Mothering the Revolution

New moon at 14° of Cancer

Chris Oh’s Seep, 2024, acrylic on seashell

Friday, July 5th at 3:57pm PST, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 14° of Cancer, a cardinal water sign and the archetype of the Great Water Mother. You may have been feeling the call of this moon all week, in the form of an especially tender heart or general wateriness, or the flaring up of distressing feelings and symptoms and insecurities. It’s all an indication to pause, reorient, and check in with our bodies; resensitize; absorb this new season and any changes in situation and the arising needs we have because of them. Notice what’s in need of reconnection and repair. Notice what could use a little reparenting. Cancer’s energy is intuitive, nurturing, and loving, and she wants to help us tend to all that and some general recentering. She wants us to remember especially how to care for our creative lifeforce, or even The Creative Lifeforce, how to mind the intelligence of its ebb and flow so that we can sustain the long loving effort of bringing new forms into fully realized being. This new moon is arriving between two Capricorn full moons, and in the midst of a larger quality of time that is very difficult and fiery and not so much about resting and being, but about the massive work in front of us. So let’s all really breathe this one in if we can.

Cancer is the Moon’s domicile, it’s the sign where she feels most at home. The Moon is taking deep luxurious sighs here and has full access to all her moon powers. Together they are the yin to the Sun’s yang. They teach us the way of receptivity, of stilling and sensing, of feeling our way through the dark. They want us to focus on being and being with rather than doing. They want to remind us that all of our efforts will be for nothing if we are making them from a place of unconscious reactivity. In fact, taking action for action’s sake may make things much worse, intensifying suffering and prolonging the process of resolution. Cancer and the Moon aren’t teaching us to be passive; rather there are times when the most effective response is a kind of active surrender, a relinquishing of attempts to control, a pausing and sinking/syncing in to listen and wait. In that place, the rational fearful mind, consumed with what it thinks it knows, can start to quiet; the ego can recede and decenter. We can contact and feel, instead, the wisdom of the whole. Body, mind, heart, spirit; everything within and without. We can deepen our understanding. Eventually, and right on time, knowledge of the next right action for us to take will emerge.

As with all new moons, a current of manifestation is kicking off, and it’s good timing for ritualizing new beginnings or calling things into being. There’s also a lot of support constellating. Venus is also here with the Sun and Moon in Cancer, and Fridays are her day, so that’s like a full choir of water mothers and compassion goddesses, ready to bless children and creations of all kinds. There’s also a sextile from Mars in Taurus, offering some longevity magic and the wisdom of slowly warming up to a steady, sustainable pace. And there’s a very sweet trine from Saturn and Neptune, both now retrograde in Pisces. Neptune is in its peak at 29° of Pisces, sitting on that final anaretic degree, not just of Pisces but the entire zodiac. Its generally trying to dissolve our boundaries and personal attachments so we might be in the greater cosmic flow. Saturn is working on the opposite; it wants us to have the boundaries we need, that our creative lifeforce needs. It wants to slow and still and steady our inner waters, to make our energies less volatile, our intuitions clearer, more reliable, and more in-conversation with reality. They are both in Pisces until early 2026, so their collaboration is still very much in process. Their trine could mean this new moon is a little dreamier than we wish, insights arriving as images and impressions and bits of song, genuine worries that our visions are delusional, that sort of thing. It’s nothing that can’t be abided by keeping one eye in, one eye out, as they say. Drop your disbelief, let yourself fantasize, and stay knowing where the ground is. Be full of wonder and not-knowing and not-needing-to-know. See what arises.

Whether you want anything for yourself personally this new moon, consider this next week an ideal time to pray and call in the inner resources that will be needed to make it through the second half of this year. And please consider extending that prayer for the collective. Practice any intuitive or spiritual practices you feel called to, anything that steadies you, nourishes you, brings you comfort; anything that helps you to access the light during dark and difficult times. Be curious about what it would take to stabilize your access to hope, the fierce kind of hope mothers have. 8 years ago, in July of 2016, in another election year like this one, Rebecca Solnit reflected on her book Hope in the Dark, and what it meant for the moment:

It is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings…

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

It’s a much longer piece of writing, with more on mushrooms and collective power and successful revolutions, please give yourself that if you need it, The Guardian keeps it up without a paywall. It’s one of the things I keep close, when I doubt whether what we do matters. We matter, and the actions we take to create hope, to be sources of love in the world, they matter. And, my heart goes out to all of us, living in this open wound of a world, trying to figure out exactly where and how we can nurture this revolution of interdependence and care, how we can apply ourselves to the work of love and repair. I don’t know how we will do this. I don’t know. I worry about our tendency to sabotage ourselves and cloud our hearts with righteousness and blame, right when we need to unite in defense of the most vulnerable. But I’m taking Rebecca’s advice to dwell in the not knowing and uncertainty and its openings. And I’m taking the new moon’s advice to pause, feel my feelings, get still, and listen. May the grace of the Water Mothers permeate the depth of our beings. May we release all unnecessary fear. May gratitude and joy soften our genius hearts. May our minds open to the possibilities.

Exactly what I need, from Ariel Rosso

Ritual & Writing Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit. Make your own magic.)