The Cancer New Moon doesn’t require a lot to perform healing. She likes baths, oceans, rose water. She deals in intuition, the senses, the comfort and pleasure of the skin. She wants you to feel how it feels because you might have been avoiding some important steps in your journey towards intimacy and fulfillment.

When I think of Cancer I think of the ocean, I think of the tides. When you are caught in a tide the worst thing you can do is try to fight against it. This is our natural inclination, to survive, but this isn’t how the ocean works. When we surrender to the tide she may pull us in deeper, but we can save our energy once the rolling tide passes, and swim to the surface. Of course, this is a metaphor for emotions. Our scariest emotions. Feelings of entrapment, rage, and endless sadness. Of course this is a metaphor for healing. Healing is nonlinear and illogical. It is against our illogical and sit quietly while bombs drop around us. It is counterintuitive to surrender in what feels like a war. It is hard not to beat ourselves up for being to intense or vulnerable or cold. It’s hard to acknowledge that things you thought you were over are not done with you yet.

Our emotions can give us vital information. They can be a green light, an alarm system, a fuel gauge. My bet is that your anger and frustrations are showing you where your boundaries need to be and you are not sure if your ready to build them. Boundaries can mean letting go. They can mean breaking up. But honestly, the ones that are going to go up after these next two weeks are going to be about respecting yourself and the people you love. It’s transcendent. It’s long game. It’s real love. It’s fucking radical.

Respect the messages your feelings are sending you. Take time to go through them and find where they meet your reality. Witness them. Honor where they came from. Let them be obscure and illusive, avoid emotional hygiene and new age guilt trips about becoming a “whole person”. You are a whole person, though sometimes or most times fragmented, distorted, or broken, you are whole. Yes, respect your feelings and avoid being over protective. What I mean by this is that there are feelings that serve us and feelings that have been products of our environment, ways we have been conditioned to feel that may not accurately reflect what we actually need. Guilt and shame at their best can be markers of where we could have done better. But under patriarchy and white supremacy they are often useless attachments to not being good enough, for needing “too much”, or even being too much. Although the New Moon is a time of new beginnings I think the most successful endeavor we can embark upon this cycle is recognizing old pattens of guilt, shame, or insecurity.

The new moon falls on the 4th of July where, in this country, we set off bombs in “celebration of the liberty provided by our forefathers”. There cannot be a better metaphor for the irony and flat out bullshit this statement is than the scene in a refugee center or a VA hospital on this day. My liberation isn’t celebrated with bombs, beers, or bros. My liberation will be celebrated when every prison is destroyed, all reparations are paid, and patriarchy eviscerated.