Hey Love!

June has been bringing lots of goodies to our Café. I’m excited for you to read this week’s channeled message, learn about exciting upcoming events, get cozy with journal prompts, and much more.

I’m doing an Instagram live stream with this week’s featured author, Clarence A. Haynes, on Thursday night, June 18th at 7:00pm ET! Learn more about Clarence Haynes and his books in this week’s Bookshop 📚 Segment.

What is better than ONE colorism expert? TWO! Next Friday, I will be featured on Dr. Maya Williams’s YouTube Channel to discuss my forthcoming book Colorism: The Politics of Skin Tone and How we Get Free. Together we have read countless articles on the subject and both wrote our dissertations on the topic. Please join us on the national Black holiday of Juneteenth from 3-5pm Eastern Time to discuss this important work! Click to Watch Here.

If you’ve ever had a bold, inspired idea, and said to yourself, yeah, but who am I to do that? Who am I to write a book? To curate that space? To start a movement in my community? I want you to have a front row seat at my next Dream Studio workshop: Dare to Dream. We will hold space for all the personal, cultural, and systemic reasons dreaming feels so scary and vulnerable. And you will discover the framework and strategies for how we get free. Register for my next Dare to Dream workshop!

The solstice is a collective threshold moment. As we cross this threshold, we will begin to see more. For those in the Southern Hemmi, your days will now increase in light, illuminating more of your environment and the external world around you. For those of us in the Northern Hemmi, our days will begin to increase in darkness, illuminating more of our inner world, providing more internal insight and connection with our subconscious. Such inner illumination, however, naturally makes it easier to discern the world around you.

Like all thresholds, there’s an opportunity on the solstice. There’s a choice about how you will show up in this space now. Choosing the same is a viable choice, yet you can just as readily choose something different. Even in choosing something that resembles an old path, you can make a different choice about you show up and navigate that same path. Maybe your choice is approaching the same path with newfound courage and confidence, a new sense of dedication, or love and levity, or a new expression of authenticity and truth.

This is not just true of the solstice threshold. Every breath you take is also a threshold into a new moment where you have the agency of choice. Solstice is cosmic breath—stillness before the next inhale, a pause before the exhale. It is fractal, this phenomenon of breath. Solstice is Earth breathing—inhale and exhale at a scale we perceive through our dimension of time. All of us, all of Earth is breathing in harmony. Winter solstice - inhale. Summer solstice - exhale.

Solstice isn’t just the change of weather. It’s also the threshold into a new zodiac season. In June, that would be the start of Cancer season. The Zodiac sign of Cancer is cardinal water: leading (cardinal) with emotion and intuition (water). We will experience a collective drop from the headiness of Gemini energy down into the ooey gooey heart of Cancer energy. Prominent themes of Cancer energy include home, family (blood/chosen), roots, ancestry, foundations of our lives, and deep care for all of the above.

We don’t all experience this the same. The themes will manifest in a variety of ways based on your free will, your personal astrology, and other factors. Should you feel called to do so, those of you who move with intention and conscious alignment with this field of energy could see enhanced growth, healing, or momentum. If you’re just following your intuition, you’ll flow through this field of Cancerian energy in divine alignment.

That’s the thing about this spiritual stuff. There are multiple maps to the same destination. Whether you use metaphysical tools like tarot and astrology, or empirical studies like psychology and neuroscience, or just learn to trust your gut and listen to your body, you can fulfill your soul’s destiny one way or another.

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Clarence A. Haynes has solo-authored two modern fantasy novels, one which comes out this month on June 23rd. It looks quite spicy too. Haynes has previously co-authored a series of Afrofuturist novels with Omar Epps. Haynes is a fellow New York resident and fellow Legacy Lit author, so if you get one of his books, shout him out on Instagram @clarenceahaynes, and tell him I sent you!

You can read these page turners while waiting for my book to drop on July 7th 😜. These are affiliate links that support independent bookstores. If you use my links, I get a small percentage of anything you purchase, not just the books I recommend.

Speaking of breath… the song “Breathe” by Seinabo Sey helped me articulate my concept of healing, specifically healing from colorism. It deals with Cancerian themes of home and family, and the generational wounds we work to heal from. As we pause in this cosmic solstice breath, don’t forget to breathe…

Sincerely,