The Homing Beacon: Full Moon in Cancer and Winter Solstice 2018
Full Moon in Cancer | December 22, 2018
0 degrees | 9:48am PST
Full Moons fall right in the middle of a lunar cycle. While New Moons are what we associate with beginnings and Full Moons are usually culminations, for several reasons this Full Moon has eked out its own title not only as a culmination but as a good beginning as well.
Taking place shortly after the Winter Solstice and at 0 degrees of Cancer, this Full Moon signals a moment of birth: the opportunity to nurture in new and previously unexplored ways, and to redefine the way in which we come home.
This is a time of year when we ritually reflect on the previous cycle and look to new beginnings, but this Moon lends the Solstice a particularly powerful spaciousness, as though the unknown is hungry to reveal itself and the most pertinent work for us is to caringly witness the shapes coming through the night.
Cancer, whose landscape we’ll be exploring under the light of this Full Moon, cares unconditionally. Her mother archetype shows us how to get curious about what goals will actually nurture us at the basic level where soul meets body and ancestral lines are healed. Nurturance will remain a critical theme for a good 18 months to come, because this Moon also brings in the themes of the new nodal axis: Cancer and Capricorn. While the Moon is too far away from the Node in Cancer to eclipse now, she still flags us onward into the evolutionary theme that the next year and a half of eclipse seasons will unravel.
Image by Enoki Toshiyuki
That theme is the polarity between home and work, Cancer and Capricorn. Between inner life and how we give of ourselves to the outside world. Between fertile self-nurturance and community-improving industry. As we approach this Solstice and Full Moon, it will come easily to molt old habits of mind that have held us back from most effectively translating our inner lives into something truly world-building, thanks to lucky Jupiter and Mercury conjunct in Sagittarius.
Saturn sits within range but at a healthy distance from the Sun, sharing his medicine without necessarily indulging his fondness for the tactics of the extremophile. His maturity here graces us with structure as we approach Cancer’s watery intuition. And he’s right, a structured approach to the molting process is necessary at some point. To do this properly we need to get clear on two questions: “How does my home life feed my work?” and “How does my work feed my home life?”
If home is the safe space from which you can care for yourself, what is home to you? Start with your abstract awareness as home and extend outward to your body and headspace. How can you make them feel safe to you? And from there, home becomes a shapeshifting display of an individuals’ feathers. “A house isn’t a home” necessarily. Is it your daily practices, your family? Is it your house, your garden, or the open road? Cave swiftlets create their nests from their own saliva. Give yourself an open field to define what home is to you. What does it need to serve your self-nurturance best? Does it need new spacial or energetic dimensions, more or less of other people’s energies?
Albrecht Durer | Portrait of the Artist Holding A Thistle | 1493 | Inscription: “My affairs follow the course allotted to them on high”
And work? If your work is the gift you naturally give to the world excluding the question of money, acknowledge it. What do you do like its your job, like you were put here to do it? Write poetry? Metalwork? Impeach the president, or offer acts of kindness? If you’ve got nothing you like doing industriously already, then fantasize about it. What would make you eager to get to work, what are you good at? And how do you want to get paid for it? In recognition, praise, money, or skill trade? What kind of pay do you need to create a mutually symbiotic relationship between this work and the home explored above?
You’ll want to workshop these ideas from the privacy of safe home space so you can make a sustainable plan to move forward without rushing into it from fight or flight impulses. Remember this is Winter Solstice and Saturn’s eye is upon us. It’s a time to be internal. From here you mark your start line, but be sure to take ample time to warm up in your dream space. Getting your ideas clear now will give you excellent and timely material to work with over the next year and a half. A 0 degree Moon signals no rush.
A good note to make in your introspective hours is that Mars is edging into conjunction with Chiron in Pisces, urging us to discover how we best defend and care for our wounds within ourselves and our societies. Check in and see who actually needs resources and has gotten none. Start small and remember that this goes for your inner child or inner parent, as well as your friends and neighbors with less privilege than yourself. If you can go there, whatever fire was lacking will ignite.
Neptune in Pisces and Venus in Scorpio are sextiling Saturn and trining one another as well, so we have a nice current of energy flowing into acts of creativity that require us to translate our inner worlds into a 3D one. The Jupiter-Mercury conjunction gives the mind extremely rich tools with which to create new realities, so look within for how you’re going to make your new world. With the Moon peaking in fullness from her own domicile Cancer, our lunar functions of creativity and connection are flowing and can easily gather momentum now.
May you meet yourself with the magic of a love ethic this Solstice, and may the Full Moon in Cancer guide you home. Blessings.
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