The summer solstice marks the sun’s entrance into wise, nurturing Cancer. If Gemini season has been stressing you out with its bottomless capacity for chaos, if you’re tired of your attention always being drawn in a hundred directions at once, or if you’re just ready to stop making so much small talk, Cancer season is here to offer some relief. 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 typically runs from about June 21 to July 22, is the first sign of the summer and the first water sign of the year. But this isn’t exactly the splashy, carefree water vibe of pool parties or boardwalk antics with friends. Astrologically, the water element is moodier than that; water signs are intuitive, perceptive, in touch with their feelings. It’s a sensitive energy that’s more magnetic than aggressive, reserved rather than extroverted.
Lana Del Rey, a Cancer sun, gave us a classic anthem for the season with the lush and dreamy “Summertime Sadness.” Solange, also a Cancer, gave us another with the rhythmic bass and melancholy vocals of “Cranes in the Sky”: “I tried to work it away / But that just made me even sadder.” Karen Dalton, with her haunting voice and 12-string guitar, gave us a whole catalogue of Cancer-season folk-vibes.
Cancer’s ruling planet is, naturally, 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 the people 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, outside of the safety of their own trusted circle, Cancer can experience intense vulnerability. Sometimes this manifests as defensiveness, evasiveness, an intense desire for privacy. Other times it looks like hypersensitivity to the smallest unkindness, or a myopic focus on all the cruelty that exists in the world. It’s not easy to feel this much!
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.
