Under the Cascade
Body Made of Stars for the New Moon in Cancer, the Nodal Shift, Venus Retrograde Shadow, and the Start of the Dog Days
All around the world, the dials on the temperature meters are going up. Last week, according to world weather monitors, was the hottest week in 40+ of record keeping. Sirius, the many-headed Dog Star, is rising in the East at sundown, signaling the dawn of the famous Dog Days of summer — times which traditionally connoted intense heat, and the society-wide listlessness that comes with it. Small wonder that both the French and American revolutions began in early July. This is the time of getting fed up, and no longer being willing to take it.
On the other side of the evening horizon, the lady Venus is fertilizing the ground she will traverse for the rest of summer and into fall, as she commences her six-week retrograde through Leo in early August and remains there until October. The last time she turned Rx in the sign of the Lion was in the summer of 2015. How have you evolved in love and luck in the 8 years since? Where is your heart at now, and how can you burnish its shine? This is one of the great themes of this current season in time.
Another one is a shift even longer in the making: the nodal axis is making its long-awaited shift out of Taurus and Scorpio and into Aries and Libra. For the first time in nearly 18 years - since early 2006 - the North Node Rahu will be traversing the firestarting Aries, bringing a passionate charge to self development, martial arts and sciences, and the willingness to cut against the grain and carve one’s own path. Ketu, the South Node, will likewise shift into Libra, stirring deep currents in the collective subconscious relating to Justice, Inclusion, Equity and Politics. For better and for worse, we are entering an era that will pit the individual versus the collective, the creative iconoclast against the collaborative compromiser. May we meet the shift with the bright enthusiasm of Aries and the measured care of Libra, and make the most of both.
According to how one measures the nodes, the transition will happen on July 12th (Mean) or July 17th (True). Regardless, the journey is underway - and will help to define this next year and a half, all the way through 2024 until the start of 2025. Our first real taste of their energy will come on the 17th, when the moon goes dark in Cancer, in a loose square to these transiting nodes.
The new moon will bring a culmination of the Cancer Season in which we’ve all been swimming for the past month. With the sun and moon conjoining so close to their meeting point at the Cancer-Leo cusp, a place I like to call the Eternal Wedding, this has the potential to be one of the key moments of the year as a whole, an invitation to the next phase of your life in creative, caretaking, and homemaking capacities. For me, it will mark the end of travels across Europe and the start of the journey home to the west coast of Canada for the first time in a long time. Let it be a homecoming for us all - whether physically or spiritually.
And don’t forget to get in the cool waters. Our ancestors didn’t hide indoors during the dog days - they made their way to water, to refresh, plenish, an be restored. To find communion and calm. To lay down and make peace beneath the pummeling cascade. To feel at home, and to gather the strength we need to change our lives for the better.
With love and water
Samu