Only Connect: Glass Tears
New Moon in Cancer
Welcome to ONLY CONNECT, a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by friend of the letter, Moselle. Today: notes on our new moon in Cancer, exact at 6:31am EDT.
Have we forgotten the heart, no, who could forget the heart, it’s just that so often we are party to its forgoing — by way of a cold, we don’t need this restraint. Feelings drop off in favor of language, ideas, pinging text messages, easy A’s, quick answers. Thoughts boil over, however carefully, into actions.
The sign of Cancer frames this week’s lunation, on the heels of the summer solstice, as a moment of graceful flush. The down and out tumult of the last few weeks entailed a closing-in on sentiment without supercharge, as a period of emotional egress where dramas, real and serious dramas, materialized through calculating minds and ricocheting mouths, rather than in expressions of heart.
The combined force of a Sun, Jupiter and now, New Moon all in Cancer shuffles us back inwards. Cancer serves as an enveloping mobius, lending permission for soul-parts to be stirred up and cycled through, as well as peacefully resettled; it pauses to encase our tears, and fears, in glass. Those still streaming down will be salty, full of lessons worth licking.
Cancers are thought of as those who are good at holding and who are upfront about their wanting to be held.
In Vedic astrology, the lunar cycle falls in the ‘moist’ and clarifying Ardra Nakshatra, symbolized by a literal teardrop. Cancer, too, denotes a liquid churn before crystallization — associated with a pursuit of higher knowledge, as well as security and incubation; with religion, truth and truth-telling; maternal wisdom and womb states.
Cancers are thought of as those who are good at holding and who are upfront about their wanting to be held. Ardra, corresponding more so to Gemini, evokes wilding and upheaval, and amid both, persistence, like a star still shining in a storm. Across both readings, there is the possibility for therapeutics at play, this New Moon being one to inevitably work on you; with so little room for word-worship, to purify and anoint you, rather than you, it.
July is going to be busy; it may be, some are saying, the year’s most pivotal month. Not out there, one hopes, but necessarily within. Added to the fact that an exalted Jupiter will travel through the sign over the next year, and that all three now-Cancerian planets are entangled in a pent-up quincunx with Aquarian Pluto, these are days to muse about our homes and horizons, about desires we wish to encircle and stretch past, and what, through the heart, can be evolved.
Ritual
Cancer rules the fourth house, of home and family; in other words, of ‘ties that bind.’ An artist friend of mine recently did a piece where she gave her household items away for free, each adorned by a length of bow-tied string seeming to say: this thing, in being made available to take, is marked as having once been mine. I like the exercise of trying to map, from within a Cancerian cocoon, domains ‘yours and mine,’ our network of ties and binds, what we have corded onto in ways positive and nourishing; how we fasten tags on people and physical objects that broadcast our presence, bear impressions of human intimacy.
In a literal or more likely, metaphorical form, amid the primordial soup of digital perma-slop image-text turnover and equally mercurial summer feelings, keep a ribbon’s eye on all the shapes and circumstances you’ve touched, affected, even for a season. Let them unravel now, or embrace you in turn.
