on the claws of jupiter in cancer

and what it means for writers and artists

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ICYMI

🗽 NYC! Come see me read in a stacked lineup at Patchwork Literary Salon in Brooklyn next Wednesday, June 11th at 7pm (900 Fulton St. Brooklyn!).

🏳️‍🌈 I’m thrilled to be hosting my 4th (!!) annual Pride Publishing Q&A, a totally free event for LGBTQIA+ writers, on June 25th at 1pm Eastern. My agent Dana Murphy will once again be joining me to speak to the agent side of things. The event is free, but registration is required.

🎧 June 2025: The Outlaw Takes Their Place — new Call Your Coven episode is out!

Jupiter enters Cancer on Monday, June 9th at 5:02pm Eastern, where it will be until June 30th, 2026.

Of all the major planets to change signs this year (Neptune in March, Saturn in May, Uranus in July), this is by far the least disruptive.

Most significantly, this is because Jupiter is moving from Gemini, where he has had to try much harder to do his job, with more unconventional resources, to Cancer, where he is powerfully resourced to support our hopes, dreams, beliefs, and intellectual endeavors on a grand scale. (Technical language: Jupiter in Gemini is in detriment, and Jupiter in Cancer is exalted.)

Jupiter being powerfully resourced to do his (healer-teacher, higher ed, systems of belief, “collective dream”) job is good news.

It’s good news for folks struggling to find work, to pay for groceries, to get healthcare, since Jupiter’s most traditional significations are with abundance and plenty and generosity. It’s good news for folks who work in libraries across the country, and for literacy organizations like PEN America, fighting book bans and for institutions of higher education such as Harvard fighting the Trump administration, since wide-spread access to institutional knowledge is at the forefront of this particular transit.

With Jupiter having so much to do with how institutions of organized religion plays out, it’s good news for renewed community caretaking of mosques and synagogues that are under hateful attack as well as for Christian pastors in Minneapolis trying to keep ICE out of their communities and churches in Oklahoma voting to become sanctuaries for those at risk of deportation.

If Jupiter in Gemini invited the expansion of systems of knowledge (including, quite literally, the explosion of AI), then Jupiter in Cancer invites the expansion of community caretaking — and the desire to protect it.

While I don’t believe in moralizing transits (aka, that Jupiter in Cancer will be so good for the left and so bad for the right — the beliefs that are expanding work both ways), I do think that this transit’s intense focus on who counts as community, how we show up for community, and how far we are willing to go to protect our community will amplify existing tensions and fractures to the kind of breaking point that results in a systems shift. As we here in the United States continue to live through all the ways in this regime violates and reneges on the alleged promises of “the system” and “legally doing it the right way,” alternative modes of mutual aid and care, of protesting and underground networks, are going to expand — and Jupiter in Cancer promotes that kind of rapid expansion.

Jupiter in Cancer knows that care is political. Who gets it. Who gets access to it. Who gets to be a parent. Who doesn’t. Who gets to take care of their community. Who can’t. Who is protected. Who isn’t.

Cancer is a sign that often gets stereotyped as “the mom friend,” which in a white supremacist patriarchal culture takes the fangs out of what it is to mother — to not only to care for and protect our children but all children, including Palestinian babies being pulled out from under rubble. Reducing Cancer energy to the drudgery of domestic labor ignores the way that the mother is on the front line, advocating for everything from reproductive rights and abortion access to healthcare for their trans children.

I do not think it is an accident that, even as a child-free queer lesbian living in New York City ~mostly~ surrounded by other child-free queers, my most politically active, on-the-front-lines friends are all mothers. I am not surprised that allegedly anti-Trump politicians have done virtually nothing — for Gaza, for us — while a mother like Ms. Rachel has put her entire business and reputation on the line to advocate for children’s rights, most notably kids in Palestine.

Cancer energy has claws. And community caretaking should, too.

For me, a keyword of this upcoming transit is protection. What is sacred to you? What is inviolable? If you could use your resources to throw a shield around any one group of people, who would it be?

Devote yourself to that this year. (Jupiter himself is so much about devotion.) This transit is an invitation and a support, a buffer and a balm. Link arms — literally, metaphorically — with your neighbors, and take a stand.

The thing about being an artist and writer in these times is that our creative work is a form of caretaking.

It is a balm and a respite, a source of escapism and fantasy. A way to imagine a different world — a better world. A way to imagine the revolution itself. Sometimes, it’s obvious, like how the three-fingered salute from Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games became a symbol used by resistance fighters in Myanmar. But sometimes, it’s more subtle: it’s the hope found in a Mary Oliver poem, the sensuous joy in a romantasy, the example of a more just world in the work of N.K. Jemisin.

Of all the things that make a life worth living, art is up there in terms of my “why.” The human capacity for imagination is extraordinary, and is something that — used in service of the collective good, acknowledging the worth and sanctity of each and every person walking this earth — might still change this world for the better.

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,” Toni Cade Bambara once said. May her words be a prophecy and a blessing.

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