Cancer: I am held
Nurture your creativity and refill your cup: A guide to Cancer Season
This letter is part of Creative Contemplation—rituals and practices to help you harmonize with the energy of the season and remember your connection to spirit, nature, and each other. ✨💗🌿
Love doesn’t require perfection.
Hello.
Cancer season is here (June 21- July 22) with the New Moon in Cancer arriving July 5th. I’m already feeling a tender softening. While Cancers are known for their hard outer protective shell, this season calls for a reclamation of our most vulnerable selves, the part of us connected to nurturing, care, and our relationship to mothering.
How were you mothered, or not? How is creating an environment of care showing up in your life?
Ruled by the moon, this is a great time to evaluate how we’re progressing in creating systems of care, how we relate to the work of caregiving, and how we might begin to place more value on the cyclical, seasonal (moody) energy of Cancer. How can we honor our bodies and the natural rhythms and cycles that create and sustain life?
This month, we also have two full moons (an unusual event!) in Capricorn, Cancer’s opposing sign. Where Cancer is more emotional and maternal, Capricorn is paternal and physical. With full moons signaling times of completion, release, and culmination and new moons suggesting initiation, beginnings, and setting intentions, how can you work with these energies and find harmony?
Saturn is also stationing retrograde in Pisces (June 29th-November 15th), another fellow water sign. Saturn rules structure, time, boundaries, and the physical aspects of our lives. Pisces is a mutable energy, ethereal, dreamy, spiritual, and permeable. Cancer season combined with Saturn retrograde is the perfect time to examine how (or if) the structures we’ve created are serving our internal, emotional, and spiritual landscapes.
Our affirmation this month is “I am held.”
Download your free copy of the Creative Contemplation journal and lunar calendar with all the monthly affirmations below!
Let yourself feel it in your body.
How does your physical form change shape with the support of being held? What armor can you release? What expectations melt away?
Maybe the feeling of being held isn’t accessible to you right now, and that’s okay. Can you set the intention to invite the possibility of it to show up in your life? How might you open the window and allow it to come in?
Archetype
Perhaps one of the most complex and foundational relationships we’ll have is with our mother. This month we explore the archetype of the Wounded Child and the Mother together, realizing we have the essence of both within.
These archetypes (and the relationship between them) bring up questions about protection, innocence, personal responsibility, and martyrdom.
This quote from Glennon Doyle Melton felt especially resonant.
“Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.
What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living.” -Glennon Doyle Melton
As infants and children, our survival is dependent on others. The care, or lack of care we receive can have long-lasting effects, shaping our hearts and wiring our nervous systems. We’re created for connection, and while that need may shift through time, it never disappears.
Yet— mothers are mere humans. How can we forgive their shortcomings, learn new ways of relating to our needs, and take accountability for them moving forward? How can we open our hearts beyond this two-way relationship and see all children as ours, in need of love and protection? How can we carry the wounded child within us with grace and compassion?
We also need to create room for grief in this dynamic. Grief for the children we’ve lost, and the ones we long to hold. For the mothers we never had, and the ones no longer with us physically. Grief for the children experiencing violence and harm they could never deserve.
Mourning is a holy act of healing, a sacred call to return home. When we grieve and our hearts break, we’re acknowledging a loss created by love.
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Creative Inspiration
Have you heard of Creative Mornings? This is a worldwide, in-person (free!) event with monthly themes and talks from local creatives. If your city doesn’t have a local chapter, they host virtual Field Trips weekly! The collective theme for Creative Mornings this month is Trust, and I loved this description.
“When we trust each other, we feel safe to share ideas, give feedback, and take risks. It requires vulnerability and a willingness to be open to the possibility of disappointment or betrayal. So, trust is not purely belief or faith. It is an active choice.”
They’ve curated a lovely collection of art and musings on the theme of trust for you to dive deep here.
We can’t speak about creating communities of care without acknowledging how this work is traditionally devalued. I heard about the book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change when I was attending a prenatal yoga class and I’m just now reading it. In one passage author Angela Garbes offers this challenge:
“How might we properly value care? It requires a new way of seeing the work and the world, bringing forth a new vision. We need to question our entire system of values. Productivity, efficiency, and hustle must share the stage with wholeness, health, stability, and self-regard. We must start by acknowledging mothering as a highly-skilled work that deserves respect and compensation.”
Creating and re-building systems of care within a larger cultural and historical context enables us to learn lessons from our past and ensure we include everyone in a wider safety net of love.
One of my favorite resources for hope, inspiration, and connection is the On Being podcast. The episode below on biomimicry blew me away.
“And when people ask me, how are things going? I’m like, well, I think the circles of healing are starting to grow and they’re starting to grow towards each other. And if we were to reach out our hand in the dark at this point, we might find another hand.” -Janine Benyus
I literally cried with relief at the possibilities for healing and restoration. We have so much to learn from Mother Nature.
Tarot Reading
The Queen of Cups
Besides The Empress card, The Queen of Cups may embody the most nurturing, emotionally centered, receptive energy. This Queen reminds us of the wellspring of emotional clarity that comes from self-trust. We cannot pour from an empty cup but to receive we must create space. What is wanting to pour into your heart or your spirit?
Just as mothers create space in their bodies for life, yet they are not the life itself, we must learn how to be vessels. There’s also a gentle nudge to look at the relationships in your life and notice if there’s a healthy reciprocity. It doesn’t have to be 50/50, but a dynamic, flowing energy of giving and receiving. Are there situations or people that drain your energy without pouring into you?
Trust (Osho Zen deck)
The Trust card (The Knight of Cups) is about trusting the currents. When birds fly, there are moments when there’s very little movement—their wings spread wide, they simply allow the air to hold them. They trust in their partnership with the wind, with the forces of nature. They know they were designed for this.
This is a moment to coast. To let yourself be who you are and to trust in your partnership with life. You do not need to spend extra energy flapping your wings, exhausting your resources. Trust the currents.
The High Priestess
The High Priestess is a reminder to trust the lessons we’ve learned from the light and the dark, the joys and the challenges. Wisdom is gained from the experiences and the integration of both. The High Priestess is as comfortable under a new moon as she is under a full moon because she knows there are gifts and opportunities inherent in both. This is a great time to embrace the esoteric, lean into your spiritual practices, and allow yourself to be a channel for divination as we intentionally begin again.
I’m taking a break from our group tarot readings this summer but would LOVE to sit down with you for a one-on-one session. If you’d like to receive a tarot reading from me, email thebarefootbeat@gmail.com. All Heartbeats subscribers will receive a 25% discount through the summer!
Notes from Nature
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair, not because I have my head in the sand but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” -Robin Kimmerer
I took a walk this morning, just a few minutes from my house on an urban trail. While wooded, it’s still in the middle of the city. As I walked, I heard construction noises and birdsong. I often think about the birds, singing over the hum of city traffic. How they don’t refuse their song just because we’ve added our own cacophony of noise.
This month in our nature journaling class (date TBD!) our theme is “Noticing our Home.” And I think it’s important to start with what is working well. To start with acknowledging how our home is serving us, holding us, and feeding us, even if it’s an imperfect one.
Perhaps we’re straddling two homes, past and future—caught for a moment without shelter. How can we notice this, too? (And because it’s crab season, here’s a little nature video I adore!)
New Moon Blessing
May you be held by the molecules of water in your body, singing in harmony with the ocean. May you be held by the gift of gravity, even as you gaze at the moon. May you remember your connection to Mother—the great Spirit of life that sees and knows and loves all. May you become both mother and child, open to the reciprocity of communities of care, built to hold and be held.
All my love,
Mariah
Heartbeats is a community for spiritual creatives, mothers, and messy humans who believe in the power of community. By financially contributing to Heartbeats you are saying yes to collaboration, connection, and creating sacred spaces where we can heal, learn, and honor each other with care. Thank you for your presence here. 💞
2 things:
1. I signed up for the Creative Mornings so maybe we can get something started here!
2. I ordered the Rumi oracle deck you've used at Tea + Tarot and I just love it so much.