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Becoming Water: Cancer
Hope is a river
that flows from these stonewalls
into an ocean
that we have never seen.
~ Irish singer/songwriter, Susan McKeown
Greetings from the tumultuous river of Life! We have just passed through the Solstice zenith point— the gateway to summer marked by the Sun’s cycle bringing a climax of light in the northern hemisphere, and the entrance into winter and increased darkness in the south. Taken in this light, this moment is a heightened experience of both an extreme and a stillpoint—one in which we are intimately embedded—before the turnaround and subsequent move towards the opposite pole.
And indeed, across the globe, now more than perhaps ever before in our lifetimes, we find ourselves part of an ‘extreme’ reality as we head into the energy of cardinal water sign Cancer, which presides over our roots: of home, family, ancestry, and emotional security. Cardinality represents taking initiative, and as the first of the introspective water signs, Cancer calls us inward for nourishment of our personal sense of security and identity, and for those inclined, spiritual grounding. So it is tending within that is our first order right now, even while the bombs fly.
Noteworthy is that when the Sun entered Cancer on June 20, it was conjunct (together with) expansive Jupiter, newly in Cancer at 2°. With the solstice chart influencing the next quarterly cycle, and with these two fiery planets linked through Cancer, issues related to the Cancer themes of home and homeland, and personal or national identity are and will continue to be strongly highlighted. Inwardly, it is a point in the wheel that invites us to connect with an inner ocean, “one that we have never seen”, as my favorite Celtic singer Susan McKeown suggests above. It is in this inner ocean of light, which flows from Source, that we are invited to bathe and find our hope, and our renewal.
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The grace of the Feminine
Off-centered Cancer energy can manifest as victimhood, hypersensitivity, and over-personalizing. But in its purest manifestation mystically sourced Cancer has a fertile imagination, and is astute and resourceful. Hope and renewal at this fragile time come from leaning into the sign’s water nature—strongly emphasized as the zodiac’s first water sign— both through water’s living presence, and through embodying water’s ways in how we meet life. As our indigenous elders remind us, Water is Life. It follows that, if skillfully met, Life is flow. We are flow.
To enhance our receptivity, we may feel to partake of nourishing escapes to river, lake, or sea, and/or to tune ourselves within to the feminine capacity to meet hard reality with acceptance; as well as to prioritize care for self (mind, body and soul) and all beings. The sky may be appear to be falling, but tend we must, like the goddess Hestia, to the hearth within—the light of the soul—in this death/rebirth moment. We are both hospice nurse, and birth midwife.
In this work, Cancer offers to connect and sustain us from a deep, intuitive place—at a remove from the mind and the clattering concerns of the day. To access her gifts, we must continue to be discerning with the amount of news that our nervous systems can handle, and protectively curate spaces to tap into presence and deep listening, while training our focus on what is nourishing and life-sustaining. Despite the noise of outer life, something is gestating inwardly in those of us aligned with the desire to serve the Change. Cancer’s job is to protect and nourish new life within the womb.
With harsh energies afoot that spotlight both Pluto and Mars (see New Moon section), it can be certainly challenging to access inner peace. Those with a significant Moon, 4th House, or Cancer signature in the natal chart could be feeling particularly tenuous or even threatened these days. And it’s not just us as individuals— more than ever we see how microcosm and macrocosm conjoin. The chart of the United States itself is packed with Cancer energy, with its Sun in Cancer, as well as Mercury (communication), Jupiter (opportunistic expansion), and Venus (social impulses). This all points to our nation’s prideful cherishing of homeland and family values—with the populace now acutely divided as to how these ideals should be manifested. Time-held values and the security of the nation as a whole, with highly polarized tensions around immigration, will continue to be challenged.
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Water as Creator
As Nigerian-born philosopher/activist Bayo Akomolafe shared recently in an online forum, the sacred spirit of Water is essential to the survival of life on Earth. He relayed the Yoruba creation story in which 16 creator gods (orishas) were sent down to Earth to get humanity established, but that try as they might, things were not working out. Interestingly, 15 of these gods were male gods, while just one was female: Oshun, goddess of water, divination, and beauty.
The male gods had not thought to include Oshun in their machinations, thinking they could handle this earthly building project amongst themselves. So in despair, they returned to the Creator god to ask why their efforts to jumpstart civilization where failing. The answer was simple, the Creator said: Oshun had been excluded from the project. So they returned to earth, and included the water goddess Oshun, after which things starting humming.
As true then at the start of creation as it is now, when some are left wondering about the potential end of creation, the spirit of the Divine Feminine, and the element of water and what it represents, must be included if we are to survive as a planet, and as a species. Drawing on these, we must invite into our own self-relating and social discourse the Cancerian ‘Great Mother’ gifts of understanding, deep listening, softness, and intuition.
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Given that the ‘teacher/guru’ planet, Jupiter, will be residing in Cancer for the next year, at the highest level we can hope to see and experience, and embody ourselves, a flourishing of these water-informed qualities. Considering this notion of Water as Teacher, the remarkable work of New Zealander Veda Austin comes to mind.
After personally experiencing the healing power of ‘living water’ drawn from a pure spring after a debilitating accident, Veda turned her focus to researching the hidden intelligence of water, and how it responds to human intention and emotion. Building on the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, she developed a technique of freezing panels of water in proximity to the stimuli of words, images, or presences. What she observed has confirmed her intuitive sense that water actively participates in communication.
Most recently, Veda has been working with the young, non-speaking “autists” (people with autism) who have been featured on the The Telepathy Tapes. This series of interviews highlights the autists’ astounding telepathic/ESP capacities—with the series being dubbed ‘required watching’ by some, as the autists seem to have a line in to understanding other levels of reality. In a recent discussion with astrologer Pam Gregory, Veda describes how she worked with some of the autists to get their input on certain of her frozen water panels that resemble cuneiform and hieroglyph scripts. How they responded is truly astonishing.
Referring to the ice panels resembling ancient script, one autist shared:
The general message of the images is about the foundational structure to build or co-create the new. The images are like music actually—sheet music, to inform everything that is matter on the planet that a cosmic cycle has closed, and a new epoch is beginning. The way the lines are is like foundational structure at the pre-manifestation levels.
This takes me to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction (discussed at length in last month’s Gemini journal) that we’re navigating with for the next year— Saturn being the builder of foundational structures, joining with Neptune, the ‘creative spark’ principle that imaginally precedes (or pre-seeds!) physical manifestation.
When asked what water is, one autist responded, To ask the question, What is water? one most ask, What is the Creator before form?
Another said, Water is the expression of the Creator’s first love. It is a being that Creator never wants to separate from. Therefore it’s in everything. It’s love.
We may need no reminder, but the human body is 60-70% water, and the earth itself, over 70% water.
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Initiation through presence
A strong celestial ‘influencer’ on the Cancer archetype at the Solstice and the June 25 Cancer New Moon, is a square (internal challenge and tension due to conflicting impulses) from this Saturn-Neptune conjunction, a configuration that could be said to be holding imaginal instructions for the new. In case we hadn’t noticed (!), our trusted structures and institutions of stability (Saturn) are continuing to be eroded. This is a work that destroyer/transformer Pluto has already begun—particularly in the US with its Pluto return last year—and a work that now, the dissolving power of Neptune is continuing, with truth and even ‘reality’ as we have known it no longer a thing we can expect to recognize in the public discourse—or even within some our own formerly trusted social networks.
The tightening of the Saturn noose (Saturn being about control and determination) on our notion of homeland, along with the smoke and mirrors tactics, and radical uncertainty that Neptune energy plays with, will continue as a rough ride for many, as we experience serious challenges to what we had held as the foundations of our stability, whether that be our own personal experience of home and family, the future of our nation, or of the planet itself.
But one of the key lessons of this time is to learn to let go of our clinging to the structures, certainties, and conveniences of the realities we have known. This is tough, in the West, where these have been taken for granted as rights, or shared values, for so long.
As Bayo Akomolafe counsels, “We need to become initiates through rituals of presence, through the cracks.” This would be a Cancer specialty, as Cancer, and its ruler the Moon, are the most ‘here and now’ archetypes in the zodiac. It is through maintaining our capacity for true Presence that we are invited into new ways of sensing and swimming with what is. “Resonance is much more than meaning,” he says, steering us away from the mind, to water’s intuitive ways. He quotes James Baldwin: “We’ve run out of water—it’s time to become water.”
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The long view, and the ‘magic triangle’
I take heart at this time in the long view, both from the astrological indicators, and from visionaries who point variously to the possibility of a harmonious, unity-sourced, Future Human (Richard Rudd and Christopher Bache) being cultivated now within those of us set to this work; to the frame that we are in a difficult state of ‘messy birth’ as a planet preparing to create “a world that works for all” (Shariff Abdullah); and that we are in a phase of deep initiation and transformation in the necessary gritty trenches of growing a more mature planetary community (Duane Elgin).
Each of these individuals’ teachings (along with others singing the same tune) I find uplifting. And, with the planet of higher mind, Uranus, poised to enter Gemini (opener to new ideas and perspectives) on July 7, in addition to the Cancerian work of care and sensing into the currents within, it’s important to feed our minds with viewpoints that ‘radicalize’ (as Uranus is wont to do) our perspective into a visionary one, which Pluto in Aquarius also demands.
The positions of the outermost planets undeniably signal heightened change on a transpersonal and transformational level. Not only have Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune all transitioned into new signs within just eight months of each other (this hasn’t happened since these planets were discovered)—indicating change at the epochal level—but from now through 2028, these three movers and shakers are engaged in what some call a “magic triangle.”This configuration involves harmonious, flowing, collaborative energies (trine and sextiles) between each of them.
Uranus trines Pluto and in turn, each sextiles Neptune. With Neptune at the triangle’s apex, this small blue planet’s miracle-making potential for divine intervention offers ‘help close at hand’ (the nature of the sextile) in manifesting the two types of upheaval energies that Uranus and Pluto presage. While their methods differ, Uranus and Pluto’s shared intent is Big Change— Uranus’ methods are unpredictable, electrical, and revelatory (with this planet being the higher octave of Mercury), whereas Pluto’s are deep, visceral, and volcanic. With the two working together as a trine (and Pluto in Aquarius, co-ruled by Uranus), and helpfully linked to the possibility of a preternatural boost from Neptune, we have a setup for being saved from the brink.
So let’s join imaginary forces with the triangle in the heavens, with our own trinity of body, heart-mind, and spirit and keep imagining into this possibility of reversal before cataclysm, one which Christopher Bache discusses (see link above), having convincingly witnessed it in a long-term, deep dive project he undertook, and then wrote a book about, with LSD journeying.
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Cancer’s ‘holy’ significance
Toggling back to our lived reality in the Now, where Cancer presides, there is more to learn from the depths of this vital, life-nourishing sign. Transpersonal astrology forefather Dane Rudhyar discusses in his book, The Pulse of Life, how Cancer, symbolized by the crab and thereby associated with the sea, is symbolic of the “universal matrix of life.” In this respect, he points to the “God-releasing significance of the summer solstice” and suggests that the archetype of Cancer is “a holy place in which God has descended.”
Rudhyar suggests that Moon-ruled, sensitive Cancer can be the most “helpless” sign, due to its susceptibility to changing moods and psychic intimations of larger energies, and yet the most determined, in a “strange, yet silent way.” Because the archetype presides over a time of year when the Sun stands still, there is a stillness about Cancer that also calls in the possibility of intense Light.
This [stillness] is because all great sacraments come when there is a pause, silence, and tremor. Man possessed by God, or by the Beloved, is at first overwhelmed by the union. Everything must be reconsidered, all motion and motives reversed. And in those short intense nights when the Feast of St. John is celebrated there may be tumult in the outer world, but there is stillness in the Holy Place where Night enfolds Day, and Life is conceived anew.
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Squares to Cancer – Sensitives take care
Those with natal Cancer placements (particularly Sun, Moon, or Rising Sign) at 0 to 7 degrees will experience sustained impact from the square from Saturn-Neptune in Aries; while those with Cancer placements from 22 to 29 degrees will be hit, over time, by another square, from the Chiron-Eris conjunction in Aries. If either of these are you, you may recognize some of the “silence and tremor” Rudhyar speaks of within yourself, as I myself do, with my Moon at 24° Cancer!
Chiron is an asteroid representing the Wounded Healer principle, after the highly revered Greek god Chiron, wise and gentle teacher/healer to numerous Greek heroes, yet unable to heal his own, ultimately fatal wound to his achilles heel. Astrologically, Chiron represents the area in our lives where we have to work with the medicine of the ‘sacred wound’, which we excel at offering as wisdom and healing to others, but can be thwarted at being able to heal within ourselves. Our ‘sacred medicine’ comes from embracing Chiron’s challenge.
In February of this year Chiron entered Aries, a cardinal sign like Cancer, which informs our desires, our boldness, and our willingness to strike out on our own (or in war!) and assert for what we want or believe in. Chiron will stay here, with an advance into Taurus next summer and then back again into Aries, until spring 2027. During this period we will continue to be tasked with the work of overcoming and healing our sense of deficiency or weakness in manifesting our Will, in the house in our charts where transiting Chiron falls.
The archetype of Aries, naturally square to Cancer, is further emphasized by the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in this sign. So we are now doubly tasked—by both Saturn-Neptune and Chiron—with finding our inner authority, and acting on its behalf. When Aries placements square natal Cancer placements, they can trigger great vulnerability, and unearth the fears and uncertainties of the collective unconscious. Great softness and gentleness with self is important here.
The asteroid Eris, currently exactly conjunct Chiron, is the female counterpart to Mars. Known as ‘goddess of strife” she represents that part of us ready to go to battle over perceived hurts and bitterness long-held through time. While some may be feeling (and certainly seeing) this in an outward-moving, ‘yang’ form, Chiron-Eris squaring yin Cancer energy can also unearth deep wounds and uncertainties within, especially when one senses (wisely) that outer revenge or retribution is not appropriate.
Writer Shannon Willis points to the vital way of water in this situation in her Kosmos Journal article about ‘soft rebellion’:
Soft Rebellion is the way water carves stone—not through brute force but through patient insistence, through intimate knowledge of the cracks, through the whisper of time… It listens before it moves, feeling into the hidden weaknesses of oppressive systems, understanding that no empire, no ideology, no monolith is without its fractures. It knows that control is a brittle thing, and that softness—fluid, adaptable, decentralized—is far harder to extinguish than steel.
True to water’s ways, staying present with our hurt parts is the medicine here, feeling the feelings, surrendering with presence to the ride that suffering may demand of us, so as to let flow through us the ancestral traumas that beg for healing at this delicate time. And to those inclined, as Shannon recommends in her article, the process can be enhanced by some form of ritual to grieve, speak, and release old wounds back to the earth, for composting and renewal.
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New Moon Astrology
I’ve touched on most of the primary signatures of the June 25 New Moon already: Sun-Moon-Jupiter in Cancer square the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries, and the ‘magic triangle’ between Uranus-Neptune-Pluto. When Uranus enters Gemini on July 7, the orbs will be tighter, with both Uranus and Pluto in air signs, which could lift some of the heaviness of the moment.
Other fierce players right now are two yod configurations (also known as the Finger of God), which involve a sextile and two quincunxes, creating an elongated triangle that appears to be ‘pointing’. (A quincunx is a 150° aspect between signs five signs apart, posing a problem difficult to resolve, as the two signs share neither element—earth-air-fire-water—nor modality—cardinal-fixed-mutable.) A yod creates great tension especially for the apex planet (the one being pointed to).
In this case the two yods are directed at the most highly volatile planets in our solar system: Mars (anger, aggression, violence, among other things), and Pluto (volcanic rage and destructiveness that can result in death and transformation, among other things!), and each of them involves the other planet! The yod to Pluto receives quincunxes from the Sun-Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer and Mars in Virgo. The yod to Mars receives quincunxes from the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries, and Pluto.
This is advanced astrology, which I won’t unpack here, but the takeaway is that the key archetypal signatures of this moment are interconnected through extreme internal tensions threatening to burst into rash action or speech, such as we’re seeing with the violent actions being taken with the war on/with Iran. These energies can also be experienced in our own lives as quick-to-rise tempers and indignation at injustices (Mars in Virgo being quite principled). Taking three long breaths is always good medicine here, and the recognition that sensitivities are heightened right now. All nourishing Cancer remedies apply!
Finally to assuage jangled nerves through music, I leave you with Susan McKeown’s song, River, from her album Prophecy, in which she asks to be bathed in the waters of her homeland’s sacred rivers, the assuage the division and rage of the day.