Mars in Cancer

Are you powerless or are you focusing on things that your power cannot influence?

Are you powerless or remembering moments as a child when you had no power?

The roots of power begin at home. If you are feeling overwhelmed, try cleaning something . Make a meal. Have a conversation with a loved one about your feelings.

Strengthen your base, then try doing harder things.

There was a time several years ago when my regular blog writing started to gain traction and my regular views began to really increase. Then Facebook did something different, acted different, updated the all-mighty algorithm, and I was back to very few clicks a day.

Or perhaps it’s convenient to blame technology and it’s just my moment, barely achieved, had lost its draw?

These are the kinds of questions I feel as the sun traverses Aquarius. This is a season where that potent joy of creation and feeling of purpose really feels hemmed in by the changing structures of the culture around us. Laws change, tastes change, technology disrupts old pathways, and here we are trying to shine our little lights while the walls move around us.

It’s enough to get someone wanting to claim the power to be the changer, to make the rules and the laws and decide who gets attention. And the effort required takes us further from lives of play and connection into the heavy work of organizing and gaining power.

But the light always shines from within wherever we are held, and these shifting walls may themselves let us shine the brighter.

Saturn is the ruler and embodiment of limitations, old age, infirmity, and all the things that most of us try not to think about when we are not forced to do so. And Saturn can teach us what truly matters. All the bluster of trying to prove ourselves or shore up our own ego gets stripped away when Saturn lays her leaden hand upon your crown.

To feel limited is soothing when we accept it. When we feel overwhelmed with possibilities and responsibilities it starts to really fray the energy. We hold on to too much and accomplish little. But Saturn is here to remind us we will die, our powers are limited, and what matters are the children—the future world, the continuation of our species and people. Without children there will be no one to care or remember what you did anyway.

This does not mean having children is everyone’s path. But if we can let our limitations weigh down our imagination, we can better focus on our piece of life. We’re not saviors nor pure victims. We’re people moving through life in a particular moment.

Along with that, what we dream and imagine needs our steady commitment and discipline to make something the children will inherit when they are ready.

Today Venus appears to me as fierce and magnetic, all tattooed and ready to party and fight while nourishing new life. I am reminded of Aries’s great power to initiate, to use her profound vitality to get things going—a party, a bar brawl, a new project, and life itself. I am also reminded of Aries’s need for freedom and self-centeredness.

As much as Venus can create and get going this season, she’s also not going to be one to stick around and nurture. It’s not that she’s incapable of love or does not care for the things she births. But her pride is her relief; to see her children able to make it on their own so she can move on to the next intrigue.

Along with this, she may feel so inspired by ideas, so stirred by new conceptions, she struggles to focus on which would be most rewarding. In truth, it doesn’t matter what she chooses, but if she cannot choose and commit then nothing she carries forth will have much vitality. If she’s going to bear a literal or metaphorical child, she might take a break from the partying and fighting, which risks boredom.

Today you might sense into where in your life this energy is kindling her flame. There is great potential to get something interesting going, and a risk that it could be a brief flame that burns bright and flickers out. At least it will be interesting.

Today we might feel a cleavage between what seems like the smart move and what feels like the right move. Logic and instinct need not always be at odds, but these moments of opposition may make us feel stuck, agitated, indecisive. And it’s an opportunity for the sacred marriage to renew itself.

The moon in fullness in Leo feels that need to be loud, to be seen, as a path to safety. Mercury in Aquarius might favor the path of conformity, to belong clearly and adhere to the community norms for the purpose and protection such adherence offers.

Sitting with this, it feels like now is the time to clarify what side of the line you’re on, and part of me recoils from the thought. Such clarity can be as empowering as it could put us into danger. And there is something deep within that wonders if being true to one’s truth might be more important than the idea of safety.

And the full moon reflects the light of the sun, which is so close to mercury right now. Perhaps that dramatic pronouncement is the instinctive expression of the sense of purpose and logic shining forth today.

The warrior energy of Mars wants to be strong, protective, and move confidently toward what is necessary and useful, but in the nurturing and punitive sign of Cancer he must move crabwise, side to side, with two harsh claws that will quickly register their displeasure with anything that seems threatening. In this sign, that warrior energy becomes highly reactive, easily spooked, dramatically boastful one day and then dramatically victimized the next.

What is wanted is to connect this powerful energy to the heart, which can turn the claws into hands that could grasp, push away, hold tightly, or strike if needed. In this sign, we might forget we have hands that can do so many things based on what the situation is needed. We might feel we are in a state where we must claw at anything threatening or cling strongly to what we want to hold close—a clinging that might actually break or injure whatever it is we’re holding.

If we can open the heart to what we are feeling, there is room to perceive and respond. Our feelings and the stories we tell about them are only one layer of reality, and may be quite different from what others are perceiving outside of us. In Cancer, feelings are sharp, urgent, and overwhelming, and the last thing we’d want is to slow down and spend time with them. But it is that practice—letting our hearts be the ocean in which our feelings are merely waves that peak, break, and recede—that lets our power truly flourish. Then that tight pincer grip may become a really firm, loving grasp. One can feel truly safe and loved in such a grasp, one that knows its power and chooses to express it in care.

So this is a good season to notice those swelling waves and the drive to go on reckless attack, strategy be damned. See if you can breathe space for your feelings and perhaps try to simplify your response to two questions: What do I love right now? How could I protect it?

Today the moon has a brief confrontation with the collective underworld on its way to blooming in fullness with the reflected light of the sun. For those who follow the lunar cycles, this is a potent moment in which what has been growing in shadows is finally ready to come forward, and in Leo this coming forth is prone to come with a lot of drama and pomp.

But today, it’s as though you’re the actress preparing to step on stage, and through the curtain your eye settles on the audience and suddenly you’re struck by something. Perhaps you see an ex in the audience, an old nemesis, or—perhaps worse?—no one you recognize at all. Total strangers, wanting to be entertained, ready to either celebrate or judge you based on what you do.

Whatever you see, there’s a feeling inside that comes forth that needs to be acknowledged before you step on stage. Because what you perform will be for those people, and for the whole audience, and all the emotion coming up is fuel for your work—but the story must be set aside. You cannot control how you are received or judged, whether you gain satisfaction of some long-running vendetta or you are wholly ignored. All you can do is step onstage and bloom as best as you can.

There are people who want you to succeed, if only because they want what you have to offer. Even if they don’t know you personally, or know what you offer, as soon as they connect they’ll recognize it and be glad for it. Writing this is of course much harder than believing, and believing much more tenuous than knowing, but perhaps as you prepare to step forth, you might imagine connecting to that possibility. That possibility that, whatever dark feelings arise toward the audience—which may be quite valid—there is also a sea of support in which those feelings swim.

Then take a deep breath, and step onstage.

Today, the mind and spirit touch and the terrain becomes clearer. If you feel like you’ve been in an elaborate and almost incomprehensible maze, that is not wrong. Only it’s a maze that shifts as we move through it, where what was once a dead-end now opens up to a new pathway, and a reliable corridor now goes nowhere.

Alone, we may feel condemned to wander pointlessly in a puzzle designed not to be solved. But with the clarity each of us brings to our little portion, if we could put all of those individual maps together, we’d have a glimpse of the whole and the path through.

This is the ongoing work, to map and illuminate our portion of the maze, to tell others what we’ve learned and listen to what they’ve learned. Even if you cannot trust another to save you, you might learn something useful if you listen.

It is unfortunate that mindfulness went through its rising popularity, co-optation, and then rejection almost a decade ago. When mindfulness was taken out of its religious context and introduced to the public as a self-help tool, it was easy for corporate leadership to then adopt it as another opportunity for people to better manage themselves and become better workers. Then, naturally, the pushback—articles suggesting it was sinister that we were being encouraged to stop thinking in a time when we were being used.

Of course, mindfulness is not gone, but it comes back to me today as an important tool and as something deeply misunderstood. The benefits of a meditation practice are subtle and hard to name because in part the practice is to thwart our desire for definitions, control, and names—freeing the mind to be more flexible in experiencing, understanding, and responding to the world. But even as I name this benefit, it must be with the caveat that we do not meditate so we can be more flexible. We meditate simply to meditate, and that freedom and flexibility may be a benefit that arises as a result of the practice.

All of that prelude comes to me because now seems like a good time to practice meditation. When there is anger and fear, when there is a fixation on enemies and oppression, our minds become entangled with and subsumed to this world of oppression and enemies. I don’t mean it’s your fault you are oppressed. I mean that we can be so fixated on the first coming toward our face that we don’t notice there’s all this space around the fist that you could use. It is a martial practice to attend to this. Focusing on the specifics of how you are being attacked actually works for your attacker’s favor because you are paying more attention to their tactics than your own opportunities to respond. Of course, it isn’t good to ignore the attack either.

Hence the practice of meditating, of softening. Just sit, and breathe, and notice what is happening within you but let it be there without you needing to fix or manage it. See if you can soften your gaze and expand your senses.