Everything’s coming through water now
Mercury retrograde in Cancer, and the writing that lives below language.
You notice it before you have words for it. The sentences you were writing a few days ago, the ones that were moving, start arriving in pieces. They aren’t gone. Just scrambled. The word you meant shows up three words late. The paragraph you drafted clean last week reads back to you like someone rearranged it while you slept. You know what you meant. The page doesn’t.
Mercury stationed retrograde yesterday, and if you’ve been paying attention to your writing practice over the last couple of weeks, you already felt it before you could name what was happening. The pull backward. The half-finished draft from March surfacing in your mind at 2am. The conversation you thought you were done with showing up in your morning journaling like it never left. The signal is still there. But the frequency has shifted. Everything’s coming through water now.
This is what Mercury retrograde can feel like for writers. The mind stops reaching forward and starts circling back. The things you thought you understood about your work get fuzzy at the edges. You reread a draft and can’t tell if it’s good or if you’ve just been too close to it. Miscommunication is everywhere because the signal has changed.
Yesterday, Mercury began its second retrograde of the year in Cancer. It will move backward through the sign of home, family, and emotional memory until July 23. Most of what you’ll read about this transit tells you what to avoid. Back up your files. Don’t sign contracts. Wait to send the pitch. These are practical things to be mindful of. But pop astrology has a way of flattening a transit into a warning label.
I’m an evolutionary astrologer. I go deeper than that. I’m not interested in what Mercury retrograde tells you to avoid. I’m interested in what it makes accessible that wasn’t accessible before.
And I’ll be honest with you. This essay fought me. I sat down to write it three times, and each time I knew what I wanted to say and each time it came out sideways. Which is exactly on par with the energy. Knowing what a transit is doing doesn’t make you exempt from it. I’m part of the same collective sky you’re sitting under right now. It’s affecting me too. So don’t take what I’m offering here as someone writing from above the cosmic weather, but as someone who’s in it with you, trying to find the words the same way you are.
The retrograde didn’t arrive alone. It came in under a full moon in Capricorn, and I found the timing pointed in the way the sky sometimes is when it decides not to be subtle. Capricorn is the sign of what really exists, not what you planned to build. A Capricorn full moon puts the receipts on the table for you and everybody else to see. On January 18, we had the new moon in Capricorn, which was a planting point. Some of you set intentions then, consciously or not. You said you’d finish the draft. That you’d submit or pitch an agent. That this would be the year the manuscript stopped living in your head and started living on paper. Six months later, the accounting is now here: what grew? What didn’t move? What moved in a direction you didn’t expect?
Then there’s Jupiter, who just entered Leo, the sign of creative identity and self-expression, which means your sense of who you are on the page is expanding right now. Your ambition is louder than it’s been in months. And pressing against the full moon are Saturn and Neptune, both sitting in Aries. Saturn says slow down, be realistic, do the work before you celebrate. Neptune blurs the edge between what’s real and what you wish were real.
Both active at the same time means the thing you see clearly might also feel confusing. You might look at your writing goals and not be able to tell whether you’re behind because you weren’t disciplined enough or because the goals were never quite honest in the first place. The clarity and the blur are both information. And since Mercury turned inward the same night the moon was full, whatever the full moon showed you, you’re going to sit with it for three weeks. Don’t try to fix anything yet. Let the retrograde do its slower work underneath.
Cancer is the sign of home. The feeling, not the physical structure. The place in your chest where you keep the things that matter too much to say out loud. The memory that lives in your hands, your jaw, the base of your throat. Cancer is where the body stores what the mind wasn’t ready to process when it happened.
When Mercury moves through Cancer in direct motion, you can write about these things from a comfortable distance. You can craft an essay about your mother or your childhood kitchen or the silence at the dinner table, and keep your hands steady while you do it. The analytical mind stays in charge. You choose what to reveal. You edit from a position of control.
When Mercury retrogrades through Cancer, that distance collapses.
The story you’ve been circling for months without finding a way in might not need a better angle. It might need you to stop thinking about it and start feeling where it lives in your body. Mercury retrograde in Cancer doesn’t take your words away. It reroutes them. The signal that was running through your head drops into your chest, your belly, and your breath. The draft that wouldn’t come when you sat down with an outline might come when you sit down with nothing and let your hands write what your body already knows.
Some things are stored below language. The only way to write them is to go below language to find them. Mercury retrograde in Cancer opens that door. The question is whether you’re willing to walk through it without knowing what you’ll find on the other side.
For the next three weeks, your mind is being pointed somewhere your craft hasn’t gone yet. This might feel like regression. It isn’t.
Return to the drafts you stopped in the middle of because something felt off and you couldn’t name what it was. Mercury retrograde in Cancer gives you different ears for your own work. The thing that felt off might become legible now. Pull out the essay without an ending, or the chapter you wrote fast and never sat with, or the manuscript you put in a drawer because you told yourself it wasn’t ready. Read them slowly. Out loud if you can stand it. Listen for the sentence that makes your stomach tighten.
Slow down on sending work out. The signal is scrambled right now, and what you send will land differently than you intend. The pitch that sounds clear to you tonight might read sideways to an editor next week. If you can wait until Mercury stations direct, wait.
Between now and then, try this. Not every day. But more days than not.
Sit down with something unfinished, a piece you’ve been avoiding, or one that keeps surfacing at odd hours. Don’t look at your outline. Don’t reread your notes. Open the draft and ask it one question: what are you really about?
The answer that comes during a Mercury retrograde in Cancer will arrive lower than usual. Less in the head, and more in the gut. It might not sound like a plan, and instead sound like a feeling. Write it down anyway. Write from that place for as long as it lasts. No structure or editing while you draft. Let it be ugly. Let it be too personal if that’s where it goes. Give it permission to contradict the version of the story you’ve been telling yourself for months.
When the session is done, save it and close it. Don’t revise or reread. Let it sit until Mercury is moving forward again. What you wrote will read differently than it reads today, and that difference is significant. The writing that surfaces on the other side of this retrograde will have deep roots.
During these three weeks, write like somebody who isn’t in a hurry to be understood. Write toward the thing your body has been holding. Let the scrambled signal teach you something your clear signal couldn’t.
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About the author
High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.
Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.
Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.
And I thought these jumbledy, mixed-up feelings I've been having was because I was trying to come to grips with the fact that I'll be living the rest of my life without my beloved, and trying to move on from it. I've barely written a word since he passed, but lately my mind is fermenting, much in the way you describe.