The Ebb and Flow of Belonging
Cancer New Moon | Tuesday | June 28 | 9:52pm CST
This Cancer New Moon searches for and cultivates peace amidst the turbulence of the waves that crash into the seashore. It asks for containers to learn the stories our emotions tell us as the tide swells and we ride their potent waves.
In western myth, Cancer gets represented by the sideways-scuttling crab, who lives its life in this liminal zone, ecologically tense, where the sea meets the earth. No one describes this place better than Dionne Brand:
“It’s difficult to live near the sea. It overwhelms. Well, not true. It owns. Your small life is nothing to it. The sea uses everything. Small things like bits of black bottles and rusty bottle tops, smoothed transparent fish, fish bone, cockles against small rocks…The sea can make a tree into spongy bits, it can wear away a button to a shell. It can wash away blood and heal wounds.”
Such is what Cancerian waters invoke. Life not in the sea, but by the sea, where human life longs to be united with the sea, and knows that falling into a total belonging means annihilation.
Because if it does anything, Cancer feels its bonds. It starts low, with the bonds that are essentially umbilical, to the parents, to family, to the bonds our bodies will never forget. Those bonds are eventually cast wider, to those we’ve befriended, those we’ve loved, those we’ve chosen as family, and even those we’ve chose as community.
Like the seashore, bonds are turbulent. We can feel the violence that echoes through them. Birth is violent. A seed pushing its way through the soil is violent. A wave crashing onto earth is violent.
And Cancer is inherently tribal. It lives between the we and the y’all, or if in severe expression, between the us and the them. Cancer feels that there is an us that needs protection and care, whether that’s a community, a family, or an internal family system of parts of a self that need protecting. And if there is any sign willing to cut a bitch to protect a bitch, y’all, it’s Cancer.
This new moon creates supportive challenges to personal growth. It squares Jupiter in Aries, so we have some occasion to expand a little beyond our ego shells, which may have been functioning more like cages. We have to grow beyond who we thought we were into order to become who we are. Of course this can feel like breaking, or like pain.
Registers of “we” here challenge “I,” so see if it’s possible for you to stay humble to your sensations and emotions, and to find the language to share them with others. Venus in Gemini sextiles Jupiter, and there could literally not be a better aspect to facilitate relationality around the expansion of our sense of self.
How does Venus in Gemini facilitate this relationality? It makes it easier for us to ask each other questions about our experiences, and try out new language with which to represent our personal experiences more accurately.
Perhaps you can begin curating questions to ask yourself and your loved ones. What does this pain of breaking open feel like for you? How do you experience growth beyond your own edges?
These questions and capacities for learning are particularly important at this time because Cancer can forget that in the context of togetherness, individuation still has to happen. So within our togetherness, we need to make space to learn about our particularities and differences. Not everyone experiences the same events in the same way; nonetheless we need to be able to hold ourselves and each other when events occur.
Another quality of Cancer is nostalgia. It’s very easy for Cancer to be so in love or in loops with memory that it forgets to recognize the present as something different from the past.
(If y’all know anything about me it’s that I like to queer time and time travel and revel in how the past is fundamentally present. And so is the future. But we can still differentiate between them.)
The myth Cancer likes to fall for is that if you stay in the past by excessively running its narratives or trying to solve its problems, you’ll finally find belonging.
This can look like identifying the same story around you all the time, and asking yourself what ifs. As in, if I could just figure out how never to experience this traumatizing circumstance again, I will finally belong with myself and others.
First, it’s important to normalize that. That is you responding to how you desired to live in the past, even when your annihilation was near you. Your organism has always had this desire to live. You can cherish that.
And what you can do now is ask yourself, what does it look like to respond to that desire to live now? In the present.
It’s very ok to not know. The courage to not know is admirable, and it’s made more available through the Aries Jupiter - Gemini Venus sextile. Beautifully, this aspect in the chart also directs us to a first step, already mentioned above, namely: explore language. Natalie Diaz once said “Language is one of our desires to live.”
You can expand your concept of languages, just like you’re letting your life, your concept of self, and all your relations expand. Explore the language of words, of grammars, the language of emotion, the language of touch, the language of symbols, of the birds, the frogs, the beyond. Can you get to know them through questions?
As you go, remember that Cancer exists in the ebb and flow of belonging. It knows that we have to be careful of the alluring sea and its obliterating riptides. It knows that every umbilical cord is severed and remains so. Cancer knows no belonging can be complete without the disappearance of the self. Finding our way back home is never a repetition of what was once belonging. It’s the creation of a new and different experience of belonging. Finding belonging can feel like a sweet and lulling memory, and it can feel disastrously uncomfortable because it isn’t a memory. So with this moon let us learn how to intend and eventually build containers safe enough to expand into new experiences of I, us, and we.
With love,
Amalia