Cycles and Your Inner Sea: Cancer New Moon

By Amanda Painter

The sea is one of nature’s embodied paradoxes: though it is in one sense constant in its vastness and depth, it is also constantly changing — such as with the tides. True, storms and certain types of currents can seem to come up suddenly on the ocean, but the tides offer a cycle of continual shift that is dependable, and which fosters many kinds of life.

Solstice sunrise meditation, June 21, 2017; photo by Amanda Painter.

On Friday — just two days after yesterday’s solstice (when the Sun entered Cancer to begin the summer season) — the Sun and Moon will conjoin for a New Moon.

This Cancer New Moon, exact at 10:31 pm EDT on June 23 (2:31 UTC June 24), seems to emphasize the ocean’s particular flavor of constant change. I realize that “change” is kind of a trigger-word for some people. Not for everyone; there are those who thrive on continually reinventing themselves and their immediate environments.

For others, though, security and stability are paramount. Of course, the catch in the pursuit of security and stability is that simply being alive implies that one is constantly changing.

At the most basic level, if you’re a living organism with cells (and if you’re reading this, I guarantee you that you are), those very cells are engaged in processes that create changes in your body (which is mostly water) moment to moment. Much of that cellular action is cyclical. Change is not only not necessarily bad, it is the very thing that keeps us alive, growing and able to heal on all levels — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Any astrological event in Cancer is likely to invoke the theme of cycles: partly because of its association with the sea, and especially because Cancer is ruled by the Moon (which itself cycles visually, and causes those aforementioned tides). A New Moon in Cancer is like a distillation of these themes — and an embodiment, since it signals the ending of one lunar cycle and the beginning of another. This year, coming so close on the heels of the Cancer solstice, the New Moon is also helping to usher in a new phase in the seasonal cycle.

In exact aspect to the Cancer New Moon (which is in the third degree of Cancer) are asteroids Achilles and Tantalus, opposite in Capricorn; and the minor object Salacia, making a square from Aries.

Achilles and Tantalus seem to speak of the confidence we tend to place in that which seems solid and unchanging — whether that confidence is real or deserved or not — and the way that the solid, unchanging security we think we want and need from external sources is always just out of reach, even when we think we’ve attained it. If that sounds familiar, see whether tomorrow’s New Moon offers a way to negotiate between those ideas and your inner sense of the cycles of your life. Ultimately it is from within that a sense of safety or stability must come.

Salacia was named after the goddess of calm seas. Yet in Aries, the sign of self-identity, it is making a tension-causing square to the New Moon. You might ask yourself whether you in fact identify yourself as ‘at peace’ more often when you allow yourself to take action in accordance with the cycles of your life. Strange as it sometimes seems, resisting action often creates more inner turbulence than does going with a new flow.

Additionally, Mercury is loosely conjunct the Cancer New Moon, only three degrees away. It looks as if an intellectual understanding of cycles could corroborate your emotional experience of them, as well as how you express your embodied cycles in the world around you. Understanding how you tend to move within your own personal cycles could offer a unique, fluid and dependable sense of ‘safety’ or ‘security’ in contrast to the idea that everything in your life must find its ideal state and then stay there forever.

Because as long as you’re alive, that idea will be a lie — even if you don’t have significant planets in Cancer in your personal astrology. Even the calmest of seas requires — and is in part defined by — the ever-changing tides.

Finally, note that a trine between Venus in Taurus and Pluto in Capricorn, exact on Saturday at 4:59 am EDT (8:59 UTC), will be upping the emotional intensity this weekend. This bodes particularly well for relationships of the loving, lusty and sexual variety, and for making emotionally deep art.

You might even find yourself experiencing some kind of compelling or magnetic attraction to someone, or uncovering profound psychological insights into an existing relationship. With both Venus and Pluto in earth signs, this is a fully embodied, sensual emotional space we’re talking about.

In the darkness of Friday’s New Moon, see what you can feel in your body as you float on the tides of your emotions. I realize that could be an intimidating space here in this disembodied digital age, when so many people carry so much unprocessed pain. Yet in a world where the only true constant is change, you might actually get a better feel for how to cycle through life to your own true rhythm, carried along by the cosmic tides.

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