Dear Readers,
My 92-year-old mother has dementia. Yesterday, she put some frozen croissants in the oven before leaving her apartment to go to mass just across the street. When she returned, the croissants were burnt, so she threw them off her 19th floor balcony. Later, she told my niece she had thrown them to the construction workers working on the building across the way.
The Moon is currently at -00° 03’, essentially right on the celestial equator—the line projected from the earth’s equator onto the celestial sphere (an imaginary sphere with earth at the center used for mapping the heavens). The Sun’s maximum distance from this imaginary line is 23°21’, but by next Friday’s Full Moon, the Moon will be at -28°21’ (south of the celestial equator), way south of where we ever see the Sun in the sky. If you go out to look, you’ll notice the Moon in an unusual part of the heavens. I remember what it looked like last summer. I was sleeping on the deck at our cabin. It was obvious because there, when the moon is full, it’s like a headlight, and almost always wakes me up. But then, it never cleared the tree-tops, the moonlight weaving between ancient firs and cedars on the South side of our clearing.
In an individual’s birth chart, an out-of-bounds planet is kind of rogue. It doesn’t follow the rules and conventions associated with the sign where it’s placed and can act in extreme ways. The Moon is associated with our emotional life and often very literally with our mother. An individual with an out of bounds Moon might express their emotions dramatically, behave unpredictably, flaunt their uniqueness, or be rebelliously independent.
When I heard about the croissant incident, I cast a chart for yesterday morning, knowing that the Moon would be out-of-bounds next week. But yesterday it wasn’t. Then I pulled up my mother’s chart and looked at the declination of the Moon… nothing. To my dismay, I couldn’t blame the croissant throwing on the Moon. To note however, it does match the symbolism. Be forewarned. If you happen to be hit by a blackened flying croissant projectile next weekend, you can look to the heavens (or your mother) for the answer.
But before we get to next Friday’s Full Moon, we have today’s Mercury cazimi. Mercury is at the heart of the sun, going through his rebirth process just as Venus and Jupiter recently did. This is another new beginning, but it’s part of the cycle that began on April 11 with the retrograde cazimi. If you think back to around that time, an idea may have captured your attention then that is being lit up again now in a different way.
For me, as a person who has typically struggled to stay grounded, it was around that time that I discovered a way of breathing in time with the earth that makes being grounded feel natural and unforced. I’m no longer sitting on my triple air-sign psyche trying to contain it. That little tweak has led me in ways that I could never have imagined or predicted then.
By the next retrograde cazimi on August 5, a new idea is likely to have captured your attention and mine—one that will take us through Mercury’s next approximately 116 day cycle with the Sun.
Currently—under the superior cazimi, Mercury is at home in Gemini, moving fast, which he likes to do. As he emerges from the throne room of the Sun, he’ll be met by Venus. In my mind, they’re two kids running hand in hand through a meadow towards a beach with the sea beyond, chasing butterflies, making up stories, chattering about friends and games, hiding from each other, and squealing with delight in the warm sunshine. It’s a light-hearted day following a week of heavy Saturn squares to each of these planets, Venus, Mercury and the Sun. If you felt the wet blanket vibes of Saturn’s reality check earlier this week, I hope that today brought a welcome spring to your step. Perhaps a yes that was a no before, or a new way of looking at something that created more spaciousness, or an opening where none was previously in view. It could also simply be good news after a week of feeling the struggle.
Earlier this week, I took my daughter’s house key to have copies made while she’s out of the country. When I went to her house the next day to check them and hide one, I got both stuck in the front door, one in the latch and one in the deadbolt. I couldn’t remove either one. They turned just fine, but the locks were dry and tight, and the keys weren’t budging. Great mom move… (Yes, I eventually got the keys out thanks to some bicycle chain lube I found in the garage). At that time, Saturn was squaring the Sun and Mercury in my 5th house—the house of children; a “Saturn square” no, with a yes that came later.
Currently Venus in Gemini is moving into a square with Neptune in Pisces that we’ll be feeling until she and Mercury dive into the waters of Cancer together (remember the two children running toward the beach?) and a couple days beyond—the 17th or 18th, at which point the Sun will be squaring Neptune. We’ll have a lot of watery, emotional, intuitive Neptune in Pisces vibes over the weekend and early next week heading into the Full Moon in Capricorn, with Mercury, Venus and the Sun all in watery, emotional, intuitive Cancer. Yes I said that… watery, emotional and intuitive. A lot of it.
Neptune puts us in touch with the imaginal realm as well as giving us trouble with discernment in Saturnian reality, and so does the Moon when we’re dreaming.
As we move into the weekend and towards next Friday’s Full Moon, we can imagine traveling through a lunar landscape where dreams and the ideal might seem more real than reality. Cancer is home to the Moon. Venus leads the parade of personal planets into Cancer late Sunday evening (June 16), followed by Mercury about three hours later. The Sun follows on their heels, reaching the solstice point where the sun stands still at noon directly over the Tropic of Cancer early on the afternoon of June 20th.
Once the Sun moves into Cancer, Mercury, Venus and the Sun will be ruled by our rogue out-of-bounds Moon that I spoke to at the beginning of this piece. As it happens, Venus and Mercury are also out-of-bounds, adding their own flavor of flying croissant unconventional, irrepressible rebelliousness to our relationships, aesthetics, values, communication and thinking. On top of this, we’re headed into a lunar landscape where the imaginal realm and our creative life might seem more real or more present than the meetings, chores, emails, politics, bills and the incessant pressure of time that make up our normal waking reality. Follow a rabbit with a pocket watch and you never know where you’ll end up…
At the time of the Full Moon, the Sun and Moon will be just past their square to Neptune, but it will still be palpable. It’s a T-square with Neptune as the focal point, likely to bring in idealism, fuzziness around our sense of self and our priorities, and heightened emotions and emotionality that can lead to escapism. But it can also help us to be open to personal growth epiphanies, spiritual insights and/or creative inspiration.
What all of this seems to imply is that we’re being asked to pause like the Sun, to perhaps stand still for a moment and allow ourselves to be untethered from our time-bound routines, appointments, errands and to-do lists. This week’s cosmic weather seems to be better suited to watching clouds form and unform pictures in the sky than for making concrete plans and pursuing specific goals. To me, this week’s astrology asks us to kick up our heels as we sprint through the last degrees of Gemini, knowing that the mental gymnastics and overall pace of life of the last several weeks are about to hit a speedbump where we’ll need to rebalance and allow the tides to slowly bring our emotional bodies back into balance with our minds. Mercury and Venus might sprint through the meadow to the beach, across the tide flats and into the water, but pretty soon, they’ll be meandering slowly back up the beach, still hand in hand, ready to take a nap in the sun.
I’ll be ready too.
If you’d like to explore how the astrology of this year is likely to land in relation to you personally, I, like my patron Mercury would be delighted to serve as your guide to the star map known as your birth chart. Email me for details: camelliablossoms@gmail.com or…
As always, thank you for reading,
Cami
The whole private “likes” thing on twitter (☿□♄) seriously made that app a lot less fun for me. Which may be a good thing in a way? Because here I am choosing to read your Substack instead. Good stuff, Cami! Thanks for writing
As will I (be ready for a nap). Thank you, Cami for this overview of what’s happening - and all best with your mum 🤍.