Today’s New Moon in Cancer focuses our attention and our emotions on who and what we care about. Cancer is the Moon’s sign, a place of hearth and home, of the kind of love that nourishes and protects.
At 14º Cancer, this New Moon is in the second decan which is named The Walled Garden in Austin Coppock’s book, 36 Faces.
I have to say walled gardens have always been a kind of fantasy refuge for me. Places in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and later times in history where sun-warmed stone protected tender roses, fruit trees, herbs, and beautiful flowers.
In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden, children who had been abandoned and lost find health again, and a kind of healing that extends out to their families.
This is what we think of with a New Moon in Cancer.
A key question, though, is who is allowed into that garden?
Cancerian kinds of caring focus on family, either the families we’re born into, the ones we choose, the ones who find us. There’s a sense in Cancer of needing to keep danger out, to protect the vulnerable within.
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We quickly get into defining in groups and out groups. Those who are safe and those who are dangerous. Those we like and those we don’t. Those who are like us and those who are different.
This kind of caring can quickly become isolating, exclusionary, and discriminatory.
So it’s good–it’s great, in fact–that Venus is also in the sign of Cancer and widely conjunct this New Moon.
Venus at 22º Cancer is separating from the Sun after her cazimi on June 4. She’s still not visible in the sky. We won’t see her again until late July. Yet the more distance she gains, the more she unfolds what she saw and learned during her time with the Sun. She’s finding her own voice again. She’s forming her message.
Venusian caring includes a commitment to balance, to fairness, to social justice. It’s not just about me and mine any more. It’s about what’s fair. Venus brings the realization that none of us is truly free until all of us are free.
Venus in Cancer reminds us that the personal is indeed political.
The walled garden of the New Moon feels very personal and private. Today and in the days ahead, we may long for a retreat from the tumult and dangers of the world. We want nothing more than to feel safe and secure and loved with those we love around us.
Yet Venus, with her wider perspective, wants us to notice that walled gardens are places for women and children, feminine spaces where the weak are sequestered while the strong and masculine go out to protect and defend.
Venus wants us to notice that this is a story. This is creative fiction. This is not how the world actually works.
Notice, for example, that it was a prince leaving his own walled garden and seeing the world as it is that led to his enlightenment as the Buddha.
With this realization comes responsibilities and the need for action.
The New Moon is applying to, as Venus separates from, a trine to Saturn in Pisces. Saturn reminds us that caring is work. Children don’t grow themselves. Food doesn’t magically appear. Protection isn’t something that happens outside the walls only. It needs to be created inside as well.
In Pisces, Saturn’s focus is wide. The Sun, Moon, and Venus trining Saturn in Pisces bring up questions like, how do we feed the world? How can we protect all children? How can we house everyone? Provide health care? Provide education and opportunities?
The New Moon may say, I want my family to be safe and loved. Venus says, we are all one family. Saturn says, ok, how do we make all that happen?
Now we look to Mars and Uranus at 19º and 25º Taurus. These two have a looming conjunction that will surely shake things up in big ways. Right now, though, they participate in this New Moon conversation.
Mars sextiles Saturn. The Sun and Moon sextile Mars from the other side, as Venus separates from the same Mars sextile to move into a sextile with Uranus.
Our world, our ways of life need radical change, which is exactly what Mars and Uranus together stand for. In Taurus, we see that the changes we need are deep, fundamental, and long-lasting.
So at this New Moon, emotions will run high. The Moon is way out of bounds, which will heighten the emotional vibe and possibly make it a little crazy.
How we react will depend on where our lives and our values are today.
I think all of us can identify with a longing for the peace, safety, and seclusion of a walled garden.
It’s fine to create something like that for yourself and your loved ones. The tricky part is how you define who you love.
Venus, and also Saturn in Pisces, ask us to open our hearts and widen our vision. Mars and Uranus call for the radical notion that we all deserve a good life. We all deserve to be safe, secure, healthy, and happy.
The world feels like a perilous place right now. The world is a perilous place right now, and always has been for far too many.
This New Moon invites us into a vision of a world family, in which we all care, and we’re all prepared to realize that caring can sometimes take the form of radical action.
