Cancer New Moon: Soulmates

Thanks to a generous colleague with an Ancestry.com account, I recently got my hands on a copy of my mother’s birth certificate. For years, I’d used a chart based on her recollection that she was born “just as the men were coming home from the fields for their supper.” Mom was born at home on a backwater farm in the early 1930s, so I’d never searched for her birth records, assuming her time of birth wouldn’t have been recorded. But there it was, crowded next to the doctor’s signature like a precious afterthought. I might actually have squealed when I saw it. (Maybe you have to be an astrologer to understand.)

So I now have a proper birth chart for one of my parents, at least, and I’m having one heck of a good time tearing it apart. Astrological signatures seem to run in families as surely as high arches or a Roman nose, and it’s always good fun to compare the birth charts of parents and their children to see the recurring patterns. Not to mention that each of us were little transits to our parents’ birth charts, and it can be sobering to realize that your natal Mars conjoined your mother’s Moon represents the sweltering August afternoon hours of your agonizing birth. (Sorry about that, Mom. Guess you got back at me with that Saturn/South Node connection.)

How is it that when we think of soulmates, our parents seldom come to mind? Or for that matter, siblings, first cousins, and the grade school nemesis who unfailingly edged us out as the top student in our class? We seem to assume soulmates present themselves only as romantic partners or maybe the rare lifelong friend. That usually disqualifies the people who grounded us or gave us wedgies.

Romance is neat, but surely the soul has a greater variety of work to do. How better to make sure it gets done than to drop us into a family with some soulmates who share our cranky, angular Mars placement and neurotic Moon/Pluto aspect? Placed together in a sort of astrological hothouse of shared frailties, my tribe struggles valiantly to control our volatile tempers, obsessive/compulsive tendencies, and impatience with poor grammar and punctuation. Not one of us is what you’d call easy-going.

Yes, if you’re ever going to work out some of the karmic homework you elected to tackle in this lifetime, family members are definitely going to help you do it—if you don’t kill each other in the process.

Summer begins with the Sun’s journey through Cancer, the sign associated with family heritage, ancestors, and your own little familial, astrological sweat lodge. The Cancer New Moon is in rather a close opposition to Pluto; what family secrets might come tumbling out of the closet at your July 4 celebration? What bitter political tensions are apt to ignite interpersonal fireworks? And, at the risk of sounding cosmically, infuriatingly Californian, what are you meant to learn from it all?

All this tribal soulmate stuff doesn’t end at the front door of your ancestral home, either. You belong to many tribes based on everything from nationality to religion, following a particular baseball team or Game of Thrones. Most tribes are connected together by a “mother” chart, too. Nations have birth charts, though there is often debate about which date or time is the most valid. So do sports teams, television series, and the company that pays your salary. It may be tricky to track it down, but if you do, you’ll find connections between that mother chart and your birth chart…the energetic hook that drew you in.

Because I don’t think we join our tribes by accident. As if seeking to replicate that family hothouse, we’re drawn to the groups that push our buttons and try our patience (if you doubt it, spend ten minutes on social media). We find our way to the ones that offer a sense of belonging, a flag to salute, an origin story; the ones that are filled with soulmates who laugh at our jokes, drive us crazy, and wound us in the tender places that need toughening up. Unerringly, unwittingly, and with accidental wisdom, we eventually find our way home to our soulmate families.

© 2016 April Elliott Kent