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The Eternal Now - Cancer
Time for Serenity
I like to live in the sound of water,
In the feel of mountain air. A sharp
Reminder hits me: this world is still alive;
It stretches out there shivering toward its own
Creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing.
Enters into the elaborate give-and-take,
This bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
Winter, summer, storm, Still—this tranquil
Chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.
~ William Stafford
William Stafford speaks poignantly to the call of Cancer energy which, by the July 5th New Moon will have the Sun, Moon, and Venus under her sway. Deep feeling Cancer is the first water sign in the zodiacal wheel, ushered in at the ‘extreme’ of the illuminated Summer Solstice here in the Northern hemisphere—the longest day when the exuberant yang light starts its slow retreat back towards yin darkness—or at the other extreme of the Winter Solstice in the Southern hemisphere. Either way, this sign, along with its polarity partner Capricorn (falling at our Winter Solstice), pulls us inward into contemplation.
Ruled by the Moon, Cancer is associated with the sensitive, receptive, feminine part of ourselves. The Moon is the fastest moving heavenly body in our night sky; hence Cancer as an archetype invites moment to moment Presence in the here and now, with its ‘moods’ ever- changing. We may be one moment deeply peaceful, at one with the quiet stillness of mid-summer with its pervasive warm light, enjoying the slowing down of Gemini’s busy pace; and the next, washed by a dark mood of sorrow, aloneness, or uncertainty. These are the fluctuating waters of the Cancer energy, “this tranquil Chaos that seems to be going somewhere,” as William Stafford so eloquently describes.
Cancer is correlated with the fourth house at the base or root of our chart, and as such is concerned with home, mother, and family—and by extension, our spiritual home or connection to Source, which we renew and sustain particularly in times of solitude. All of these domains point to our origins, that which ‘birthed’ us. So while the Cancer impulse at this time of year can draw us together for family reunions or trips to mountains lakes, it can just as well be felt as a call to connect more deeply with our own spiritual nature, and that of the Earth, our primary Mother. The gift here is that dwelling deeply in the present moment, both with ourselves and with the world we are part of, we have the capacity to access William Blake’s ‘eternity in a grain of sand,’ to cultivate relational presence on the level of Being.
Formal practices such as meditation, Qi Gong, or yoga can attune us with this state, as can simply being present in Nature. The garden, the forest, and the alpine meadow can each invoke the spacious, inward call of our inner kinship or belonging to Life; but in Cancer time, many of us are drawn to spaces and places around water, the element that calls us back to the primal waters from which earthly creation arose, including ourselves.
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Finding our belonging
With its association with Mother, birthing, and nesting, Cancer speaks to our point of incarnation into the physical realm, serving as midwife between the worlds of life and death. Considering this, contemplating life at the water’s edge—particularly the ocean—under Cancer’s sway perhaps helps connect us with a death/rebirth impulse in our lives. What losses (old or new) or ‘deaths’ are we feeling right now? Where and how are we feeling a stirring of new life within our depths? Are we willing to be with the unknown, the unformed in us, that precedes birth? What shore of our life might this new life be whispering upon? In ancient Babylon, Cancer was said to mark the entrance to the underworld. This was later conveyed through the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which Demeter lost her daughter to the Underworld after Hades abducted her while she picked wildflowers in a field. Persephone was eventually allowed to return to earth, but on condition that she spend half of her life down below with her husband Hades. So while the qualities we think of as Cancerian—nurturing, caring, tending, holding, and listening—are life-giving and nourishing, there is this darker, veiled side to both Cancer and the Mother archetype that we must reckon with. |
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In its fullest sense, the Mother archetype signifies both the intuitive, wise, and compassionate Divine Feminine, as well as the Dark Mother— that which is destructive, devouring, or smothering. This unruly, more primitive part of nature can at times pull us back into unconsciousness. We might experience this when overtaken by instinctual urges to find someone who makes us feel consistently cared for, in just the way we want. Or conversely, when we are in a caretaker role of some sort, we may be triggered when our ministrations and offerings are not received as we would like.
Even if we find our belonging in a beloved ‘other’ or community for a period of time, in the end, those of us with an emphasis on Cancer or the Moon in our charts are here to learn to give to ourselves that which we imagine others could or should give us. This is ‘up’ this year for those with a Cancer signature in their charts, as both the North Node and Chiron are in Aries for the rest of this year, forming a square to Cancer (suggesting inner tension and stimulation). Those affected will be challenged to claim their will, their assertiveness, and their capacity to take action for themselves, as opposed to relying on others to meet their needs.
Right on time, as these archetypes never fail to be, I just received notice of a new book by Parabola Magazine editor, Tracy Cochran, fittingly called, Presence: The Art of Being At Home With Yourself. She will be discussing her book on the Awaking Weekly platform, with the recording available afterwards.
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Ultimately, the journey through life is uniquely our own, and no outer source of nourishment can be counted on to always be there. Self-care, turning to and being present with difficult emotions that may arrive (Inner Child work being one method), and of course consistent spiritual practice are all pathways of essential maintenance and growth for those significantly influenced by Cancer or the Moon. Without this, unmet childhood needs tend to continue to propel us outwards in search of the ideal source of nourishment.
The rampant consumerism that has gripped modern culture is driven by an attempt to ‘feed’ ourselves with various forms of matter (aka mater), given a lack of connection to the Earth—our Mother—as well as to our spiritual origins. Our broken and collapsing culture reveals a failure to keep the Cancer qualities of caring, nourishing, and tending not just alive, but front and center, where they should be to foster healthy life systems. It is shocking how sorely lacking these qualities have become in the arenas of politics and business.
The feminine is rejected ever more by denying women the right to birth control, and the greed-based disregard among developers and capitalists for the health of our planet’s vital ecosystems. But the problems we face likely won’t be solved ‘out there.’ Rather, the work we each do to reclaim the Mother archetype within ourselves can have a reverberating effect of reorienting the Whole to the reflective, receptive ways of the Feminine, and to the acknowledgement that all forms of life are intimately interconnected.
Marriage of opposites
Mythologically, I find it interesting—as well as infuriating—that the original god of the Sky and Starry Heavens, Ouranos, was birthed by Gaia herself. Ouranos later became his mother’s lover (the gods work with a different playbook than we mortals), and they purportedly enjoyed a honeymoon moment in their marriage of Earth and Sky. But Ouranus (associated with the planet Uranus), presiding over the lofty lights in the sky, grew to feeling separate from and superior to Gaia, and thereby rejected the births of the many children he sired with her. One by one he pushed these children back into Gaia’s womb, devaluing and suppressing the products of her feminine creativity. Apparently the crisis of our time had its roots long, long ago!
We earthly ones now desperately need a re-invocation and rededication to earth-respect, earth-love, and earth-connectedness if our planet is to survive. My readers likely know this. Historian and socialist thinker Howard Zinn spoke to this vital need to invoke the medicine of tapping into the eternal Now to effect the urgent change that’s needed in our time. He wrote, “… we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now [my emphasis] as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
Since indeed ‘the future is an infinite succession of presents,’ under the influence of this Cancer energy in particular we are urged to tap into our psychic capacity to meet Source through stillness, silence, and deep listening. Here we can re-member ourselves back into connection with all life, with our Mother, our origins, perhaps accessing our intuitive remembrance of how we belong to life, and how we need to live, or Be, in order to stay in alignment with the Whole. Maybe we can even hear our unique note in the ancient wisdom song of Earth and Cosmos.
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Engaging with true Presence with the deep soul isn’t easy, as it requires fending off the busyness of thoughts, experiences, to dos, and the endless influx of information that beckons to the ego part of ourselves. Here’s where Capricorn comes in, Cancer’s polarity partner. This Saturn-ruled Father archetype provides the discipline to get serious about this work, by creating and holding a container through time, one that includes rhythmic returns to the practice. In this way, the centered Cancer-Capricorn polarity brings Substance into Form, Essence into Materiality, and organizes Flow with Structure (such as the banks of a riverbed). The Moon needs Saturnian groundedness, intention, and self-responsibility to do its job effectively, both to keep the focus steady, and to prevent flooding, when Water (Moon) overcomes Earth (Saturn).
Holding to the imaginal
I’ve written a lot about Saturn’s current 2.5-year run through the third water sign, Pisces, where Saturn has just recently stationed retrograde, making its energy stronger. It’s an important combination that likewise calls for applying material plane practical methods of structure and discipline to the fluid realms of surrender and letting go on the one hand, and faith, idealism, and imagination on the other. With this signature, we are called to allow any confusion and sorrow that arise, to take time to muse and meander through whatever creative, inward-focused methods call us. Perhaps new magic is already arising within us, but we can’t yet name it or frame it, as the mind is not involved. Water signs do their work in the inner spaces, in mysterious ways.
This process needs to be given spaciousness, not just in terms of our removing language, and expectations from it, but as well, from the strictures of Time. Here again, Saturn/Capricorn can help, for Saturn rules time, and its medicine helps us hone our mastery of Patience, which is essential for any work of releasing the old and birthing the new.
A quote from a recent article about 12th Century mystic and saint, Hildegard Von Bingen, who fully embodied the path of the Divine Feminine, speaks to the importance of the ‘contemplation of the unseen,’ which she championed.
Hildegard’s profoundly optimistic cosmology urges us to revive our innate powers of intuition and rouse from the collective spell of forgetfulness that keeps us dependent solely on the mind’s logic. It is not that Hildegard would have us revert to superstitious or pre-rational thinking; she valued the intellect, was a botanist and a scientist in her own time. She viewed the rational mind as a gift from God but understood that rationality alone could not deliver humanity from all its strife and suffering. Her visions point to another route: a concealed pathway that can be found when we suspend disbelief and contemplate the unseen, almost as an astrophysicist explores the invisible but implied substance known as dark matter.
Furthering this feminine, watery theme, Neptune and Saturn in Pisces are in the spotlight this month, as both have recently turned retrograde, heightening the inward focus of the letting go and re-imagining undertaking. This will be particularly the case in the house/s where mid-Pisces (Saturn) and late-Pisces (Neptune) fall in your chart. At the New Moon, these two planets are 10 degrees apart – almost a conjunction, which emphasizes the Saturn in Pisces signature. During their retrogrades the two planets will grow further apart (with Saturn moving faster), but in January Saturn and Neptune will both march forward again, towards an actual conjunction in Aries in May. This will be big news, particularly as Neptune only enters a new sign roughly every 14 years. More on that conjunction in future blogs, but for now, the news remains Piscean!
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The perfect mom
Blending the archetypal Cancerian instinct for nourishment of new life with Capricorn’s discipline and structure takes us back to my story of the Scrub Jay nest that those who read my Gemini blog will know I found perfectly situated so as to be viewable through one small hole in the dense branches of a dense bush right outside my living room window. I first saw Mama and Papa Jay together on the nest about six weeks ago while standing in front of the window doing Qi Gong, and a few days later I again saw Mama while on the floor in a Pilates class.
I’ve since been checking regularly to get a glimpse of the chicks, which I‘d neither seen nor heard for all these weeks. Many times though, I saw Mama, sitting away on the nest, without even a knitting project to occupy her, single-pointedly dedicated to her task. One day last week, I noticed during Pilates that I couldn’t see the nest at all through the opening in the bush. I was shocked – was the nest somehow gone? I was concerned as that very morning I’d pruned a couple of large branches from the side of the bush, to give more light to several plants struggling beneath. Could The Jays have picked up and flown the nest to a safer spot?
I got distracted after class and forgot to double-check for the nest. It wasn’t till two days later, standing over the kitchen sink preparing dinner on a different side of the house, that I saw Mama Jay pointedly looking my way from a branch. This reminded me I’d meant to go look for the nest! and I immediately dropped my work and hurried across the house.
Just as I came in view of the nest—thankfully still there!—there was Mama having exactly matched my pace in high-tailing it to the nest, where she alighted to feed her wee ones, affording me my first view of the bright pink, gaping beaks of her two chicks. I could see only these huge, urgent beaks stretching in all their tender pinkness above the edge of the nest, screaming FEED ME!! I NEED IT!!!
I was touched by Mama’s gesture of ‘cueing’ me through the kitchen window that I should get over to the nest in order to catch a glimpse of ‘the kids’, and was completely struck by the urgency of the chicks’ demand. The need of Cancer as small child can indeed be dramatic! Shortly, Mama blithely flew off, leaving me feeling crestfallen in simpatico with the chicks—“just that little bit was all you had?” (I confess to having a Cancer Moon myself!) I’ve since learned that mother birds commonly feed their babies through regurgitation, so I guess they can’t regurgitate a 3-course meal. Maybe they are perfect moms after all, giving themselves over as completely as they do to the task.
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Echoes of the past
Cancer works to bring that which is hidden—whether within or below—into life, to bring a feeling of emotional security to that which feels unsafe or threatened. To do this, this archetype urges us to identify and root ourselves meaningfully by connecting to our origins. A built-in challenge here is that, if home, friends and family are part of what provide us with our sense of security in life, we must face the specter of loss when these ties are uprooted. Cancer is not so good at navigating loss, as ‘attachment’ is something it can be prone to (along with its fellow water sign, Scorpio). Taproots run deep, and neither the Crab nor the Scorpion is inclined towards letting go, with those well-constructed pincers!
Both these water archetypes tend to a concern with the past, which can include one’s ancestors, family relations (or lack thereof), or memories. While Mercury, too, presides over memories, the water signs do so in a feeling-based way, with a base note of nostalgia. I notice this myself quite acutely, how the Cancer vibe of summer predictably calls up memories of summers past, and as well, a more acute rumination over relationships that for one reason or another have not endured the test of time.
For many, perhaps particularly so later in life—when we may already have said goodbye to multiple family members, as well as friendships from different eras of our lives—this mid-summer Cancer time calls us to a deepening of our sense of spiritual connectedness, as this alone outlives the ego life’s transitions and leavings. The other day, waking up feeling unrested, I was overcome by a surprise sadness over having left so much of my past behind in my journey through life, as well feeling the collective grief we all share of losing the ways, special places, or systems of life we’ve been so used to. Of course part of this grief extends to that over the torn moral fabric of the ruling powers of this country (once ‘the shining city on the hill’) and of the entire Western world.
These are the ravages of time, which Cancer in her Eternal Now might wish could be halted in an Endless Summer. But the onward turning of the wheel of life and death, and the attendant storms of climate change and socio-political developments promise to threaten our egoic ‘foundations.’ With many of us set to ‘sea’ in this time of great transition, of not knowing what of the old ways or former relationships will persist, this challenge of letting go of the past will likely mark the decades to come, particularly with the Pluto in Aquarius energy calling in the radically new and unfamiliar. With enough detachment, the thrill of change can be exciting, but seen through a backwards-looking Cancer lens—not always!
There will be fruits
I ruminated over this later that day while walking at our local Laguna wetland, where I took myself to give ‘ground’ to my moody fluctuations and come back into alignment. Accompanied by bird songs and waving tall grasses and summer flowers, such as the periwinkle blue chicory and the soft white Queen Anne’s lace, I thought of the Sufi teaching of “having nothing and wanting nothing.” It’s a tough one! But if we are to truly embrace this business of letting go, and the embrace of ‘what is’ or ‘what is to come’ (of which we absolutely know not), we must let go of our attachments to what and whom we have cherished in our lives. This is of course painful, when it hits us in certain acute moments, with the feeling-body aroused.
But just as I was holding this in my heart-mind, I spied the very first ripe blackberry of the season—a surprise as virtually all the bushes I’d passed so far sponsored only tight green bud clusters, with not yet even a hint edible fruit. But there, calling to me, was this single, dark ripe blackberry. I happily placed it in my mouth, savoring the spreading delight of its perfect sweetness. An ‘out of time’ gift from the earth perhaps, assuring me not to worry— moments of bliss, yet ahead! Then I saw a second, fully ripe berry on the dirt path in front of me. These were the only two in their ripeness I was to see that day. But these were enough. There will be blackberries, even out of season, even in a time of loss and letting go.
I’ve resolved to endeavor to allow these memories of ‘ghosts past’ to simply wash through me in their fullness of feeling, knowing that ultimately, time, as well as death itself, is an illusion of incarnation, and that all that has been seemingly lost is still living within, in some manner.
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Cancer New Moon
The imprint of this New Moon will likely offer us the opportunity to appropriately ground and channel our sorrows or uncertainties over the coming weeks, as Saturn will be in harmonious trine with Sun-Moon in Cancer. As well, sweetness lies ahead! with Neptune trining Venus. This planetary combo can invoke beautiful, seductive flights of fancy through any of the arts, or the natural world, which will serve as a much needed balm to the news headlines.
With Jupiter getting settled in its year-long stay in Gemini, the flow of information will only continue to grow, but Jupiter helps us hold a vision or over-arching purpose as to what we take in, so we don’t keep consuming what doesn’t serve us. The Jovial planet can help us choose to learn and educate ourselves in the areas that serve our highest intentions, and leave the rest.
Chiron in Aries will continue to be a theme, which I’ve discussed in prior posts, as it is squaring Sun, Moon, and Venus in Cancer. The effect will inspire us to cultivate our capacity to assert for our needs, and to show up for ourselves in new ways. Wounded healer Chiron ensures we evoke self-healing as we engage with this work. We will also have a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus with us this month, which can manifest with someone in the room being feisty, stubborn, or unpredictable. Better channeled into our taking action (Mars) for calling in our higher mind inspirations (Uranus) in grounded, earth-centric (Taurus) ways!
In the dreamy days of mid-summer, one of the things I love is having doors/windows open, to listen to the presence of the natural world outside—the bird calls, winds rustling the tree leaves, crickets and cicadas, or the sound of water. This summer, however, we have been visited with significantly more heat, like much of the world, which calls me to close doors and windows for long periods of the day to keep the precious cool air inside. Given this ‘winter in summer’ phenomenon, I’ve found myself turning to music to help invoke the reflective state to swim within. This piece, You Name It, by composer/pianist Nils Frahm beautifully evokes the realm.
I’ll close with an excerpt from a Rumi poem offered up by Michael Meade, in a powerful, free talk on Self-Abandoning (a habit that wayward Cancer energy gets prone to).
What you search for is sleeping in your very being.
And that which sleeps and dreams of sweet water is the taste of the divine in you.
The true way is who and where you already are.
~ Rumi
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Links For Further Meandering
Some of my material herein was sourced from UK astrologer Jessica Davidson – https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2018/06/21/the-mythology-of-the-zodiac-cancer-myths/
Tracy’s Cochran interview on Awakin Weekly about her book, Presence: The Art of Being At Home in Yourself – https://www.awakin.org/v2/calls/695/tracy-cochran/
The Mystic Vision of Hildegard von Bingen in Parabola Magazine – https://parabola.org/2024/04/29/the-mystic-vision-of-hildegard-von-bingen/
Nils Frahm Pianist/Composer – You Name It – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smtFMic7Pv8
Michael Meade, Talk on “How to not abandon oneself” – https://www.mosaicvoices.org/how-to-not-abandon-oneself