Cross-wheel Collaboration

My band, Chicken Ranch Road Show, ripping it up at a show last Sunday evening. It was an amazing show, but so hot that it took me a full day to recover from the body weirdness that came out of it.

We’re in the height of summer, and coming up on early august. August 1 is Lúnasa, or Lammas, a holiday celebrating the first day of the harvest season. I take this metaphorically as well as literally - it’s a moment of taking stock of what we’ve grown and created throughout the year since the winter solstice. We can pause, offer thanks and a prayer for a good harvest season, and then dive into reaping the fruits we’ve planted.

For a meditation on this time of year, a Tarot reading for my subscribers for this moment, and more info on Lúnasa and how to celebrate it, head over to my Patreon and sign up as a free or paying subscriber - all that will come out later this week and you’ll get it right to your email.

It sounds nice and tidy as a time of year when I describe the harvest moment, but hell, this moment is a real roller coaster for me.

Part of that is astrological - for a breakdown of that, check out my friend Sabina’s excellent write-up on the carnival of July 2025 (and stay tuned here for when she opens her Substack, because I’ll be shouting it to the rooftops).

Part of it is personal.

And part of it is that high summer always fucks me up a little bit.

I say that as a summer person. I love the heat and swimming and ice cream. I love the lush bursting of leaves and fruits. I love peaches and tomatoes and wearing nothing but a bikini or a sports bra and very small shorts.

And also, there is so much fullness in this moment that my being has a hard time holding it all. I’m only human - I have to intentionally embody the tree’s surrender to the seasons, the loam’s cyclical submission to the changes in temperature. It doesn’t come as naturally to me as it would if I were a tree (which, in some previous life or lives, I think I was).

This moment is calling for an awful lot of surrender. Mercury retrograde has led me on a winding path of plans gone awry: the river is closed when I get there, and it rains when I arrive at the lake instead; my sleep cycle is a wreck but the only path to sleep is to stop trying to sleep; the trail that promised to take me to my car took me deeper in the woods and I spent an extra half hour finding my way back.

In these moments, there’s nothing for it but to admit my powerlessness, release control, and reconnect with the universe through succumbing, instead.

There is one thing I’ve been doing to help rebalance the rollercoaster of high summer, and it’s something you can do too. I notice that in midwinter, I don’t have enough motivation or energy. Light and heat are lacking. In midsummer, light and heat, motivation and energy, are so much that I’m bowled over by them. I need some shade and cool to calm me, to balance my turning wheel of the year.

So, I thought, why not send what’s needed to where it’s needed?

When I feel an overwhelm of high summer, I picture sending that light and heat and motion to the bottom of the wheel, to my December, January, and February. I pour that abundance across the circle, bypass the false linearity of space and time, and give myself what I will need. I’m also doing this in a more tangible way by canning tomatoes and peaches.

I plan to do the same thing in January. When I have so much dark and calm that it’s dragging me down, I’ll siphon some of it off across the wheel to my next summer. I’m excited to see how collaborating with myself across time (a concept I learned from my friend Rachel Swift) blossoms. I can already feel the care I’m giving myself.

Do you need support in caring for yourself? We all do, I think. This is my specialty. Send me an email (prewritten for you below) and let’s hop on a call where I can listen to your problem with compassion, or simply check out my coaching page for more info on working with me.

The rain coming in over the lake, lovingly, wetly, showing me how to surrender.

Village Witch’s Corner

My intention this week : 

Surrender.

Question(s) I'm asking this week:

How might surrender look different than I thought it would?

What I’m listening to:

I started listening to The Telepathy Tapes, a podcast about nonverbal autistic children communicating via telepathy (it’s also about other things), which has been on my list for a long time, and it is wonderful.

Tiny Spell of the Week:

Practice surrender in a hundred different ways and see which I like.