.  we live through anything, even this.  even when we want out.  & then i slept.

my writing altar for today.

i dreamt of my Mother & Grandmother, & someone so old that all the family trees connected to her.  this Ancestor was something like the land, but they had hair like my grandma Lucy, fluffy & dark.  i remember laughing & holding onto my Mother’s arm, telling her, “i never thought you’d change!  but i’m so glad that you did!”  & then i woke up to a dimly lit sky & searched for that star, breathing calmly & deeply, tongue against the roof of my mouth.  i stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, face fresh from crying all day yesterday.  i’m here.  you’re here, i told us.  & then i collected my writing altar materials: Collective Tarot deck with the Disaster on top, my amazonite, moisturizer, lip gloss, sage & glittery lighter, tinctures oils, & tea lights.  i set everything up & boiled water for tea.  Panda woke shortly after i did & slowly descended the stairs.  i know it was because they are still worried about me, so i gave them a big hug & said, good morning, baby,  i love you.  i’m ok.  i’m staying here.  & they told me they loved me & hoped i was ok.  i poured my water for tea & prepared a bowl of salt water to help me journey & write.  & here i am, five hours later, smoothing the edges of my rough draft, reminding myself that finished is better than perfect.  just get it out, Lettie.

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the Disaster card with my self healed smoky quarts beneath.

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​the Tower is something you built yourself, however long ago, & you did so with a purpose.  it’s creation required your blood, sweat, & tears, & each brick is made up of you, your dreams, your hopes, your life blood--the Tower is made up of you.  for a time the Tower served their purpose, whether it was for shelter or esteem or proof that you could rebuild & make it on your own.  it gave you a place in the world to claim as your own, big enough to house the hopes & dreams & life that pulsed within it’s very walls.  & then, for whatever reason, you began to outgrow it.  you began to explore beyond the walls of the Tower, outside in the sun in every direction.  soon, you found that you were only able to travel so far from the Tower before you hit some kind of invisible barrier that extended into an invisible circumference around the Tower itself.  the tower is your everything, & you are only allowed to stray so far from your everything before you hit a wall.
 
you began to spend more time at this Invisible Wall, longingly looking off into the unknown, imagining what it would be like to go there.  you began to spend more time there than you did within the walls of the Tower, & the Tower noticed.  at night when you would come back to the walls made up of your life blood, the Tower would come to you in your dreams & tell you it was time for it to come down, but no matter how logical or passionate their arguments, when you awoke, you refused.  you tried to come up with a plan of dismantling the Tower, but it was always so overwhelming that you pushed it further into the back of your mind.  instead, you hoped that your time at the Invisible Wall could adequately comfort you.
 
over time, you began to resent the Tower & all that it represented, but this was only to project the resentment you felt for yourself.  you found yourself frustrated that you could not have both the comfort of the Tower & the freedom to go beyond the Invisible Wall.  when the Tower wanted to check in about the possibility of coming down, you rushed off to busy yourself with that & that & said you would talk about it later.  when sleep was no longer a place to find peace because of the frequent visits from the Tower, you began to work yourself into exhaustion to avoid dreaming.  meanwhile, the Tower knew what all was going on.  while you were concerning yourself with the Invisible Wall & wondering what else was out there & avoiding the Tower, the Tower began to formulate a plan to heal itself through it’s own destruction.
 
wounds know how to heal.  wounds mean no harm, though they can be painful.  your wounds have been wanting to heal since their creation.  wounds are openings that allow energy to move through you.  wounds can orchestrate their own healing, & sometimes your only role is to get out of the way.  through this process of denial & resentment the Tower became a wound, & just like all your other wounds, it knew what it needed to heal, & it began to call into being exactly what it needed to. 
 
enter lightning.
 
lightning occurs when a cloud collects more than enough negative charge & needs to find the quickest path to the ground, which is positively charged.  any tall structure that is grounded can act as a conductor for such a current.  trees or buildings, & in the case, a Tower, will be more than adequate to conduit the negative & postive charges.  to prepare to ground, the negative charge sends out feelers while the positive charge also reaches out, & once the two charges meet a channel opens up.  this is when the lightning becomes visible. 
 
what i want you to hold is that lightning is not random, & that it is an agreement between opposite charges.  lightning, my love, is a femme science, a science of healing. 
 
when your Tower understood that you were not able or willing to dismantle it yourself, it did what every wound does, it femmeifested it’s own healing.  the Tower began to call out to a nearby cloud, orchestrating conditions that caused friction & negative charge to collect in said cloud, & beckoned it to come to it’s aid.  maybe you did & maybe you didn’t notice that thick cloud on your horizon getting closer every day.  maybe you did & maybe you didn’t notice how it danced with lightning in your dreams when the Tower came & wanted your input on The Plan.  maybe you did & maybe you didn’t feel some kind of relief as the rain came & washed over you while you sat vigil at the Invisible Wall.  but i’m willing to bet you did notice once the Tower cried out as the cloud holding the negative charge exhaled through to the positive charge, & lightning lit up your whole life.  i’m willing to bet you felt the snap of thunder as the Inviisble Wall crumbled along with the Tower, & that your tears drowned out the rain.
 
the Tower loved you.  how could it not?  it was assembled with determination & dream, constituted of your life blood, your hopes & dreams, your everything.  & in an instant it was gone.  now, love, is your time to sift through the rubble & ashes.  take time to bury what needs to be buried, & then take all the time you need when choosing what hopes & dreams & life blood you want to take on your next great journey.  & then leave the rest.  you do not need to take the whole Tower with you.  take only what remains glowing & warm, take them as testaments of the love the Tower has for you, as proof of your love for you.  this is all you, Sweet One.  all your magic, your fury, your healing, your devastation, your stories, your survival, your truth, your cleansing.   
 
trust your yearning when you find yourself spending more time at the Invisible Wall.  trust your dreams when the Tower visits to foretell the dismantle.  trust the lightning when it comes.  trust that you will take with you exactly what you need to, & then leave.
 
all my love,
lettie

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​If you're needing guidance or connecting with your Ancestors & Spirit Guides in your life, Lettie Laughter has over 10 years experience reading tarot & can totally help you out!  For your own magical 60 or 90 minute tarot reading  & connect with your Ancestors, book here.  There are discounts for first time clients to make showing up for yourself more feasible.