the full moon in cancer for writers
I’ve been drawing the Queen of Swords a lot lately. When I first started reading tarot, she was my constant companion, quickly becoming the card I identified with. Deck booklets and online descriptions told me that she was a bitch, a divorcee, a woman who’d seen some shit and lived to tell the tale. That the sword she almost always carried was her tool for cutting the wheat from the chaff. Her superpower was discernment; her primary commitment, her own integrity. She’s smart AF, but her feet are firmly planted on the ground. She is in this world, and of it.
These days, she only shows up in my morning readings to affirm when I’m on the right path.
Lately, I’ve needed the reminder.
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Tonight’s Full Moon in Cancer is at 10:28PM ET. Cancer, a water sign, is known for feeling and especially for caretaking — but it’s also very much a sign that is about security and, taken to extremes, control. Consider its zodiacal opposite, Capricorn: the season during which the Cancerian full moon always occurs.
Cancer and Capricorn are both security-minded. In their own ways, both are deeply concerned with time and the sturdiness of legacy. In a traditional chart, Cancer rules our past, our heritage, and family foundations (the fourth house and the imum coeli), whereas Capricorn governs the most public point of our chart, concerned with how we are moving in the world, what roles we are taking on and what our reputation is in society (the tenth house and the midheaven). To ancient astrologers, Cancer and Capricorn were, bluntly, our parents and everything to do with lineage.
They are also, at their most base, water and earth. Yin. Matter. Good soil. Fertile ground to plant good shit in. But to do that, we have to sit with the tension between the groundedness of Capricorn and the deep reserves of Cancer’s water that demand we get very real, and very present, with what we’re feeling.
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In the tarot, the Queen of Swords is part of the suit associated with the element of air — intellect, communication. Not earth — materiality, manifestation. Certainly not water — emotion, intuition. But in the deck I’ve been using the most lately (The Muse Tarot), the Queen is not shown with her erstwhile sword. No. She is surrounded by crows.
Crows, much maligned corvids that they are, symbolize transformation and change, rather like a full moon. When I see my favorite Queen surrounded by these birds, I look at the tattoo on my wrist of a tree with ten crows breaking off, ink inspired by my favorite Mary Oliver poem, “Landscape,” and I am brought back, present with my body and my heart:
Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though
all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.
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Today’s full moon connects to the New Moon in Cancer on July 20, 2020 — a new moon that was more about starting things that were sustainable than “get up and go,” a security- and caretaking-oriented moon that came at the height of the summer’s revolutions here in the United States, asking us who and what we wanted to orient our care toward.
That New Moon was deeply connected to daddy-taskmaster Saturn (it was in an opposition to ye olde Kronos); any growth that was happening then was slow, incremental. If you’re feeling ready to burst at the seams with energy (however frustrated) for what you were planting then — well. You’re right on time.
Your writing prompt for today is simple: to look at your calendar (or review your social media or inbox) and see what you were starting or obsessing about around the New Moon in Cancer of 2020. How are those interests or obsessions now starting to bear fruit — or not? Notice and observe the shifts and changes the year has brought, both within yourself and around you.
I’ll see you back here next year. Xx
Coming next: Two newsletters dropping on January 1st — Major Themes of 2020 (going to everyone) and The Writer’s Guide to January’s Astrology (paid subscribers only).
P.S. Registration for my new course, Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work for You, is live! As a newsletter subscriber, use code “solstice” for $100 off.