New Moon in Cancer | July 2021
New Moon at 18 Cancer
9 July 2021
9:17pm EST
Greetings dear ones. Happy New Moon in Cancer.
As I always say, the New Moon is an opportunity to “become new” with the archetype of the lunation, in this case the Cancer archetype.
Water is Life
Cancer is a water sign, which governs and resonates with the human emotional body. Water can be soft and flowing, yet also wear down great structures and carve great valleys. Water, like the emotions, is healthiest when in motion and can change states in response to its environment.
The emotional body brings us specific, unique and important messages from the instinctual self and from the subconscious. They each have a purpose and something essential to communicate to us as they arise. While all emotions are essential to the human experience, they are most useful to us when like water, they are in motion and we relate to them in present time without holding on. They are energy in motion (e-motion).
So this moon is an opportunity to renew our relationship to our emotional body, to treat it like a wise friend who always guides our way with its messages.
Our relational selves: tapping the maternal nurturing generative energies within us all
This New Moon in Cancer is also an opportunity to engage our relational lives in a way that best meets who we are now and what we want to contribute to one another and to life.
Cancer is one of the cardinal or culture bearer signs, which are all concerned with relationships, whether with self, a specific other, culture, community or the greater earth ecosystem of which we are a part.
Cancer is a feminine archetype, often connected to the Divine Mother energy of creation. This isn’t limited to the mothering of human children, but this essential nurturing, generative, maternal energy inside every one of us.
This is the energy we use to:
Create safe spaces for ourselves and others; shelter + safe harbors
Nurture new + tender seedlings into mighty stable beings that blossom to their full potential
Create containers of compassion, empathy and healing in personal relationships
Protect, care for, and nurture children, projects, ideas, creations, and “the vulnerable ones”
Give from a place of being deeply resourced
Tend to and nurture that which will sustain and enhance life for seven generations forward
Cancer’s unconditional love, tenderness, nurturance, and compassion is personal–– it’s not our capacity to feel love for All, it’s our capacity to love a particular other within our ecosystems.
Concentric circles of interrelated ecosystems
Let’s get back to this idea of ecosystems. We participate in many.
On the physical level, we are made up of different organs, cells, and even other organisms such as bacteria and fungi (the human microbiome is still a pioneer area of study, but science acknowledges that the number of microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses in the human body actually outnumber the human cells in the body). We relate with many others within.
Our psyche is also a collective of “beings,” as has been illuminated by Internal Family Systems, and deeply engaged ones such as Hal and Sidra Stone, Carl Jung, Marion Woodman, and Bill Plotkin, among many others. We all have as parts of our psyche the inner child, protective parts, wounded parts, and resourced facets of psychological wholeness.
We relate to one another, in concentric circles–– from those we practice daily intimacy with (children, partners, friends, family, pets, co-workers), to close extended family and friends, to those we relate with perhaps in a less intimate way in digital and physical spaces.
We also relate to this Earth and the more-than-human world—the plants, the animals, the insects, the sunlight, the planets and the stars. But, with cancer, this isn’t general, it’s personal. It’s about your relationship to a specific place in nature, a certain tree, a particular bird, one of the planets.
This New Moon invites us to renew our loving, compassionate, protective and empathic connections within any of these ecosystems. It invites us to bring our maternal nurturing generative love to bear on those we care about and want to relate to.
This includes those within us – our bodies and psyches – and those outside of us, in the human and more-than-human realms. But this is particular and specific love, with which we can be polyamorous –– NOT in the trendy way –– but in a way of loving many, truly and deeply as a path to our inner wholeness and to bringing sustenance to our cultures and communities of human and earth.
And in service to loving another ––particularly, deeply –– I offer this poem:
Love is particular.
When you love someone,
A tangible, touchable someone,
The whole world opens up.
If you want to know the universe,
Dare to love one person.
All the secret teachings are right here––
Go deeper, and deeper still.
The gift of concentration
Is the spaciousness that surrounds it.
Focus illuminates immensity.
––Sutra 99 of the Radiance Sutras, Lorin Roche
Caretaking or caregiving
With this Cancer lunation, we are also invited to review and renew our relationship to how we care. One of my teachers differentiates between caretaking and caregiving as follows.
Caretaking is the act of giving our care from a motivation/desire to avoid abandonment, criticism or some other experience of lack; or to care in order to rescue or control; or to care out of fear or incompleteness.
Caregiving is something we offer from our nurturing generative centers, from a place of loving, discerning wholeness + respect for self and other. It doesn’t seek to save, enable, rescue or do-the-work-for but is one of mutual care, nurturance, and generative energy. It amplifies life, rather than depleting it. It offers attunement and empathy for self and other in equal measure and in that organic flow that water knows so well.
This is a tender path to walk, as we renew our relationships to our beloved ones. It’s not a place for blame, shame or judgment, but a place for radical personal compassion and a willingness to step from victimhood and fragments into our wholeness. Caregiving honors our interdependence.
The Chandra symbol for this lunation, speaks to the tenderness we experience as we endeavor to risk revealing our “unarmored underbelly,” as we attempt to make the “excruciating edge” of revealing our innermost soul somehow safe and secure. It speaks to what many of us experience as supersensitivity, both a superpower and one that comes with tremendous responsibility.
Chandra symbol for New Moon in Cancer
CANCER 19
An opossum comes out into the moonlight.
Inside-out.
Massively vulnerable and strictly unreachable.
A verge in destiny where the innermost soul is revealing its true colors in a magical display.
However, it is a ritual performance and heavily guarded and veiled all the while.
You give a glimpse of the unarmored underbelly, yet mask so many things in order to make this excruciating edge safe and secure and something to dream into at many angles, but remain alone within.
Becoming ready to open to threshold states, vastly afraid of myriad dangers.
And therefore, placing a small part of yourself into the light of the shared arena while retaining control over the rest.
A testing of the waters with such underlying supersensitivity that there will be a lot more hiding than seeking before you discover how to put yourself forward freely, face the shadow of your fears, and live to tell about it.
This new moon is a time to be tender and loving with our inner opossums, the ones who bare their teeth in defense or play dead, as ways to cope with perceived threats. Yet also this same one who sees in the dark our true soul’s colors, and labors to make them known–– to discover how to put ourselves forward freely, face the fears, and live to tell about it.
If you’re interested in diving into your personal astrology Soul Map or would benefit from the support of a soul guide for all you are navigating right now, please contact me. I’d love to explore cosmos and soul with you in a way that truly serves and nurtures you.