Note: a simplified version of the solstice chart, showing a precise multi-planet background configuration in addition to the Sun and Chiron, is at the very bottom of this post.
I don’t mean to shortchange Gemini, but we’re almost at the solstice! The Sun enters Cancer at 4:24 am EDT this Sunday, June 21, marking the start of the summer season here in the Northern Hemisphere — and our first taste of another type of astrological “season” that runs on a longer timeline. The question is whether we’ll all be too busy trying to pack more than usual into these long daylight hours to notice it. I invite you to slow down and tune in to what’s making this year’s solstice special:
Today, June 19, Chiron begins its initial visit to Taurus at 5:18 pm EDT. It will hang out in the very first degree of this earthy sign for about three months. (Next spring Chiron will enter Taurus for a “Chiron season” of about six years.)
What this timing means is that when the Sun enters Cancer on Sunday, it immediately makes harmonious contact with Chiron in its new sign, Taurus.
Chiron in Taurus will likely be raising our awareness around such Taurean themes as: our bodies and physical senses; money, material wealth, and possessions; what we value’; and our sense of moral values (or lack thereof).
In any sign and in any configuration with other planets, Chiron tends to act as a focusing agent.
Depending on specific circumstances (astrological and personal), this heightened focus may come through discomfort or even crisis. Other times, Chiron contact may express as gentler experiences that allow our understanding to transcend its previous limits and become better integrated. In all cases, the end goals are learning, healing, and integration.
When thinking about Chiron and the Sun in aspect, consider that the Sun is the star around which our entire solar system organizes itself: the source of the light that warms us and makes life possible on Earth. Astrologically, the Sun is a symbol of consciousness, will, and life force — and its path through the twelve signs describes the themes marking each segment of a year.
Certain points along that cycle tend to resonate with particular sensitivity, and the first days of the signs that begin each of the four seasons — Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn — are four of the most significant. To have a symbol representing “the focusing of awareness for the purpose of healing” enter a new sign — andbe directly in contact with the Sun (symbol of light, consciousness, will, and life itself) — just as the Sun occupies one of these especially sensitive seasonal points?
That is a signal to pay attention.
When the Sun lands in the first degree of Cancer, it makes a square to the Aries Point — the first degree of Aries. Events occurring with significant activity in this part of the zodiac often describe or emphasize the ways our personal concerns and the themes of global events or collective experience intersect, invert, mirror, and often heighten each other. As mentioned, the early degrees of all the cardinal signs, which begin the seasons, share this sensitivity.
In Cancer, this astrological/energetic sensitivity or resonance can take on especially Cancerian flavors. Cancer’s theme of cycles comes from the waxing and waning of its planetary ruler, the Moon, and extends from Earth’s Moon-dictated tides to the biological cycles that enable women to become mothers.
That “mothering” role broadens into other forms of taking care of others, beyond the realm of the family and domestic settings. Sometimes, like the crab symbolizing this sign, “taking care” takes the shape of withdrawing, as with some forms of self-care. Other times, this “taking care” looks more like reacting with raised pinchers in defense of self, family or home, whether “home” gets defined as a literal house, as the sense of feeling “at home,” or as a “homeland.”
I have been mulling some thoughts about this solstice aspect between the Cancer Sun in sensitive Aries Point territory and Chiron, which will be brand-new in Taurus beginning on June 19 — the Juneteenth holiday. Here in the U.S., Juneteenth commemorates the day the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation was ordered in Texas at the end of the American Civil War, officially ending slavery (if not fully ending it in practice — read up on convict labor, sharecropping, and crop lien systems).
Refer back to that paragraph where I described some of the Taurean themes I think Chiron may bring into stronger focus. There is something here, I think — especially in this year of the United States’ 250th birthday — relating to our collective reckoning in this country with our history of viewing people with dark-skinned bodies as possessions; the still-persistent devaluing of their personhood; and our far-too-long cultural process of seeing more clearly the entrenched, ugly values underpinning it all.
Not all countries are celebrating a big birthday this year, true. Not all cultures care about Western astrology, though it describes energies and themes that are (as far as I can tell) fairly culture-agnostic.
But I don’t think there’s a patch of inhabited land on this planet that has not seen its own version of historical, outright enslavement — or at least the gross devaluing of people with bodies of certain types — and is not working through its own version of related, culturally inherited themes. And while many people are working to act on values that center care for the wellbeing of everyone in this vast human family, we still have so, so much work to do.
The aspect between the Sun and Chiron this weekend is a sextile. This harmonizing blend (in this case connecting water with earth) describes opportunity.
“Opportunity” is not the same as “ease.”
We don’t simply get handed the potential benefits this weekend of all that these two planets represent in combination: the light and energy and consciousness of the Sun, the awareness and focus and healing mission of Chiron.
Without leaning into the caring theme of Cancer and the values theme of Taurus, the emotional and the physical, the thing asking for our attention and our willingness to see it for what it is — and then doing something tangible with what we discover — the awareness doesn’t matter. We have to take action in alignment with what the planets in this sextile are describing and offering. And that action needs to affect us meaningfully.
Otherwise, it’s just some pretty geometry in an astrology chart.
The size, scope, and specifics of that action will look different for everyone. Maybe you’re reading this and can already feel the inner issue or personal life circumstances that this potential for focused awareness and healing action describes. Working inwardly with what comes up might be exactly where you need to be. All inner self-awareness and healing work has the potential to translate into our ability to make more active and aligned contributions to community wellbeing and justice.
Maybe this astrology isn’t making a strong enough connection with your birth chart for the themes to come through clearly or with obvious relevance in your personal life, yet you can see an area in your community where you can apply the themes and energy anyway and put something in motion.
Or maybe you’re living a life that is so inextricably impacted by how these themes are expressing in your community and in national or global contexts that you’re already moving with it: an embodied conduit creating more opportunities around you as you step into the moments unfolding for you. This astrology may simply feel like a boost to what’s in process, or like a thick-tipped Sharpie underlining all that handwriting on the proverbial wall as you identify and take your next right action.
Whatever shape your awareness, caring, and next steps take, may the process serve the highest good of all concerned — and I wish you blessings for the upcoming solstice.
With love,
Amanda
P.S. I owe a debt of gratitude to the following two writers for their consistently clear, thoughtful, and pointed articles on matters of both historical and current Black experience in the U.S. and particularly in Maine, where I live. I’ve been reading both of them for many years, intermittently in various forms, and both have Substacks worth supporting:
Samuel James writes Banned Histories of Race in America and his website The Real Samuel James.
Shay Stewart Bouley writes at Shay’s Cogitations and at her website Black Girl in Maine.
P.P.S. I also want to shout out The Bollard, which runs an additional monthly column by Samuel James titled “Racisms,” and a monthly column titled “Radical Mainers” by Andy O’Brien about notable (and ignoble) figures and events in Maine’s historical abolition and labor movements.
Interestingly, at the moment of the Sun’s Cancer solstice ingress, a set of four objects that are not in contact with the Sun or Chiron offer another layer to the story and suggest some ways in. With the Moon in Virgo, Mercury in Cancer, Mars in Taurus, and centaur planet Nessus in Pisces (plus Jupiter in Cancer, more loosely) all in contact with each other I see an undercurrent that looks something like this:
– An ability to analyze feelings — and make a plan of action in response;
– Emotional intelligence regarding others in your environment, your (and perhaps others’) unconscious reactions, and your instinctual desires;
– Physical stamina, persistence, and an ability to take grounded action in response to both conscious feelings and less conscious emotional and spiritual porousness or soft boundaries;
– The ability to act on the opportunity to stop the proverbial buck on some old, confusing, internalized, and possibly intergenerationsl transgression against your most solid values;
– Access to a more adaptable framework for evaluating values: one that allows you to understand the necessity of creativity in constantly remaking the values you were instilled with as a child, IF they are blocking your ability to enact your free will in the pursuit of justice, liberty, and wellbeing for all.
Like the Sun and Chiron this weekend, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Nessus are making a series of sextiles between alternating earth and water signs, like a daisy chain. While the earth-earth and water-water connections describe simple ease and flow, those sextiles are where the actual opportunity to use these energies for your benefit — and for the benefit of all — come through.
If I can support you through the current changes and uncertainty with an astrological consultation or some soul work sessions, please get in touch. And if you enjoyed this, please consider leaving me a tip here. I offer this writing as a gift, but it does take time and energy. Thank you!
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