Mercury (Storyteller) turns retrograde in Leo (for 3 weeks):

🔮 Alchemical Opportunities:

• This retrograde in heart-centered, expressive Leo asks for a rewiring of self-expression—especially around how you speak from ego versus soul.
• It’s an invitation to revisit your inner scriptwriter: Are you performing or revealing? Are you leading from performance or presence?
• Mercury’s journey back through Leo is a mythic call to recover your original creative fire—the gold of authenticity buried under personas built for approval.

🌟 Invitations:

• Revisit past projects, creative dreams, or bold communications that still hold vitality.
• Track where your voice has been dimmed—by shame, fear of rejection, or performative pressures.
• Reflection: “Where am I being asked to re-ignite my courage to speak and create from truth rather than approval?”

Sun in Cancer Squares Chiron in Aries

🔮 Alchemical Opportunities:

• The Cancer Sun illuminates the wound of over-defensiveness or isolation (Chiron in Aries). There’s a tension between the tender need to belong and the armored stance of fierce independence.
• This is ancestral and inner-child territory: wounds around not feeling safe to need others, or feeling unseen in your vulnerability.
• A sacred clash between the protective shell and the initiatory fire of healing.

🌟 Invitations:

• Notice where you’re either retreating too far into protective patterns or pushing too hard to “go it alone.”
• This is a ripe time for tending to younger parts of you that learned independence as a survival strategy.
• Reflections:
   “What part of me longs to feel safe enough to let others in?”
   “What am I protecting that is actually ready to be loved into wholeness?”

Mars in Virgo Conjunct the South Node

🔮 Alchemical Opportunities:

• Mars—the planet of will, drive, and instinct—merges with the karmic South Node in meticulous Virgo, illuminating outdated survival strategies of over-efforting, control, or hypercriticism.
• This transit may activate perfectionism as a wound-based response to feeling unworthy or unsafe.
• You're being asked to let go of the illusion that “if I just do it all right, I’ll be okay.”

🌟 Invitations:

• Notice where you are driven by anxiety-masked-as-productivity.
• Practice right action from wholeness, not from wounding.
• Reflections:
   “Where am I still caught in the loop of fixing rather than transforming?”
   “What old patterns of hyper-vigilance or over-responsibility am I ready to release?”

Podcast poem: "Things to Think" by Robert Bly

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https://www.ontheedgesofchange.com/home-page

This episode was co-created with generative AI, engaged as a soul-aligned ally in service of transformation. At the edge where technology meets myth, I choose insight over noise, and alchemy over automation. Thank you for dreaming the future with me.