Rules: Cancer
Key words and qualities: Our inner, emotional ocean of collective memory. The water element. Moods. Our capacity to feel what is needed and respond appropriately. What we nourish or cultivate. Our capacity to feel safe and protected.
Color: Silver
Metal: Silver
Physical body affinity: Stomach, breasts.
Festival: Summer solstice
Way of honoring: Moods are messengers from some deep part of ourselves. Honor each mood with an expression of creativity; writing, painting or dancing.
Shadow, when not honored: Pouting, sulking, fuming.
The Moon changes sign every two and a half days, alternately pulsing between outreaching exuberance and introverted musings. This part of us requires reflective seclusion and will reward us for that time with inner calm. Following the prompting of the Moon, as communicated to us through feeling, provides us with the stability and rhythm of internal seasonal fluctuation necessary for creativity. The Moon is our caretaker, providing the stable, nurturing environment we need to cultivate intimacy with all of creation.
The Moon is the part of us that is fiercely protective of all life. She wants us all to be safe, sustained, and nourished. In turn, we work for her by caring for and about the life around us.
The Moon says that we can measure a culture’s evolution by whether that society protects, nurtures, and reveres its children, its elders, the environment, and all growing things. By that measure, the modern world is insane. This collective insanity is reflected in each one of our private emotional lives as turbulence and angst.
Through the Moon we have access to ancestral wisdom and memory, which gives us not belief, but faith. We can calm the eternal busy-ness by opening to the Moon’s capacity to feel what is needed and respond appropriately, averting disaster, both personal and collective.
The Moon tells us the story of our spiritual lineage by suggesting that we each have a memory, deep within, of an ancient spiritual tradition. It is our understanding that everything is interrelated. This story is told to us through the Moon’s placement in our charts.