Black moon in Cancer opposing Saturn in Capricorn

This new moon in Cancer is a black moon—the second new moon in a solar month (like a blue moon is the second full moon in a month). The last new moon in Cancer was June 21, 2020. 

A black moon is like a super-charged new moon, a time of cycle formation and intention setting that will play out not only for the next month, for the next three years (until the next black moon in March 2023 in Aries). 

This is powerful energy to use consciously and wisely. 

Sarah Varcas at Astro Awakenings says: “If we are thirsty for change in our life, eager to discard old and tired ways to make room for new life, a black moon is our unfailing ally, providing the impetus and focus to embrace and bring about effective and long-lasting change. If, on the other hand, we fear unavoidable change, this moon holds our hand and places iron in our soul, assuring us we have what it takes to navigate difficult terrain ahead and find, in due course, more solid and fertile ground.”

As much as you have the capacity for right now, I encourage you to tap into the personal and collective changes afoot, and really feel into what you most need and want to release and relinquish right now, and what you most need and want to plant and grow into and toward. 

This new moon and its opposition to Saturn is speaking to me of commitment and of discipline—and of these concepts evolving into their fuller potential through a sense of DEVOTION. The discipline of Capricorn becomes devotion in Cancer. 

The Cancer-Capricorn axis is the horizon of life (birth, spirit made physical and manifest) and death (transcendence, return to the eternal, and also the arduous tasks of life required to reach there). And it is also the realm of parentage—Cancer the archetypal Mother; Capricorn the quintessential Father. 

This is a time of parenting and re-parenting—redefining what it means to conceive, engender, birth, raise, parent, and care for—physical children, psychical children, creative babies, social structures, systems of family, and ourselves and our world as a whole. 

Motherhood, as I’m referring to it, is not gendered. It does not require a physical womb. People who have not given physical birth can be mothers and those who did not birth us can mother us still. Mothering is an act, a principle, of nurturing, of nourishing. It is a particular kind of care. 

Many of us need to re-mother ourselves, due to our personal experiences of being mothered or mothering. But also, as a collective whole—living under Patriarchy—where Mother has been devalued, demeaned, domineered—beaten and raped and exploited and unpaid—for centuries—we are in desperate need of rewriting our relationship to Mother, to motherhood, to what it means to mother, to nurture, to care. 

For me, these thoughts keep returning to the idea, again, of devotion. The rigidity of structure and discipline of Capricorn meets with the flexibility but also overwhelm of the fertile waters of Cancer—and together they help give shape, form a womb, for the conception, the growth and development, of our creative ideas and projects. 

Together they evolve strict discipline and wild, uncontained creative impulse into a sense of deep love and commitment—neither avoiding nor being enslaved to THE WORK of your creative desires. 

We’ve now moved out of the intensity of eclipse season, and with this second new moon in Cancer, coming just at the wrap up of this season (the past three full and new moons were eclipses) and indeed, the end of a two-year cycle of eclipses on the Cancer/Capricorn axis—we’re being asked to focus on care. Self-care, community-care, aftercare. 

On the healing, the purification, that comes through, and after, catharsis. 

Personal Writing Prompts

For the next two weeks, the skies are asking you to examine (choose any of the following to write/meditate on):

• What is it you are wanting, or needing, to offer yourself to, devote yourself to, for your personal and collective evolution and growth? 

• What projects and creative desires are you willing to offer yourself and your devotion as reciprocity for the gift of this life? 

• What shapes, rituals, routines, practices does/can this take?

• How/where/when do you Mother your creative babies? 

• How can you progress or grow in your devotion? 

• What do you need right now? What are some steps you can take to meet those needs? 

• What are you ready to release or change in your own relationship with mothering (with your mother, as a mother [whether or not you are a physical mother; in what ways do you mother?], and/or as a general concept)?

• How can you conceive of motherhood and mothering in new/more expansive ways? 

• What is a memory of mothering, of care, that sustains you? 

Creative Writing Prompts

Devotion

• How does your character define or understand devotion? How do they enact it? What are they devoted to? 

• Write a scene/snippet in which one of your characters carries out an act of devotion. 

Mothering

• How are acts and ideas of “Mothering” treated/conceptualized in your world? How are they similar to and different from “our” world, or your experience of our world? 

• Write a scene in which one or more characters enact a version of mothering (you choose whether this is a culturally “normal” or subversive or aberrant version). 

Memory

• What is one memory that sustains your protagonist? 

• Write that memory as a scene or fragment.