Cancer New Moon Meditation for 2003:

Feeding Your Dreams

By Jean Hinson Lall

This month's rendezvous of Sun and Moon takes place in Cancer, the Moon's own realm. Cancer has to do with those experiences through which we realize our own emotional truth. Paradoxically, this realization comes through immersion in the welter of collective feelings and instinctual responses related to mother, ancestry, and national or clan identity. In Cancer we discover what nourishes us and makes us feel secure, and we make choices about what we will feed and protect. We realize our dependency on others and assume the burden of caring for those who need us. So the Cancer New Moon is a good time to tend our homes and renew our family bonds. We might take the children to visit relatives, make a pilgrimage to national shrines, or journey to a distant country from which our ancestors came.

Cancer is a Cardinal sign, meaning that it likes to initiate action. When our Cancerian side is awakened, we want to act on our feelings. On this New Moon, Mercury joins the Sun and Moon in the early degrees of Cancer, encouraging us to express both positive and negative feelings. Meanwhile, Saturn, the planet of limitations and burdens, falls in Cancer as well, just a few degrees away from Sun and Moon. Saturn in Cancer points to emotional limitations. Where we feel a lack of having been nurtured and supported, we are undeveloped and needy, and this part of us may be ruled by fear and the desire to control the situation.

Saturn also shows where our ego attaches itself in order to strengthen identity. With Saturn in Cancer, there is a tendency to be over-attached to family because one is still trying to get certain needs satisfied - or else a tendency to detach altogether, because the demands of family seem too heavy. There can also be an over-identification with the person's national or ethnic group, as a way of gaining a sense of security and belonging. Saturn's journey through Cancer over the next two and a half years gives us a chance to examine our own lives and see where we may be living out of a sense of emotional lack and thus letting our actions be controlled by fear.

Cancer's pitfalls include sentimentalizing emotion and instinct and inflating the personal. Saturn in Cancer encourages us to cook down our emotional inflations. It asks us to recognize our emotions for what they are and to acknowledge the part of us that operates from instinct (whether mother-love or war-fever), without sentimentality and without ideology or propaganda.

Saturn in Cancer also suggests food shortages - either actual or perceived, literal or symbolic. Economic problems plague most countries at present; in the U.S., serious budget shortfalls and government policies are resulting in severe cuts in funding for education, nutrition, health care and many other nurturing and protective programs at the state and local levels. While Jupiter is in Leo (separating from a prolonged opposition to Neptune in Aquarius and forming a trine with Pluto in Sagittarius), encouraging us to dream big dreams for ourselves and our children, Saturn brings us up short and asks how we are going to fund those dreams. Within the family, we may feel that there just isn't enough to go around; if one family member's dream is going to be nurtured, others will have to do without. Or, individually, one has to make painful choices, sacrificing other good things in order to pursue the dream.

Mars and Uranus are conjunct in Pisces, trine the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Saturn. The Mars-Uranus pairing will be with us for several months. Placed in Pisces, the sign of the imagination and the collective unconscious, these two dynamic planets could be a source of new ideas about how to handle our Saturn-in-Cancer fears and dilemmas. Whereas Cancer takes things personally, Pisces (the "elder" Water sign) has a compassionate but impersonal, global and cosmic perspective. Where Saturn focuses on the facts of the present situation, Uranus intuits alternative futures. Mars in this configuration should stimulate strong dreams, helping us see how the "night world" wants us to move and how our personal dreams may be realized as part of the larger dreams of the world-soul. The Mars-Uranus combination could even produce inventions, novel ideas about how to solve our shortages.

This New Moon, celebrate your own family tradition and give thanks for the nurturance and the lineage you received. Recognize what you missed and where you still feel wounded, undeveloped or inadequate. Accept that you will always have some weaknesses, and forgive those who failed or harmed you. Take on the responsibility for "fathering" (Saturn) the frail and late-blooming parts of yourself. Dream of pursuing your heart's desire, drawing on Jupiter's confidence and enthusiasm as it closes on its trine with Pluto on July 1. Call upon Saturn to give you the discipline and thrift to accomplish your goals with the resources available. And turn to Mars and Uranus for dreams, visions and inventions.

Look for the Capricorn Full Moon July 13, 2003.