Being the Water in a World on Fire

Full moon at 23° of Cancer

M. Fatchurofi (@rooovie)

On Monday afternoon, at 2:26pm PST on January 13th, the Moon is bright and full at 23° of Cancer, bringing us the first lunation of 2025. Cancer is cardinal, initiating water — in the northern hemisphere, it guides the first month of summer, where its job is to protect and nurture all the young life born in the spring. So it’s an archetype of loving and caring and giving sanctuary, connected to the themes of home and family, domestic and emotional labor. Its nature is essentially emotional and intuitive, concerned with well-being and relationships. It’s our receptivity and sensitivity, our ability to attune to emotional undercurrents and feel what’s needed. And while all this is a kind of soft labor, Cancer is famous for its tough outer shell; it’s a highly defensive sign, sometimes strict with boundaries, always tenacious in protecting what it loves. Cancer’s most spiritual teachings begin when any illusions of carefree love start vanishing, and the realities and responsibilities of our commitment to each other set in. There is a richness of love, or a thickening of it even, that is only possible when things get heavy and hard; when what love and interconnectivity demands of us gets overwhelming; when our love for each other is both the crisis and the solution.

Cancer is ruled by the Moon, and so the Moon is in her domicile here, feeling herself fully, able to access all of her moon powers. If you are comfortable with the full range and volume of your emotions, in a loving relationship with your mysterious, genius body and all its complicated needs, and you can put work and public Capricorn responsibilities aside for a few days, a full moon here can feel dreamy and good, even luxurious. It can be like being on the shore of the ocean at high tide, all the psychic channels wide open, and you’re singing and praying, swimming in the vibes, receiving visions of ancient love from the Water Mothers. If that was you this last weekend, or in the next two days, please just enjoy that, and be a full cup overflowing, and say some prayers for the rest of us.

Many of us moved into the field of this full moon and its water in direct relationship with fire at its most destructive, as the confluence of wildfire and hot Santa Ana winds, moving at hurricane speeds and spreading that fire rapidly, burned down tens of thousands of acres of Los Angeles. We were feeling the Cancer moon themes of care and relationship and providing sanctuary to the vulnerable, while having to sit with the harsh truth of how many had just lost everything; while actively trying to get to safety, or help others get to safety, or put out the fire. If you have been impacted directly by the fires, if you have lost your home, or someone in your family or community has, my prayer is that you feel how many of us are with you and loving you right now, trying to surround you with invisible protection and cash and the physical evidence that you are connected and not alone. There are also so many people are helping right now, putting themselves in harm’s way, to provide that protection. No matter what the government does or does not do, now and in the coming months and years, there are other structures of care—that’s Cancer at its best, serving its highest calling, creating sanctuary, physical and emotional, out of relationships and love.

This particular full moon in Cancer is in a very close conjunction with Mars, who retrograded back here a week ago on January 6. Mars is all fire, in the way that Cancer is all water. The first week of the year, Mars was in a direct opposition to Pluto, and while there is no literal connection between that and the fires breaking out, it’s symbolically powerful to take in. Generally, Mars in Cancer is a kind of heart warrior, and it heightens the already strong desire here to protect what we love most. But because Mars is retrograde, its on pause, and there’s a struggle to take forward action, or effective action, or any action at all. And that’s coloring the start to this year—that our assertive, active, warrior energies are in a state of learning and review and reflection, and that it got a stern talking-to from Pluto, god of soul work, god of bringing death to everything that doesn’t serve that soul work. When Mars was retrograding through Leo, the question felt like what is my authentic creative response to a world in crisis? What do I most want to express, and what gifts of mine will be helpful in this fight? And now that it’s in Cancer, the question has shifted to how to I combine my courage with my compassion? Or how do I get my fight instincts to be fully informed by my loving, compassionate heart? How might staying connected to my heart build my capacity and resilience for a long, fierce, ongoing fight, trying to protect what I love most? And these questions aren’t meant to be clearly answered yet, just deeply felt and reflected on. Because the answers that do arise are going to shape things for us, they are going to give us a direction.

There are a few other conditions—the lunar nodes moved from Aries and Libra on Saturday to Pisces and Virgo. And the full moon is also getting an exact trine from Neptune in Pisces, which is just a few degrees from the north node now. The last 18 months there has been a north node emphasis on embodied agency and personal power, and a south node emphasis on healing from our avoidant tendencies and people pleasing, so we’ve been pushed to step on the gas a bit more, or a lot more, and letting more of our healthy aggression lead us. And now the north node is going to be emphasizing our psychic and intuitive navigation of the unseen world, and the south node is going to be releasing our tendencies toward order and control and perfection. With that exact trine from Neptune in Pisces, there is a lot of support coming through on this full moon, but it’s from our dreamy nature, our imagination, our allies in the spirit realms, and the part of our life ruled by the unseen, unmanifest, collective unconscious. That might not be the kind of help we think we need, we might want physical earthly help right now, but that’s a part of the larger shift happening for the next year and half. It’s going to feel like we are driving blind, in a chaotic, disorganizing time. We are going to need to learn how to trust something bigger, and tap into sources of wisdom that can see, even when we can’t.

I got a lot of condolence cards in the month after my mom died, from good friends who couldn’t be with me physically, but put in the time and to create a small artifact of their care and love. I’ve never been good at sending cards like that, for any occasion, and I was surprised by how powerful it was, how it worked—it made me feel connected and cared for. There was one card from my friend Laura Moulton, and it had a line from a poem by Victoria Chang, called “Love Letters” from her collection The Trees Witness Everything, and while I was writing this it actually like fell from where it was tucked on a shelf, and floated down to the floor, like it wanted to be sent to you all. This is the line: “There is a bird and a stone / in your body. Your job is not / to kill the bird with the stone.” It meant a thousand things to me, this line of poetry, receiving it during a time of acute grief. I felt around in my body for the bird and the stone, for the heaviness and the lightness, for the part of me that hoped and transcended and the part of me that sank down into the grief, and they were all there. As you sit with whatever you are sitting with on this full moon, I wanted you to have that image with you, too, and the reminder that your job is not to kill that bird, whatever that is for you. Your job is to love the stone and the bird.

If you can, take time to pause and connect with your physical and emotional intelligence, and check in with yourself first, and all your parts, and then check in with others. How are we really doing? How are our bodies? Our hearts? Our relationships? Are we getting enough care? If we have not been getting our needs met, it’s going to magnify our hard feelings about that, but that’s ok—we need to know where we are at, so that we can call in the change and support we need. If Cancer had a teaching for us right now, its the reminder that the one resource that is endlessly renewable, that we will never run out of, is love. It may seem like we cannot possibly continue, but we can, and we need to remember that we can, and to keep loving to the best of our ability, to keep learning from love what it requires of us, what it’s capable of. A question that Cancer asks all the time, whether Mars is there or not, is what would I do if the whole world was in pain? And the answer is, I would be a source of love in the world. I would be water. And I would do everything I can to ease as much suffering as I can.

Sending all my love and protection to all of you today — and thank you for your patience. I usually try to get these letters out the day before the lunation, but I have been sitting with so many dear ones who have lost everything, just caring at full volume. Here’s to a whole year of caring at full volume, and having what we need to do that.

I know there are so many people hurting right now, and so many worthy and deserving of our help. Here is a link to a large collection of Gofundme’s for black families in Altadena who got displaced by the fires, and I’d like to pass it along just in case any of you have some extra resources and are looking to spread that around: LINK

And here is a link to someone I love up close and personally, the poet Beth Marquez, who I grew up with on open mics. She just lost everything, and I would like to surround her with love and support, every little bit helps: LINK

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of Cancer writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some specific suggestions for ritually working with this full moon, and a generative creative writing prompt in sync with tides of the current astrology.