“Day Moon Over Ocean, “ chalk pastel by Maria Theresa Maggi
The moon is new at 17 degrees Cancer of the tropical zodiac at 11:33 AM Pacific Daylight time on July 17, 2023.
The moon is at home in Cancer, the sign that rules our sense of home, our emotional instincts, and how we nurture, parent, and feel our way through the world, both publicly and privately. While Taurus energy may help us pour the foundation for a physical home, Cancer brings us the emotional energy to build a sense of home, both within ourselves and for our families, however they are constellated.
We talk a lot in this newsletter about how the moon describes our emotonal instincts, and Cancer is the sign where that all begins. So it’s quite an essential new moon in that our emotional instincts and habits start out this month in their very birthplace—the first water sign, the second cardinal sign, the one that begins with the beginning of summer—Cancer, the crab.
Cancer is a sensitive sign. It gives us all the feels that generate a bond between parent and child, and from there how we learn to bond with others in both our private and public lives. It rules the stomach in the physical body, and we all know how a powerful feeling can make us feel queasy or nauseous, or cause us not to be able to eat or to eat too much. This new moon is a natural and welcoming time to go deep to reset our own emotional instincts, conditioning and habits. Or maybe we want to revel in them, or return to them if we have been trying to do things counter to what helps us feel at home with ourselves. Or maybe we need to restart an emotional connection to our literal home, or the place where we were born. All of this comes naturally under a Cancer new moon.