Your Guide to Cancer Season
Prepare to be in your feelings.
The summer solstice marks the sun’s entrance into wise, nurturing Cancer. If the chaos of Gemini season has been stressing you out, if you’re tired of your attention always being drawn in a hundred directions at once, or if you’re ready to stop making so much small talk and connect on a deeper level, Cancer season is here for you. Over the next month, you can reconnect with your roots, your loved ones, and your deepest emotions. You can rediscover how fulfilling your rich inner life is.
Cancer season, which runs from June 20 to July 22 this year, is the first sign of the summer and the first water sign of the year. Like all water signs, Cancer is intuitive and sensitive, skilled at reading the room and picking up on all the emotional undercurrents. Some people are deeply uncomfortable talking about (or even feeling) their emotions, but those people probably aren’t Cancers.
This means that Cancer tends to have a reputation for being incredibly moody, even something of a crybaby. (Lana Del Rey, a Cancer sun, gave us a classic anthem for the season with the lush, melancholy “Summertime Sadness.”) This is also the zodiac sign most prone to wistfulness and nostalgia. If you find yourself dreaming about the past this month, pining for your exes, or more generally yearning for what you don’t have, there’s a good chance the astrology of the season has something to do with it.
Cancer’s ruling planet is the moon — dreamiest and moodiest of all the celestial bodies. The moon represents emotions and instincts, the selves that we are when nobody else is looking. In astrology, Cancer and the moon are both strongly associated with home and family, with the people we are when we arrive back from work, change out of our professional clothes, and relax.
During Cancer season, you might be more of a homebody than usual. Even if you’re typically someone who loves novelty and adventure, the comfort of domesticity now seems inviting, even luxurious. While Gemini season was a time for meeting new people, Cancer season invites you to deepen your relationships with those closest to you — whether that’s your family of origin or your true-blue friends. In other words, while Cancer season may push you to delve into your innermost feelings, you don’t have to do so alone. This is an opportunity to nurture and be nurtured, to make room in your life for all kinds of care.
The flip side is that getting into a new friend’s trusted inner circle — or letting new people into yours — can be a challenge right now. The sign of the crab is famous for its hard outer shell; Cancer can be defensive, evasive, and intensely private. Even the most outgoing of Cancers can be difficult to really get to know. They feel deeply, but they don’t tend to wear those feelings on their sleeve. Have some patience, though, and the hard work of building intimacy will be more than worth it.
Depending on your own astrological chart, all this talk about Cancer’s quiet, inward focus and caring nature might sound comforting and lovely, or it might sound awful — hazy and heavy and simply not fun. But whether it’s easy or difficult for you to do, Cancer season demands that you not try to fight off your feelings or persuade yourself that they’re unimportant. No matter how strong you are or how great your self-control, you can’t ignore your emotions forever.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean you have to become soft and retiring, either. Not all feelings are gentle, and not all Cancer energy is sad. Courtney Love — hard-edged, confrontational, messy — is a Cancer too; so was punk icon Poly Styrene! So was poet June Jordan, who loved the world, and her people in it, more fiercely than tenderly. “I choose to exist unafraid of my enemies; instead, I choose to become an enemy to my enemies,” she wrote. In Cancer season, you can choose to do what you want with your feelings, but you can’t opt out of feeling them.
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