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Issue # 16 - July, 2008

THE RETURN
Newsletter for Aquarius Rising Astrological Consulting

CANCER – the CRAB or the TURTLE

June 20 – July 21, 2008

*Positive Archetypes for Cancer:
The… Mother/Matriarch; Parent; Homemaker; Nurturer/Caretaker; Moral Support/Life
Coach; Psychotherapist/Counselor; Healer; Family or Clan Member/Trusted Neighbor;
Sensitive; Myth Weaver

*Negative Archetypes for Cancer:
The… Over-protective Parent/Smothering Mother/Backstage Mom/Invisible Person/
Enabler; Sleep Walker/Walking Dead; Abandoning Parent; Crybaby;
Parasitic Parent/Predatory Therapist

CANCER
Come Home to Yourself

By Lark Bowerman

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore

The full moon rides high. Waters of the bay are calm. The world is filled with magic and mystery. Creatures now immersed under the high tide line have waited for hours and are feeding voraciously. Anyone walking along the beach at this hour must extend their sensitivity beyond its normal limits to pick up all of what is going on—has to be quiet to listen and observe very carefully. And if instead of the full moon, we were to be walking on this beach in the dark of the moon, we would have to be even more acutely sensitive to get all of what goes on…

Who doesn’t begin to dream a little under the spell of the moon and of darkness? We open to our feelings. We open to dreams. We think of what we are and what we could become. We long for the touch of someone close and familiar. We want to pour out our hearts and share our feelings with someone who understands us.

One of the creatures affected deeply in each cycle of the tides’ ebb and flow is the crab—hard shelled creature with a soft and succulent interior. Crab’s flesh is so hard to get at that once we do, we tend to think of it as a delicacy, if not a colossal bother. And so it is with people born under the sign of Cancer, the crab. They are lunar and reflective in nature. Sensitive. And their sensitivity requires them to wear some emotional protection. This sign in times gone by was also known as the sign of the Turtle. Same idea—soft interior protected by a hard shell. The turtle is in a way, an even better symbol for this sign because it carries its home with it on its back. It has the ability to withdraw when needed, to a place of refuge.

How well do you know yourself. How in touch are you with your dreams? How do you nurture yourself? How well do those close to you know you? How much of yourself do you share with them? And they with you?

Do you have a secure home? Is your home more than just a house? Is it a dwelling for your soul? Who are your friends, neighbors?

The most important work you and I will ever do will be within the walls of our own homes.
Harold B. Lee (1899-1937)

In her bestselling book, The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aaron tells us that in our North American culture the trait of High Sensitivity is something that we are biased against. How curious… Why would that be? Why would we tend to think of people who require a little extra time to withdraw and process feelings as being in some way not normal? Aren’t these the very same people we’ll turn to when we’re needing some perspective and reassurance?

Sensitive—Webster’s definition:

Don’t you find it a bit odd that Webster missed that “sensitive” could be to other people or plants or animals, i.e. living things? A nurturing quality.

I once heard, a number of years ago, of a study that was done on the average amount of quality time parents spend in a day with their children. It came out to a dismal sounding fifteen minutes…

Or how many conversations do you have in a day in which everyone is competing to talk and no one is really listening? It’s an epidemic…

It seems that there are many more people in need of nurture
than there are nurturing people in our society.

We’re a Consumer Society. We mostly consume, what in essence I think, is “comfort and convenience.” I remember being in Walnut Creek, California. In the downtown area, the Arts Theatre sported a huge banner describing an upcoming show. It showed a pristine nature scene and on either side of it, a gigantic knife and fork. Licking around the edges of the luscious landscape were flames. The caption read, “Consuming Landscapes.”

But before we start pointing fingers at industry, I’m inclined to ask, why it is that the larger proportion of energy consumed in North America (something like 75% I think) is in building, heating and cooling our homes?

And now I’m recalling a cartoon I once saw in an environmental magazine. It showed a razed-to-the-ground, slash and burn logging scene. The caption read, “You are witnessing the cleaning power of a leading paper towel.” And of course, most of us use these paper towels, some more of them than others.

In an encounter with the Organization, Zero Population Growth, I also learned that in developed nations, each child born can expect to consume anywhere from five to fifteen times the amount of resources that a child in a so-called “underdeveloped” nation will consume.

How is it that we came to be so voracious?

I think that a study of the sign of Cancer will give us some clues. Cancer isn’t the only sensitive sign but sensitivity is played out in a very specific way in this archetype.

If you’re a Cancer, chances are in this day and age, you may have gone into a permanent state of shock. Or if you do have your sensitivity in tact, you probably have an extremely hard shell and you are very, very smart about how you handle your feelings. Or you’re working on it…

In a now well-tattered issue of The New Internationalist magazine from March 1988, I learned something interesting about how things went in England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Debbie Taylor writes, “…according to Oakley, Illich and many others, the domestic rot set in (along with many other kinds of rot) with the growth of the cities, factories and mines of early capitalism. By 1850 half of the UK population were living in cities. In those days factory and mine-owners did not care who did their work for them and hired whole families to dig coal or weave cloth in the textile mills. It might have continued that way too, except for two main things.

First was the extraordinarily high infant mortality rate in the dreadful city slums where the workers lived… In fact, the general ‘condition of the working class’ became a cause for serious concern among capitalists. …Epidemics of diphtheria and typhoid swept through the slums like evil flood-water and began to lap at the doors of the rich.

Meanwhile the clatter of the tumbrels in the stinking streets was drowned out by the roar of ever-more efficient machinery in the factories. And the more efficient the machines became, the fewer the workers that were needed to work them…

It turned out that the most cost effective way to run a workforce was to throw women out of the factories and put them to work on improving the lamentable ‘condition of the working class’ in their homes. This had the added advantage that only one wage-packet would need to be paid—to the man of the house—to support the working-class family.

Both men and women protested vigorously… ‘The plebeians rioted,’ says Illich. ‘And the crowd was led, more often than not, by its women.’ “

The world is full of women blindsided
by the unceasing demands of motherhood,
still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
Anna Quindlen, O Magazine, May2003

It takes community to maintain a human.
Earon Davis

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
W.S. Ross

So how did the world ever come to be so badly “ruled?” Is it something to do with the way we take care of ourselves? After all, the Industrial Revolution was brought about by us “needing” all those things that industry provided. And by “take care of ourselves” I mean not only with food and shelter, but how do we nourish our souls—how do we dream? Because this is where we arrive at the heart of the sign of Cancer, the archetype of the Mother, the Parent, the Nurturer and Myth Weaver.

We have to learn to mother, that is
—conceive, nurture and release—ourselves.

After all, which comes first, the child or the mother? Because if the child never grew up then there would be no mother. Conception, nurturing and release are the three phases of Cancerian energy and whichever one we find ourselves not experiencing fully is what we need to put some attention to.

Many of us had to nurture our mothers and fathers. Now we need to take those abilities that we learned doing that and apply them to ourselves. Many of us were abandoned in various ways or smothered or spoiled too. These are all myths that don’t work. We need to find the proverbial inner child, take note of its needs, and provide it with a myth that does work. How do we do this?

One way is to let ourselves dream. In our private fantasies we can allow ourselves to “act out” scenarios that are often very embarrassing, were we to share them with others. They’re parts of ourselves that are under-developed or immature. These parts of us were often shamed into forgetfulness by parents who had unresolved issues with their own inner children.

My mother could make anybody feel guilty -- she used to get letters of apology from people she didn’t even know.
Joan Rivers

So we can “try on” different fantasies about how we might go about fulfilling these things, just like children dream of what they’ll become when they’re grown up. We let our feelings out in our mind’s eye. We can watch and see how things go. We can, for example, pout for a while if we need to and see what that feels like, or fight or cry or eat all the ice cream we think we want. Hopefully we’re observing consciously and can move on from these behaviors when we get clear on what the outcomes are. Most importantly, we can CONCEIVE ourselves as being the way we want to be.

“We must nurture our dreams like we would a child. They are God-given and just as
precious. Without ambition how would a child learn to ride a bicycle, play an instrument
or whistle? We deny the spirit of God when we as adults settle for less than our dreams!”
Conway Stone

Cherish your vision and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints
of your ultimate achievements.
-Napoleon Hill

When we’ve conceived and nurtured ourselves as the person we really want to be, then we can release ourselves into the world as that person.

Release, as in giving birth, is a natural process but a very delicate one. Just like the hermit crab that has to leave its outgrown shell and look for a new one, timing and being properly prepared is everything.

We have looked to “mother” for food, shelter and comfort. We think of food and shelter as comfort. We think of Mother as “comfort and convenience.” But we also think of mother as  horrible because sooner or later, if we’re inside the womb, we have to come out; if we breast feed, we have to be weaned; If we live at home, we have to go find—and pay for—our own home and in the process we find that there are lots of things out there that can consume us. There are many circumstances and people out in the world that can prevent our dreams from being enacted if we let them. It can be scary and unpleasant even if we are properly prepared. It’s also exhilarating.

A mother is not a person to lean on
but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
Dorothy C. Fisher (1879 - 1958), quoted in O Magazine, May 2003

Mother knows this too. She knows, of course, long before we do that we could be consumed “out there” and if she’s so afraid for us that we might not make it, she might never ask us to leave home. A woman who is experiencing the world as an inhospitable place where it’s extremely difficult to get comfortable, will probably have a very difficult time even giving birth in the first place and her child will inherit that legacy of fear.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
Ellen Goodman

—or to let our hopes for ourselves outweigh our fears.

And then too, mother may be thinking of her own need for companionship, and comfort and try to get that from baby instead of giving it herself. That’s when mother becomes a prison-keeper asking us to unconsciously re-live her myths.

This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person
and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more
than pets.
Heather Armstrong, Dooce, 11-15-05

At birth, the first separation between ourselves and mother happens. Throughout our lives, many more separations need to happen; and separations from father, who is part of her life and so part of ours too; but mother is the first contact we make as we enter this dimension we call “earth,” because, try as we might, we can’t change the fact that we are all born from a woman.

That’s why the ancients conceived of the Creative Source as a Great Goddess; and why also, we now-a-days tend to think of the Creative Source as a God—because somewhere in there, the goddess “failed” us—just like god is “failing” us now…just like the shelter of the egg shell inevitably fails the chick.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.
Bill Cosby

TIME TO GROW UP

My husband, Kris Bowerman, who’s very fond of numbers, has calculated that, in comparison with the time span that it took for dinosaurs to evolve into birds, human beings (generally speaking) are at about the four-year old stage of evolution. Don’t you thing we’re acting a bit like four-year olds as a species?

We’re grabbing up every resource on this planet as if it belonged to only us. We fight constantly with each other and with every other species. We don’t seem to understand that we might be cutting off the branch we’re sitting on. This is an immature behavior, is it not?
I think it all comes back again to the same thing: At some time we all have to learn to become our own mothers. We have to learn what home is all about for ourselves. And we don’t have to wait for the effects of the Industrial Revolution to wear off to do that; in fact, that may be what helps us get over the Industrial Revolution and go back to sharing our toys and resources with the rest of the family of Earth.

As Riane Eisler tells us in The Chalice and the Blade, we need to “unravel and re-weave our myths.”

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it
would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to
a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.
Joni Mitchell

Spending some time alone reflecting? Ooh, scary! for most people. Going to the effort to cook a nice meal for ourselves? Why would we do that when we can get a fast food dinner? Sitting down to eat together… frightening! And isn’t it so ironical that we can get what we call “Cancer” from eating such bad food, from polluting our environment and from not dealing with our repressed emotions properly?

The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.
Elain Heffner, O Magazine, May 2003

The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
Henry Ward Beecher

Honoring our Earth as our home and place of refuge and creating within it a personal sanctuary; taking the time to consider who we are, to dream what we truly want to become; living it; reaching out tender tentacles of feeling into the world, forming connections to others who are here with us; protecting ourselves without harming others; to receive as well as give love, comfort and nourishment; to heighten awareness and experience all that life is, pleasant and unpleasant, knowing that it’s all a gift. To me this is life lesson of the sign of Cancer.

“The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”
Rumi, “The Dream That Must Be Interpreted”

IT HELPS TO KNOW THIS…

You can forget about those one-size-fits-all horoscopes. Your unique chart is constructed from your personal birth data: Exact time, date and place of birth.

In the method of Evolutionary astrology that I use, the Sun sign represents our basic sense of Identity. The Moon sign represents our inner, emotional nature and the Ascendant, or Rising sign tells about our personal style and how we interface with the world. Sun, Moon and Ascendant are called the Primal Triad and are the foundation for understanding your personal themes. I consider the chart as a WHOLE. I also very carefully study the way the symbols are arranged in order to make your personal life themes clear. You can find more information about Evolutionary astrology on my web site.

For an in-person reading in BC,Canada, over the phone or for a gift certificate, e-mail me or call (604) 940-8940.

www.aquariusastrological.com
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lark@aquariusastrological.com

All newsletter materials copyright © 2008 Lark & Kris Bowerman, www.aquariusastrological.com

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