Full Moon in Cancer

I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.

Dear Children,

For that is what we are, undeveloped and young to this planet. Each of us has been a child chronologically if not in the idyllic sense and though likely no real children of age are reading, I address you as beings fragile, not fully formed. Dears, what has happened to our mother, our Moon, our sense of soft imaginal tending? What has happened to our instincts?

Luna is round, round, round, she is full, she is at home. In a perfect world this crab-signed Moon is all things ocean, and feeling, incubative and nurturing. She would love nothing more than to bathe us in some perfect milk which would both feed and clean us. There would be no wolf at the door that she could not woo or shoo, shoo, shoo away. But here, in this brave new world of robots and globalism, mother is so fraught. Our dear mother so unsure of herself and her ability to be our endless resource.

“Letting Go for Many Moons” Digital Collage by Liz Wickhart

Where is home? What do crabs do in the winter? How does the sea behave when we are all too cold to imagine her waves? What’s does a fecund summer-sign Moon do perfectly full when caught in a bramble of bone-dry trees and poised at the tip of her own knife-like pincers?

“It only takes a single night of frost to kill a generation. To live then is only a matter of time, of timing.” - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Our double helixes shiver with the coming of a new age. Most of us wonder just how much change is coming, is the sum total of our history to meet us with an uninhabitable set of consequences? The waters of our being and the planet swell at this Moon. The Moon and Mars in Cancer, Venus and Saturn in Pisces; four of the original planets being in water signs is like one last thirsty drink before the skies burn and dry.

The Full Moon in Cancer at 23˚ perfects January 13th 2:26pm PST (your time). Barely separating from a sextile with Uranus in Taurus at 23˚, Luna is a mother in peril but brilliant at unexpected regeneration. She will take us into her bosom with a heavy quality because, like all good mothers, she has life lessons, and brave attitudes, and real feelings to share with us. She wants to raise us better and understands we are fighting. We are at war in our imaginations, and in our hearts and sadly, as ever, on our lands.

Luna is headed into full body contact with a fallen retrograde Mars in Cancer at 27˚. Sullen and sucked back to sea, he is in a war of emotions untenable and unwinnable. As they approach one another she leans in to pat his brow with dewey cloths but he wont be cooed. Instead slicing at her gut, he forces her down with him into the mud and turmoil. Mars is himself separating from a trine with Neptune wherein all that glittered gold left him with a stench of something abysmal. Now he knows no kindness and less so will he offer it. A wisdom in being jerked from our nests of hope is about to seep into every nook and cranny of our living dream. This is the medicine that mother brings her children, a tough love,’ “See what you have made of yourselves?” she cries. “See the monsters you have made us into?”

“The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, I’m not a monster. I’m a mother… The heads of the green beans went on snapping. They thunked in the steel sink like fingers. You’re not a monster, I said.

But I lied.” - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Dear mothers, all of you who ached in births of various sorts, I see you. Your breath is ragged and there is blood on your fangs from those terrible thoughts you feed on at night when you hide yourself from your young. I see your hunger and sickness, your disinterested desire to leave us all for something less complicated. The cupboards are bare and still we press for our supper, for new ideas, for more than any earth, nature or heaven could provide. You brought us in, why not take us out? We, ungrateful urchins with mouths that screech, we are your most tender heart and promise of the future. What a dilemma.

Something from the past is ready to emerge for healing. It may feel impossible but its burden is a monster that taints our creativity. It dooms us to repeat it’s mistakes and we have to see past the disillusioned poison of the well we all drink from. The cycle of birth and death eats itself and us. We can’t escape it. No matter how many fancy machines we build, or how many innovative bypasses to the mess of afterbirths and ectoplasms are invented, we are stained in the conundrum of “monster juice”. The randomness of fortune’s wheel is part of our genius and she is about to baptize us in this message.

“What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Consider this:

While we are being confronted by some kind of deep breach of safety, the typhoon in our collective psyche burgeons with possibility. Even as sea thunders rumble, the planets with the greatest dignity in the sky are fair and saintly-kind. Together the Moon in Cancer and the true Venus on half-shell in Pisces, have a lot of yin power. They can walk between worlds with love both wrathful and gracious. They speak to our potentials embodied and ensouled, if we listen we can make medicine out of our poisons. If we learn to spin our discontent in a kind of creative centrifuge instead of spearing our future on tines of impatience as we race to the bottom of our demise, we may begin to piece together a vision worth our salt. We may have the chance to remake our future vision into something livable and attenuated so that generations to come can puzzle and love one another with evolutionary grace.

Look to the Cancer sector in your natal wheel. What house topics and aspects are alight with this moon? What are you defending and what are you willing to let go of so that a new world is forged from your better angel? Now is the time to dream of the scene you want to see when the curtains of fire part in March and April. Set your sights on something generative for all beings, let go of the hard feelings and forgive us our trespasses. You are the god that makes the world. You are the child and the mother of your own destiny.

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Liz Wickhart is an artist, writer, and somatic educator. Facilitating in a partnership style of learning and healing, she and her clients stalk the wilderness of body, mind, movement, and stars. Together they discover new options for mobility, strength, aliveness, and meaning.