Sun in Cancer season is always a lot, if different than other emotional, water sign seasons, like Pisces and Scorpio. Things we consider permanent or safely sunken parts of our emotional landscapes loosen with the emotional tide, and are deposited on the shores of our consciousness.

If Pisces is our subconscious, intuition, and dreaming, and Scorpio is pain and passion lurking in the shadows -secrets made painfully known, stinging truth – Cancer is our own emotional way of being in the world, what we hold in, the crying we do alone. Cancer is our vulnerability we try constantly to protect. With water seasons, I find it feels similar to being thrown out of a boat in turbulent water — don’t fight it, imagine your body as driftwood, go limp, go with it, and you will rise right up. Just ride it out. Fight it and at best the waters will fill your lungs, distended your chest – expanded with the weight of salt water.

Think first of Cancer, the crab. Its hard outer shell holding and hiding tender insides, able to scuttle in all directions, perceiving, darting up and down – peering out and descending, and the pincers that grasp and do not let go. Apply that to the emotional functioning of Cancer as a sign and you can see how all of theses things (as with all signs and their pros and cons) can be gifts and detriments.

Cancer is the only sign ruled by the moon – by the divine feminine, by constant flux and cycle – usually partially shrouded, and briefly, fully illuminated, then changing again. And, because the moon moves so quickly, and of course visits the sign every month (*every month*, no other sign has to go through that kind of activity as regularly), Cancer can be considered moody. Changing. And, Cancer is the sign and behavior of mothering. Family is vital to the sign of Cancer. What the crab cares for, it goes *all in* on, sometimes to the point of smothering. Cancer is, an emotional fish, er, decapod. It’s fiercely protective of itself and of its own.

Those of us who know or love someone with strong or aspect-vexed Cancer energy instinctively seek to find stable land in those relationships, but sand shifts and moves. Even if Cancer trusts you the once, that was just that one time. The next time is its own experience: to be determined. You are in with a Cancer or you are out. And, at the same time that doesn’t mean you aren’t still caught in a pincer without even knowing… if a Cancer decides you are their family, that won’t waver. Even if you are continually tested. Cancer doesn’t let go unless it can see a good reason or something forces it.

The beauty of Cancer is the truth of the emotions. When Cancer isn’t bound by a calcifying rising or moon sign like Cap or making a hard aspect to something like Saturn (which would try to convince Cancer that overt emotion is a detriment), the pure emotional expression is generally gorgeous, or with a strong aspect to Mars sometimes scary, but usually at the least, remarkable, often an honor to witness.

So Cancer season has us all feeling what Sun, Moon, and Rising Cancers feel regularly, to some degree. Much like when the Sun is in Pisces and everyone is crying, others have to live here in this place of shift and armor and chronic awareness of underlying vulnerability, the rest of us only visit. All of this and I haven’t even addressed the Cancer new moon partial solar eclipse a few weeks ago – energy that will resonate and play out for months, especially for Cancer sun, rising, and moon folk.

Personally, that Cancer eclipse on the 12th was much stronger than I thought it would be, in ways I didn’t expect. So. Much. Cooking., and, during incredible heat outside… illogical, but satisfying. I go in cycles with cooking, but I suppose since Cancer is my 4th house of home, there’s nesting to be expected. And, extra focus on mothering of course. I went to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor with a friend, which severely cramped my crying. But still, I was and am wrecked, accessing those memories and emotions raised by it.

A thing I could see during the film was that while every viewer loves Mr. Rogers, his relationship to everyone varies, of course. As with the example in the film of Jeff Erlanger – someone to whom Mr Rogers probably meant the world – the rest of us fall along a spectrum. So confronting how much he meant to me, and why, (probably very similar to what he meant to my sister and brother) cuts to the quick, does not let up. We’ve been talking to each other about who has seen it, who hasn’t. It’s a sacred subject for us, something we each hold in our depths.

In this season it’s natural too that other, deepest, nerve-close narratives should arise now for emotional processing. Cancer is the season of the wounds that haunt us – the rusty, corroded aches we can’t quite name, asking to be pulled from the depths, cleansed, transformed. Things lost at sea rediscovered, brought up, and cataloged, understood, demystified.

A friend linked me to the CRIMINAL episodes about Evelyn Nesbit. And then Tuesday, Karina Longworth, posted the episode I’ve been so long dreading/waiting for: Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle. I’m anxious thinking about listening to it, heart my throat. I’m so worried she is going to overlook or not expound upon a key angle.

I’ve studied these stories and women and women like them so much, and their narratives resonate so strongly, both scholastically and personally, especially Virginia’s. Sarah Marshall pressed me to explain it once and I couldn’t. I thought for sure she would have something she felt that way about, a topic she has to leave the room for should it arise, unable to hear so many get it so wrong and for it to be partly personal to her. But she didn’t.

I’m going to go see the Mr. Rogers movie again, alone. And properly, though characteristically silently, express everything that should be left there, in the dark, with only his constantly accepting face flickering back at me.

After Cancer season of course, is Leo. In Leo we can have genuine, well merited pride over what we worked through, use our new wisdom in a wonderful display of saturated individuality, or we can fall to pridefulness, having not worked through what arose, with a self-deceptive shrug of: ‘I’m fine the way I am. Humph’… all very, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In a few months, Scorpio will have something to say about that.

Current recurring visual themes of my season: keys, wasps, spiders, and the feathers are back. I asked for signs to keep me bolstered and steady, and so the feathers are back. And, people leaving things on my doorstep. Which is curious, and unsettling.

Ready yourselves for the next Full Moon partial Solar Eclipse in Aquarius on the 27th, and then one in August in Leo – a sort of next chapter in the book of last summer’s big eclipse in August. I like to think I’m sitting these eclipses these out, with little activity in these signs in my chart, but as I’ve learned, how these eclipses impact others ends up impacting how their relationships and communities change, grow, or morph in turn. The ripples made by others create whole tides elsewhere.