Mercury Retrograde in Cancer: Who Needs What?
By Tom Jacobs
As a Cancer South Node person, I generally think I have a handle on that energy and how it works in my life. But I’m surprised at how much insight this retrograde period has afforded me. I just talked with my mother on the telephone, and everything we talked about was directly relevant to this period: clearing out old and unneeded stuff from our homes, our varying levels of attachment to those stuffs, what each of us has learned over time (her over years and me over the last few months) about our eating habits and how they’re (in)formed by our emotional worlds and conditioning.
The most striking inner dialogue of the many popping up in me during the talk was that surrounding the dishes with silver crescents on the lips and matching crystal that have my name on them. These were gifts to my parents at their wedding, and I remember eating off them for special occasions often while growing up. They are beautiful, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I love these dishes, and I mean love (Venus in Libra on the Libra Ascendant, anyone?), but there is no way on earth I’d ever use them. None. Zero. I’m a minimalist at home (Capricorn on the IC), never setting a table in any formal way and don’t even keep decorative things around. (Or a table, for that matter.) As I glance around my livingroom right now, I see a chair, a bookcase, a desk (but no chair, I notice), a printer and a pair of shoes…and there’s a cat on the floor over by the door. Dish-wise, I’m the kind of guy to use the same plate and fork at each meal, interrupting their use only for washing.
What I remember yet again is that staying connected to things cannot possibly offer a connection to family and heritage, one energy behind the archetype of Cancer - arguably what any of us wants when we’re in Cancerian modes. For some reason we hold onto the things in lieu of the relationships, but it doesn’t work. While I talked with her I realized that a few weeks ago I sold a bass trombone I’d been playing since I was 15. A very beautiful collector’s edition that I, as a musician, grew up with and into. It no longer made sense to define myself as a musician, which I realized I’d been doing, so it went to some guy somewhere in Texas who said he’d give it a good home. I was blown away that I’d actually given up that thing, given how it represented an idea of me for so long.
So, connection to family & heritage: Last year I looked at the charts of around 12 family members, going back a few generations. The single theme in common was a ton of Uranus/Aquarius/11th house work, whether with Suns in Aquarius, Suns conjunct Uranus, Aquarian Moons, one or the other node in Aquarius or the 11th, or Uranus square the nodes. I read in this that we’ve been looking for generations at what it means to be free.
Now, with my Cancer South Node, I’m prone to sentimentalism, attachments to things like pretty dishes from ancestors and shiny musical instruments from my youth. The ruler Moon, however, is in Sagittarius/3rd, opposing retrograde Saturn in Gemini/9th. That Moon wants freedom, but feels locked in place by Saturn. I experience this is as a tension between my personal needs and the tradition I come from, and can at times get caught up in that inner dialogue. Also, though, my Uranus is in the 1st house and square the nodes, and I see in it an individuation imperative. Even as the urge to sentimentalism is strong, the urge to break out always turns out to be stronger.
Imagine that every chart in your family you can get your hands on going back three generations screams a need to find individuation and freedom, and you can feel the need to break free in your own body, and you’re worrying that getting rid of some 40-yr old dishes no one ever uses or even looks at might be a bad idea.
Just imagine that.
I’m aware that there’s a persistent question in me with this Cancerian South Node and Uranus in the 1st squaring it: Am I where I come from, or am I something totally different? Balancing the needs of having a history and tradition to come from, the need to feel rooted in something, and the need to be free of all such things. The question becomes, “How can I honor where I came from as I have to completely break free from it (and, probably, spray paint viva la revolucion on its walls)?”
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June 28, 2007 By Tom Jacobs