Cancer Season Ritual
Join me Wednesday July 16th at 4:30pm PST for a ritual and process for working with and through this astrology. Register for the ritual here.
And So We Pivot
This is why we came here--to work a deep transformation on Earth, in humanity, and in our own hearts and minds.
We are in between the final two eclipses in the Cancer-Capricorn eclipse series that began in early 2019. The solar eclipse in Cancer coincided with the solstice on June 20th, and the Capricorn lunar eclipse is on July 4th. Eclipse season continues until the next lunation on July 20th.
This time is potent.
These eclipses are part of the big stories unfolding in tandem with Saturn, Jupiter, and Pluto in Capricorn: the story about the end of an era and the birth of a new one.
Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, and the south node eclipses all in Capricorn over the past few years have dredged the shadows up to the surface so that we may see more clearly the oppression foundational to the structures of our society, and how those structures manifest within each and every one of us.
And with such awareness now widespread, the old structures can’t sustain themselves. As the old world falls, a new one is born. There is no guarantee that the new will be better than the old. But it will be different.
Eclipses correspond, not necessarily to immediate events, but to the bigger themes at work. A blink in history takes days and months and years to unfold. To turn this corner will take some time yet. But what we don’t yet see reflected in the news and on the streets is already happening in our minds and hearts.
It’s the energy we hold now that matters, that will ripple through to our futures. The Cancer north node eclipse tells of the energy to lean into: nurturance, care, sensitivity, emotional intelligence, feeling, holding space--the heart. The Capricorn south node eclipse signifies what we release: rigidity, punishment, abuse of authority, corrupt hierarchies, emotional disconnection, and the quest for ambition, status, and profit.
Abolishing the Police
The movement around abolishing the police is so acutely in line with this astrology, and emphasized by Mars square the nodal axis (exact June 25), and likely to play out as Mars transits Aries (June 27-January 6, 2021).
Policing is paradigmatic of the old world: the old boys’ club mentality of might makes right; control, force, and violence as protection; and othering as a matter of course. There may be “good cops” out there, but just as much in our society is inherently structurally oppressive, so is policing.
History matters (another Cancer-Capricorn theme). As we learn more about the racist roots of policing (in America, and elsewhere as well: in Canada, the RCMP were created with the intention to control indigenous people, and there is plenty of evidence that that legacy of racism is still present), we have an obligation to imagine and create alternatives--not reform or training or regulation: alternatives.
Policing is perhaps the criterion; but the same goes for nearly every element of society; how can we create alternatives now that we know more? We won’t successfully navigate these waters with policy reform and symbolic gestures alone. We’ve got to pull these weeds out from their roots and plant new seeds.
Revolution in the Deep
Saturn, Jupiter, and Pluto are all retrograde. Venus just completed its retrograde (May 12 - June 24). Mercury is retrograde (June 17-July12). And Neptune just stationed retrograde (June 22).
Retrogrades encourage us to slow down, rest, feel, dream, pray. To go against the grain, to consider what isn’t working--to revise, edit, cut, alter.
Mercury retrograde in Cancer beckons us to come back home to ourselves and to Earth. When events in the outer world are dramatic and upsetting, they can draw us into the news cycle, draw us out of our bodies, capturing our attention and our hearts.
The media can leave us feeling helpless, like spectators of a horrifying drama. But this is a sort of trick that robs us of our agency. We are not helpless, we are not at the whim of the powers that be. We ARE the powers that be.
Change doesn’t take place only online and in the courtrooms, but in our hearts, and in our bodies too. The revolution might, at times, be quiet (which is in no way to dismiss the loud and external forms of activism which are necessary too).
The Cosmic Parents
I think of policing and the penal system as external reflections of a deep logic that we are waking up out of. A logic that says not only do we require force to manage and control, but we also need punishment.
How many of us have integrated the logic of punishment so deeply that we take it for granted? How many of us punish ourselves for what we deem breeches to some code? How many of us punish our loved ones, thinking it’s love?
Is punishment necessary? Is punishment loving?
We are learning to discern accountability from punishment. They are different. Accountability is necessary. It helps us learn and mature. Punishment doesn’t help us learn, although it may scare us into conformity for a time.
Another layer of this Cancer-Capricorn cycle is evolving our inner psychological relation with the parental structures of consciousness. As we mature, we detach from external parental figures and develop inner aspects that take on those roles of nurturing, guiding, offering structure, and support. We are waking up out of an immature relation to those inner parts as doling out punishment and reward.
But even deeper still, it’s not just that we have psychological parts that assume reward and punishment are necessary, but I think many of us see the cosmos itself as operating according to this logic.
How many of us assume we’ve done something wrong if we feel bad? Or can’t help interpreting an unfortunate turn of events as cosmic punishment?
Is the cosmos itself really punishing? I just don’t think it’s like that. I don’t think punishment is a metaphysical truth. I think it’s human and historical, and deeply ingrained in our psychology and society. But I don’t think it’s necessary. And I think some of us are awaking from that nightmare.
The Radical Imagination
With Neptune stationing retrograde, we are more tuned in to the energetics of the collective. And a wave of grief washes over us. We have the capacity now to feel what wasn’t felt before and to hold space for others who are feeling deeply too.
Trauma doesn’t heal if its pain isn’t felt, if its rage isn’t expressed.
And on the other side of pain is peace and creativity. We don’t hold space in order to get to the better feeling states, for that’s not holding space at all. But they emerge of their own accord if we don’t rush or force the process. If we lean in to what is.
Neptune holds the potential to dream big, to birth the new world through imagining. Everything in the human world was imagined before it was manifest. Before we can implement new policy, we imagine the world we wish to see. And if we don’t; others will.
There is a place for realism and practicality, but the imagination is not one of them. It’s time for the radical imagination to flourish. Just because there has been war for as long as we can remember, doesn’t mean war is necessary. Just because we’ve operated under a logic of punishment, doesn’t mean we need to. Let’s imagine beyond the confines of what we’ve known. Let’s make love the soil of the new.
We Are The Powers That Be
In some ways our biggest block is in not recognizing our collective power. We are the people. There are billions of us. To be human is to be powerful. Let’s not allow ourselves to be tricked into believing we have no power therefore we ought not even try. Every action, every thought, every feeling matters. We are creating the future whether we know it or not.
Given that this is retrograde season, and Cancer season, as well as the last in a series of eclipses in Cancer-Capricorn, I thought I’d leave you with a few things I wrote about the previous Cancer eclipses in this series. It could help us tie up some threads to go back and see how this eclipse series has been unfolding stories in our lives over the past few years.
When the Cancer-Capricorn eclipse cycle first began in early 2019, I wrote:
The other night, I was overcome by this profound wave of emotion and knowing, inexplicable and unverifiable, yet undeniable, this feeling of: we are gonna fucking do this. It felt like, collectively, we hadn’t really decided if we are up for the challenge. We hadn’t really decided if we are willing to be fully in our bodies and to face the wreckage of the past thousands of years, to look squarely in the face of the carnage and brutality and trauma, and then to band together and to do all that it will take to move forward, to begin anew, to do better, to heal, to help each other, to rebuild—until now. I had this strong intuition that collectively, we’ve now decided. We’re gonna fucking do this.
At the last eclipse in Cancer, this winter, I wrote:
We tend to think change will require some great exhausting effort. That we will have to gear up for it and push really hard. But the change required now is to stop going about things in that way. To stop forcing and pushing. To do less, consume less, work less. Yes, Saturn in Cap lends itself to discipline and work. But as Saturn is with the South Node, we are called on to release the unhealthy patterns of Saturn, and that includes force and over-effort.
During Cancer season last year I wrote about “Healing the Matrix of Being”:
The dominant culture is solar; it predominantly sees and honours the brilliant, the obvious, the central, the Logos; the one who speaks and does. It tends to neglect and undervalue the one who supports, holds, births, nurtures; the one who listens and feels. And so not only do we tend to undervalue the lunar people in our lives, the lunar parts of ourselves, but we also may not even be aware of the existence of this matrix of being; that which is in the background, holding our experience.
We forgot that the Cosmos itself is holding us. And that if we balance the need to work and do and achieve with the need to be quiet and be held and receive, we will be truly cared for.