Welcome in, Beautiful!

Yes, I’m still floating on a cloud after last week’s book launch festivities! The entire week was a manifestation of multiple dreams I’ve had for a long time. I am truly grateful to everyone who participated in some way. This truly marks the start of a brand new chapter for me and my work. As my café subscriber, that means there’s lots of great new energy for you to enjoy and benefit from as well!

National Black Book Festival Live Interview
I’ll be on Black Authors Matter hosted by the National Black Book Festival this Tuesday, July 14th at 9:00pm ET. Learn more here.

SiriusXM’s Urban View Mornings Interview
I’ll be live on SiriusXM to discuss my book on Urban View Mornings this Thursday at 10:30am ET. Learn more here.

Blackademics: Beauty, Bias, and the Blackboard Panel Discussion
For faculty, staff, and students, my publisher Legacy Lit is hosting a panel with me, Dr. Allycin Powell-Hicks, and Daria Burke on Tuesday, July 28th. Free registration here.

New Book Tour Stops! 📚✍🏿

A Dream Come True 💭
Tuesday’s book launch event was a literal dream come true! If you weren’t able to attend, check out the vibes here in my Instagram photo spread.

A new perspective on the past helps you heal and begin again with greater clarity, wisdom, and faith. This week’s new moon in the early morning of Tuesday, July 14th (Western hemisphere) is happening in the water sign of Cancer at 21 degrees and it will be conjunct Mercury retrograde in Cancer at 19 degrees.

As a water sign, Cancer deals with our emotions. Cancer is also a sign of our deep past, including our lineage and ancestry. Thus it represents the foundation of our lives, our home, and that includes our emotional foundation and our home within ourselves. Mercury deals with our minds, thoughts, words, and communication. Mercury in retrograde at this new moon is about gaining new awareness of our emotional truth. It invites deep introspection and self-reflection so that we understand our emotions at a foundational level. If Cancer is the heart and Mercury is the mind, this Cancer new moon conjunct Mercury retrograde can support greater heart-mind coherence! James Burgess explains the Sabian symbols for this astrology as, “The mind becomes clear when the heart is at ease,” and “Silence brings deeper perspectives.”

Because Cancer inherently references our past and Mercury retrograde asks us to go back and revisit something, I’m calling this a sankofa new moon. Sankofa is the Ghanaian philosophy that it is never too late to go back and retrieve what you left behind. In the case of this new moon, it might be the retrieval of emotional truths, things we weren’t ready to look at, weren’t ready to accept or feel before.

If we choose to do introspective work this week, we have the support of this astrology for getting to a place of greater emotional courage and confidence, of strengthening our emotional foundation and stability, built on emotional honesty. I often hear the call on social media to be intellectually honest. But I believe the foundation for intellectual honesty is emotional honesty. We cling to false narratives and lies in order to avoid the emotional discomfort and pain of facing the truth.

So this sankofa new moon is not just going back and gathering historical data and facts. This is asking the question: What was I feeling and experiencing on an emotional level throughout these past events and past chapters of my life? This is reflective work you can do for your past as a whole or in a particular area, like career, relationships, health, or anything at the forefront of your life right now.

A greater awareness of your personal history can give you a new perspective on yourself and your journey that provides you with wisdom for a new chapter that’s ahead of you.

This new moon reminds me of my journey writing my new book, Colorism: The Politics of Skin Tone and How We Get Free. For starters, I had to do a lot of rewriting and revising, which is such a Mercury retrograde activity. But most importantly, I had to not only retell stories from the past, mine as well as our collective past, I also wanted to convey the emotional truth, the emotional reality of those past events. That process was challenging yet healing for me. The result of that process is a book that helps readers understand what’s needed in the present to feel whole and well and to discern how to move forward from here.

“How we get free” is not just a social justice call. It’s also about emotional freedom. How we can reclaim our daily emotional reality and reconfigure or everyday emotional landscape so we are not trapped in the emotional architecture of our past.

I have prompts and affirmations below that will support you in your new moon reflections this week. I can’t emphasize enough how much a Mercury retrograde in Cancer begs for us to journal, go to talk therapy, read deep books, and have vulnerable conversations with people we care about.

And my hope for readers of my book is that you not only read the book to get to the end of it, but that you make time to do the practices I suggest in the book, or invent your own, so that what you learn and experience while reading can take root in your everyday reality.

This week’s Cancer new moon is a great time to plant seeds for greater emotional healing.

In expression of my gratitude for this moment and to spur on your own practice of dreaming, I present Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed.”