While we didn’t have any time off work over the festive period – after all, we had five weeks away on holidays last year – we’ve had house guests on and off since the week before Christmas. We live in a tourist area so have also had plenty of people from Sydney popping up and popping in – or wanting to catch up with us. It’s been almost as if we were on holidays but with more cooking, more cleaning and more changes of sheets. It’s been fabulous. There’s very little I enjoy more than feeding friends or having friends to come and stay; to be honest, I’d far prefer it to going out.
Having said that though, I’ll be glad when things go back to normal-ish next week. Schoolkids are still on holidays for another few weeks so the beach and restaurants are still busy and car parks hard to get, but it will be normal-ish.
As much as we’ve enjoyed it all, I am exhausted. I came back from the UK at the beginning of November with a very heavy head cold and a sore back and then just as I was beginning to feel better I sprained my dodgy ankle a couple of weeks before Christmas. While I’m back doing my 5am walks now, it’s strapped up during the day and both back and dodgy ankle are quite painful.
Given that Saturn rules ankles and structures (such as backs) and is finishing his run through Aquarius (and my 12th house) I suspect he’s trying to teach me something. Who am I kidding? Saturn is always trying to teach me something – it’s just that usually I’m too busy to listen. This time around I suspect it’s about self-care. While I have indulged over the past few months with travel, food, wine, and plenty of running around, self-indulgence is not the same as self-care.
Sometimes true self-care is doing that thing that you know you have to do, but soooo don’t want to. It’s the tough love thing, the “boring” practical stuff that you won’t see the benefit of until you really need it. True self-care is about adulting.
That’s another thing about Cancer – while it’s about mothering or parenting and nurturing, very often we mistake that with doing what feels good. Parenting and nurturing – whether it’s yourself or your business, your child, your relationship, your hobby, whatever – is very often about making the hard decisions and saying no…for your own good.
This excerpt from an article I read some time ago (apologies, I’ve long forgotten where I read it…) sums it up much better than I could:
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
At the Cancer Full Moon, that’s the sort of questions you’ll be asking yourself. Sure, the most obvious manifestation of this is regarding work-life balance – after all, Capricorn is associated with work, career and public life, while Cancer is very much aligned with home, family and private life. So yes, those themes are there at this full Moon. More than that though is the balance between “self-care” and true self-care.
This Full Moon is at 16 Cancer 22’. In my chart it falls exactly trine my Ascendant, square Venus, and sextile Pluto. It’s tough love, and the sort that is telling me to pull my big girl pants on and get on with the self-care I need.
This is also 5th and 11th house stuff for me. The decisions I’m making are around how I can balance my love of creating with attaining my long-term goals. My focus in 2023 is about manifesting my goals – and self-indulgence and a Piscean lack of care around consequences associated with that won’t get me there, but some practical real world help from good friends will certainly help.
Which reminds me of the final point I wanted to make about Cancer and this Full Moon. Cancer represents the security of home and what is known, and also the stories of the past – this includes habits, attitudes, reactions. Even though some of these might no longer be doing us good, they’re known and in that, they’re safe and, dare I say it, controllable. Or, rather, the outcome is more controllable. In order to grow and achieve goals though, you need to step outside the safety and security of the past and build new habits and structures. Changing habits, changing lives.
Given that this is, for me, a 5th house/11th house Full Moon, and the 5th house is associated with creativity, play, children, and risk, it follows that dreams and goals (11th house) will never be achieved unless some emotional security (Cancer) is risked.
A good friend told me something similar the other day but not in those words and it was for me the light bulb moment I needed to make (personal) sense of this full moon. Doing what is needed, however, is an entirely different thing.
Cancer Full Moon, January 7, 2023, 09:09am (or thereabouts) AEST