Waning Moon in Cancer: Comfort and Contempt

The Old Rectory, Westport, Ireland

Yesterday's Last Quarter Moon rode high in sunny skies all day for me, as I explored Achill Island in County Mayo. I couldn't help be aware of the turning corner, as we move closer to the New Moon in Libra.

Plenty of intense transits in the sky these days, and lots going on. Friends are reporting challenges, dark nights, fog and mist. Meanwhile, I am held in a halycon time of extra warmth, an unusual weather pattern for Ireland, days of sun, warm breezes, and white clouds, even as the bracken turns to cinnamon.

So I've been thinking about this idea that challenging transits come along to shake things up and force us out of our comfort zone. The Moon in Cancer, where she is today and was for yesterday's Last Quarter, loves her comforts and detests change. East or west, home's best, for her.

And that word "comfort" means strength, solace. Why on earth would we deliberately court weakness? Why upset ourselves?

Why, indeed?

I think it has to do with the old adage, familiarity breeds contempt. Now, that's not always true. Yet we do tend to take things for granted when they are familiar, comfortable.

If I have never before driven a car on the left side of the road, a car with the steering wheel and controls on the right, never used a GPS, never driven on narrow roads bordered by stone walls and 12-foot hedges––well, I can't just drive on autopilot to get from point A to point B, can I?

I guarantee, I cannot. I must, must pay attention to what's going on around me. At first, that attention is shot through with intense anxiety. Eventually, I find I can do it––and yet the sense of the new and unusual is still there. The world doesn't look the same. My relationship to it changes.

The word "shake" comes from the Old English, and meant then what it means now: rapid movement, agitation. But it also has roots in another word that means flight, flee, and depart. When we depart from familiar routines, our perceptions are shaken up. We see things differently.

I still think there's something wrong with the idea of getting 'outside our comfort zone' (and the Cancerian Moon would agree). The current fascination with adrenaline, for example: Danger as enlightenment ... a snare and a delusion, in my view. Just another way the sellers of "high" keep us hooked to consumption.

Instead, I'd like to advocate for a broadening of attention, a way to widening our field of vision and softening our gaze. "Attend" harks back, ultimately, to the word tendere, which means stretch ... to pay attention is to stretch toward something, to lean into it.

Yes, we're in a crucible of transformation. Yes, it is sometimes exquistely uncomfortable, even painful. Yes, the only way out is through.

And, and ...

farmhouse door, Co Mayo, Ireland

The world is filled with beauty and tenderness. Ordinary things––birds in a hedge, hot tea in a mug, turning a key in a lock––can open us to deep perceptions as surely as bungee jumping.

We're in the last quarter of the lunar cycle, when we choose what to let go of, and how to let it go. When we become acutely aware,  on this day when the Cancerian Moon conjunct Jupiter and trines Venus in Scorpio, of how much we love our familiar lives and how that's exactly the point.

So, plan for the extraordinary and do it ... take the trip you dreamed of, write the book, have the conversation ... and also know that if your life right now has no openings for anything other than the usual and familiar, you have everything you need to transform into the most beautiful phoenix anyway.

Love the familiar, look at it from a different angle, and all we need is there.