Care Is a Doorway

New moon at 4° of Cancer

Alena Hennessy is a painter and painting teacher, who dedicates a good deal of her artistic practice to the care and nurturing of other artists. In between making work and exhibiting, she designs and leads retreats, offers intuitive painting workshops, and publishes inspiring and galvanizing books like Cultivating Your Creative Life. She’s also a flower essence practitioner - and really the Cancerian ideal of an artist, one who also heals and teaches.

Wednesday, June 25th at 3:31am PST, the Moon goes dark and renews herself at 4° of Cancer, the cosmic crab and sign of the Great Water Mother. Cancer is cardinal water, initiating water, and she is the Moon’s domicile, her home sign. Cancer is, essentially, all of our sensitive feelings, combined with all of our instincts towards nurturing and caring and protecting. She is so much of what the Moon embodies and loves. Her energy is somehow both gentle and sturdy, soft and stern. It’s also rhythmic and cyclical, like the heart beating and squeezing and whooshing and spiraling our blood joyfully out into our bodies; like the ocean tide, washing in and out at the shore. As a spiritual teacher, Cancer helps us to accept our neediness, and everyone else’s neediness, and just the realities and facts of organic life and what it really takes to grow and thrive. She shows us how to care for our all our creations, and for our own creative lifeforce, and The Creative Lifeforce itself, by tuning in and staying tuned in, by tending everything steadily and faithfully. When we stay connected to the Moon and to Cancer, when we mind and honor the ebb and flow of all our energetic and material cycles and rhythms, we are more likely to be in Tao—to be in harmonious right relationship, and to experience the peace that comes with that, even in the midst of struggle and strife—and our efforts are more likely to be successful.

On its own, this new moon is already as sweet as they get for making a new beginning. But on top of this essential foundational sweetness, the surrounding astrology is also very good. Jupiter has its cazimi in Cancer less than a day before the new moon, so this week is bringing a simultaneous renewal of both the Moon and Jupiter. If Cancer is the Great Water Mother at her most obviously loving and caring, in her heart-aflame, overflowing-with-compassion Marian aspect, then Jupiter is the Great Sky Father at his most obviously loving and caring. Jupiter is the Daddy Warbucks of the planets: this rich, benevolent, generous guardian just raining down the resources, smelling like fresh-planed cedarwood and safety, inspiring hope and faith and trust. When you feel this cared for at your foundation, you want to venture out; you want to expand. You actually need less safety. You want to plant new seeds and you know you can commit to caring for them, whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

Mercury is nearby, still in Cancer, so in a whole-sign conjunction to the new moon and Jupiter renewal party, and it is ready and willing to lend its brilliance and its facility with communication and magic. The new moon is also in a very close square to Saturn and Neptune, over in the early degrees of Aries, so it’s entangled in an energizing way with whatever is being born in Aries for you over this next year. Altogether, this signature has a real winning the lottery feel to it—if you then offered your winnings to a higher cause, or a more exalted way of being human. So consider this to be excellent and nourishing conditions for whatever new thing you are creating and nurturing into being. But it will be especially nourishing for all visions that are essentially caring and service-oriented, or in direct relationship with the needs of the collective and our need to build more loving and caring social structures. Robin Wall Kimmerer once said “All flourishing is mutual.” That’s where this astrology is at. We are flourishing, we are winning the lottery, but only in the way that is mutual and for everyone.

This astrology is also calling on any part of us—or the world—that is has been neglected or forgotten. It’s calling on all that is in need of loving attunement and tender care and radical reparenting, to come forward and cry out so that it can be attended to. So if you are feeling so sensitive, or your inner children are all activated, or all the people in your care are extra sensitive and very activated, that’s right on time for this new moon. While I am not that present this week with the latest new developments, I know that they are distressing, and that we are all continuing to face the awful, life-and-sanity-threatening consequences of having these incredible unconscious, reactive, unhealed and abusive people in positions of power and authority. I want to honor that reality, and the “holy no” we are living in generally right now. And I want to encourage myself and you to not focus on the “no” this week. Where the tide is at, we really want to take this opportunity to focus on the holy yes; on the mutual flourishing. What if we won the war against hatred and greed and their corrupt systems and structures tomorrow? What would we replace them with? What are we building? What are you, personally, creating, or feeling called to begin creating, that is a part of the new story that is already being written? Let’s turn our attention to that, and give that all the water and sunlight of our love and care. Even a small step in that direction will reverberate this week.

And if you don’t know yet what you are being called to create, or how you want to respond next, start there. Let yourself sink down into the blissful, honest place of not-knowing. Cease all activity that is just for activity’s sake. In other words, cease all reactivity. Surrender to this moon. Be a new moon. Be in the dark. Relinquish all your grasping for certainty, and your attempts to control. Just let it all go. Then wait. Breathe and wait. Listen without agenda to your own body, to the room you are in, to your own breathing. If your mind won’t quiet or quit, give it something to do by thanking it. Thank you mind. Thank you for all your hard work. Incredible. Thank you for trying to keep me and others safe. Thank you. Do that until it feels kind of silly, and then until you really mean it and feel it sincerely. Thank you mind. And the rational, fearful, doing-obsessed mind will wind down. Your ego will start to remember that it is not in charge, and does not need to be in charge. Then you can contact, instead, your heart, your feelings, and welcome them. I’m thinking of that Joe Hudson quote: “Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions. She won’t come into your house unless all her children are welcome.” Right? So welcome and protect all the emotions of your heart. In the process, you will start to feel again that you are a part of a Whole, and you are that Whole. From that perspective of Wholeness, which is Wisdom, you will eventually hear your own voice, telling you what’s needed. Listen to it. Follow its lead.

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.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions! Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, relate with it and adapt it in any way you see fit.)

The Cancer archive

Being the Water in a World on Fire - full moon at 23° of Cancer (winter 2025)

Mothering the Revolution - new moon at 14° of Cancer (summer 2024)

Oh Heart, Great Sage of Love, Show Me What You’re Made Of - full moon at 4° of Cancer (winter 2023)

Times are Tender, and Getting Tenderer - new moon at 24° of Cancer (summer 2023)

Open Channel - full moon at 16° of Cancer (winter 2022)