New Moon in Cancer: from belonging to besieged, and back again.

When you look at a symbol long enough, it looks back at you. From all angles.

Attend to a metaphor with enough sustained focus, and you’ll begin seeing through its eyes. You’ll enter into that animal’s perceptual world. Your consciousness alters and organizes in accordance with their priorities. Reality shifts, shapes and orders itself around its logic.

From all the infinite data available to you, the information that’s relevant to thearchetypal creature / living field you’ve entered, will pop forward, shaping a conglomerate of certain images (and, significantly, leaving out others). Particular sense faculties and sensibilities will be enhanced in this state to detect variations of images on this theme, at lower threshold inputs.And soon, everywhere you look, variations of the same pattern will reflect back to you.

It feels like seeing and experiencing What Is. But you’re also co-creating it through who you are being.

When we feel stuck, trapped, caught in an impossible dilemma or impasse, one radical layer to what’s happening is often that a perceptual shell has enclosed and adhered to our eyes. We can call this a “lens” — but this word has been used so much now and carries certain assumptions, that it doesn’t potentiate the imagination anymore. For me at least. ‘Perceptual shell’, on the other hand, invokes all kinds of imagery.

I think about how the symbolic nativity chart of the world is a Cancer Rising. Some cultures imagined a Crab for Cancer. Some, a Turtle.

The Shell gives birth to an order, out of chaos.

But, eventually, the Sun will begin to set, again.

The Night will hint its unfathomable vastness behind the scrim of Day.

The adhesions that temporarily secured the soft inner body to its current perceptual shell — to this particular order — will become heavy, burdensome, troublesome, toilsome, if we do not molt, if we do not … sleep. Allowing in the chaos of Night when it is time. Giving ourselves a chance to awaken in the morning and to perceive a new order.

To perceive a new world into being, again.

Sunrise.

Primordial Chaos, No. 16, 1906–07 - Hilma af Klint

Seeds and shells are similar adornments of consciousness.

The seeds of new worlds are already here.

‘New’ worlds.

Seeds, shells, stones, bones, feathers. These all are ornaments that catch and hold, focus and organize our gaze, our attention / attending to these many worlds already here andthat have already been, as we’ve spiraled through them. Across lifetimes, across generations and cultures. In the dynamic and perpetual turning of the kaleidoscope.

The sparkle of new worlds is not something out there.

But also, as we see through our animate adornments — these glistening perceptual shells — the world sparkles with their particular pattern. As we see through them, we are also looking “out” at them.

If we can trust in and surrender to the seasons of Time, and the waves of the emotional body, they will continually take us to new/ancient shells, new/ancient orders, new/ancient worlds, new/ancient ways of …

Gazing at this sparkling field of such intricate detail.

Of such intimate familiarity.

And of such wild strangeness.

Linear time, linear progress, linear measures of productivity and success, prioritizes the impulse to “address” the problem that a particular shell will present to us, to fix some snag we see in the pattern. We can’t just let it go, that would be irresponsible. We have to at least address it before letting ourselves fully rest or move on. Before surrendering to the Night’s sleep.

But what if the snag in the pattern is the fixed prioritization of addressing the problem first before letting ourselves rest?

In other words, the fixation of this priority IS the over-arching pattern, or IS the perceptual shell, which is not itself a problem — but becomes one when its season has passed. (These words written as the South Node is at 0°16’ Virgo, the North Node at this same degree but of Pisces …. )

I think about how, before a crab molts, its eyes get cloudy. And how, as the Sun sets, descending into the 8th house, our eyes get cloudy. The world starts … falling apart. We must rely on other sense organs. As we let the world go. The answer isn’t to fix the world and restore it to its high-noon clarity, but to move-with the motion that’s happening. To move towards darkness. To molt the perceptual shell.

It’s not that we lose focus, or stop attending.

Just as every ending is a beginning, every “unfocusing” of our attention can be recognized as a “refocusing” of our attention. Our attending turns with the changing Seasons.

I’m aware now of Jupiter in Leo opposing Pluto in Aquarius. And how Pluto is a cthonic diety. Pluto can “help” groundun-grounded Aquarian energy. Pluto can help earth the kind of un-earthy Aquarian energy that tells us we must fix a pattern to fit it inside some Ideal picture or peak moment, before we can give this hairy, toothy, clawed moment /body /guest some Love, food, shelter and hospitality — just as it is.

We don’t have to give up an Ideal we hold around Beauty and attending to Beauty, in order to be “realistic” and “accept ourselves” and “accept the As-Is”. When we give up on an Ideal, it often comes with a disheartened whisper and sigh of resignation (“I guess this is all there is …?”) My chart ruler is Jupiter and within seconds of the asteroid Ganymede — there is a grappling with this resignation and refusal of resignation that I am personally encountering and working with alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllLLLL 🌀 the 🌀 time 🌀.

But what I’m shown, again and again, is that if we let our eyes keep moving through the kaleidoscope, the pattern will return for us.

It will return for us to continue partnering with it, weaving, enhancing, beautify-ing it in the ways our hearts long to lend it beauty through our gaze, recognition and participation. But at that point, after it has gone and returned, something often has changed on its own. Or, maybe not “on its own” but in wilder, more holographic, relational, emergent way than us taking on the sole responsibility or burden of directly addressing it.

The etymology of “address” is from the Old French adrecier “go straight toward; straighten, set right; point, direct”. And that’s where linear Time pulls us away from our natural molting instincts. We might feel complacent or irresponsible if we don’t go straight at the problem / the imperfect pattern and set it straight.

There is value and necessity to the crooked and asymmetrical, which is hard for Aquarian notions of ideal forms. And I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, just to say, I’m not encouraging us to be complacent or irresponsible, or to give up. But to just practice noticing when life force doesn’t move with you in your effort to set things (to your current idea of) ‘straight’. Cancer isn’t an animal that walks forward — generally. Specific crab species have evolved to walk straight forward, so I am holding space for that so as to not smooth out the Sign’s rich texture. But generally, the Crab’s side-ways approach isn’t something to fix. It’s to get inside of and embody, align with and get curious about:

How could (the ways we are already) approaching things sideways, back-and-forth, retreating-and-approaching — be part of a deeper wisdom?

As we approached this New Moon in Cancer, I felt engulfed by the archetype of Cancer. Swallowed by its sensorium and perceptual world. With the Sun and Moon here. And Mercury spending extra time due to its retrogradation, while ruling the places of Virgo and Gemini where Venus and Uranus, respectively, just formed an exact square to each other. And Jupiter, the exaltation lord of Cancer (and my chart ruler) having spent a year here.

My consciousness was caught in the net of this pattern.

Quick back-to-basics moment — but with some new flair:

The Planet is the actor. The Sign is its animate Costume — animate, in that it isn’t inert. The Costume (as we all, I’m sure, have experienced in our own ways of dressing and adorning ourselves) organizes the consciousness and perception of the one wearing it.

Animate Costume is another way of saying Perceptual Shell.

It embellishes.

It enhances.

It emboldens.

It brings-forth.

Essential dignities is the ancient doctrine that describes the fit between Planet and its Sign. The Actor and their Costume.

The Moon “fits” the animate Costume of the Crab. She is at home here. It brings-forth that which is within. It brings something from the inside, out.

It embellishes her inner nature.

This week, consumed by the ‘animate Costume’ of Cancer — the Mother — I felt utterly beset by what human perceptual-shells or Ideal-forms of “Mother” or “Caregiver” I’ve inherited, which had come to organize my consciousness.

I felt the rest of the ocean crashing against the walls of this shape. Beseiged by the emotional needs of all around. Human, plant, animal, house. I couldn’t escape. Everywhere I went, I saw a field of needs needs needs — including my own — that could swallow me up.

There were SO MANY CREATURES wanting a habitat and needing FOOD — which I paradoxically could not actually offer, if I remain adhered to the lens of ... Mother.

‘washed up crab molt” Virginia State Parks staff, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The mis-fit is the portal back to the polytheistic mind

A few days before this New Moon, Venus in Virgo trined Chiron in Taurus. Then squared Uranus in Gemini.

Venus in Virgo is sensitive to ‘fit’ … and ‘mis-fit’. Chiron is the mis-fit. The un-healable wound. Uranus is the rebel. The insubordinate.

Always — when we are adhered to a single story, there will be something in us (or around us) that will feel impossible. That willnotfall in line with what we imagine could be the “perfect” or “should-be” order of things. That will not smooth out. Will not be fixed. Will not resolve.

There are aspects of my personality that do not fit into the shell of ‘Mother’ that I’ve grown or been given.

But there is also a tender, soft shell of “Mother” that I have been secreting from the inside out, for a long time. And it feels good and beautiful to feel it expand and find adornment and embellishment in a co-creative calcification process with the elemental nature of the salty sea. I am a Mother who creates an energetic environment, for a diversity of creatures, instincts, perspectives, stories to find home and hearth. Just my existence and embodied presence is enough, for the next thing to happen that needs to happen.

I’m curious about what’s happening in Taurus and Gemini for you too, that might be giving the gift of the mis-fit — which is (or is at least one way to say it) a portal back to a polytheistic mind.

Who or what in the places of Taurus and Gemini in your life, refuses to fit into your solutions or plans?

What perceptual shell is it time to release, to make space for the ‘mis-fit’ to meet and make its own animate Costume, helping embroider more of your own inner nature onto your outsides, as a way to write this story, too, into the world? As a way to becomethe role model of something, thatyou yourself never had?

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

―Octavia E. Butler

Hestia

Molting and allowing a moment of chaos in — requires diligent hearth-tending.

Without a center (and the instinct tocenter as a verb), we will inevitably swing between the extremes of this feeling trapped (inside the home of a single god / a single mode of perception) — and feeling wildly un-held (left outside of any coherent pattern, any gods, any … perceptible order).

We need a central flame about which symbols can gather, while our inner emptiness is preserved. There are no images of Hestia. There is an emptiness, but not an absence. It is a space kept clear from all modes of perception, from all gods, where one’s inner Being can abide.

The gift of going a little “too far” into an archetype until you’re ungulfed and ‘trapped’ by it — its Costume becoming a trapping, an accoutrement, a thing that glitters but is not gold — is that this is a moment for the life force of your mis-fit to burst through in a rainbow of color.

It’s not a moment to fix the costume …

It’s a moment to have this burst of life force, kind of like autumn leaves bursting into flame during Virgo season, followed by a falling away, release, shedding. A turn of the wheel.

It’s not the same as re-writing your story from a place of wanting it to be different.

It’s entering into this moment of Life so fully, you catch flame.

It doesn't interest me

who you know

or how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand

in the centre of the fire

with me

and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me

where or what or with whom

you have studied.

I want to know

what sustains you

from the inside

when all else falls away.

I want to know

if you can be alone

with yourself

and if you truly like

the company you keep

in the empty moments

Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation.

The empty moments.

Addiction to drama can be a way to read the current Jupiter in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius.

It does feel good to be deep in the drama of life.

It reminds us that we belong. We’re here, in it, caught inside of something. It feels good to be held. We have people and things that need us, and we need them. We’re involved in commitments, however maddening or impossible they are.

And also, it feels good to float outside of the drama — as if untouched.

Because we can feel beseigedby others, longing for freedom or a minute of alone time.

We need aloneness as much as we need belonging.

Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things … to be besieged — but beautifully, because we have made a place to stand — in the people and the places and the perplexities we have grown to love, seeing them not now as enemies or forces laying siege, but as if for the first time, as participants in the drama, both familiar and strangely surprising. We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.

‘Besieged’ by David Whyte

How do you create and tend to this state of aloneness in the besieged everyday?

Living the Signs of the Zodiac is a place for this practice.

We aim our attention towards the same symbol, entering it together and sharing our diverse experiences of it. It’s a way to meet our human need of feeling utterly and mysteriously held inside of something. To be inside of a drama. AND to continually center and be seen in our own unique experience.

We meet the moment and we make it, coming alongside of and stepping inside of the living currents. Allowing the thread that is threading through, to actually come through. Being the thread. Lending it our love, our irreplaceable beauty, and our most authentic, creative expression. Releasing it. Putting the thread down.

Letting it slip back out of sight.

We enter the empty moment.

And pick up the next thread.

With much love,

Nicole