Cancer in the 12th House: Cruise Control
There is a logic to the order of the signs. Each sign is an answer to the excesses of the previous one. If you live fully embodied and engaged with the energy of the moment, every time a planet changes signs, it should come as a relief.
You know what this way of living feels like if you eat seasonally. You wait all year for the brief* moment when strawberries are in season. Then you want to do nothing more than to stuff your face with fruit. But once you've done that, you’re sick of strawberries and ready to eat something else.
Every sign change is like this, but the transition from Gemini season to Cancer season is one of the least subtle transitions. Gemini is highly energetic, highly social, and highly verbal. It is chaotic and scattered and excited. Cancer is slow, introverted, and speaks the language of the heart. It is connected, deep, and desperate for peace and quiet.
You can see, I think, why one leads into the other. After the excitement of Gemini, you need a rest and some time to digest your experiences. You need time to figure out what you feel about things.
I am writing this at the end of Gemini season. I am still in the flurry of intellectual energy, but I can see Cancer coming like a stop sign at the end of a highway. I still have energy, but my body is telling me that I need to downshift and slow down soon, or I am going to crash.
In the northern hemisphere,** the end of Gemini season is the end of spring. Spring is commonly associated with rain showers, flowers, baby bunnies, and the first tender greens. On the surface, these symbols seem gentle, calm, and relaxing. That might be true during Taurus season, but Taurus season is a brief (and necessary) reprieve between Aries and Gemini, the two most urgently kinetic signs of the zodiac.
Aries and Gemini are both fundamentally about growth. Aries is the newborn emerging from the birth canal and taking their first breath, the seedling cracking through the seed shell and pushing through the soil. Aries is the primal fight for the right to exist. Gemini is toddler time. It is the moment when an infant realizes that there is more to life than sleeping and eating. (The young child realizes that there is more to life than Taurus.) The weight of everything there is to learn descends on the tiny creature along with the intense energy needed to take on--quite literally--the intellectual challenge of a lifetime.
Aries and Gemini have a lot of energy because they need a lot of energy. Used properly, Aries and Gemini are capable of taking us from non-existence to being launched into life.
One of the consistent patterns in the order of the signs is that seasons of rest follow seasons of work. Spring is a highly active season. The summer that follows is a season of rest.
This is the reason why we people go on vacation in the summer and winter. Spring and fall are filled with such hard work. We need a rest, and in the agricultural cycle, summer and winter are naturally periods of waiting when we live on the work we did during the spring and the fall. Spring is the season of planting and caring for tender plants and new hopes. In the summer, we tend and mow and wait to see what there will be to harvest. Autumn is the season of harvest. In the winter, we live on what has been grown.
Cancer is the gateway to summer, and your experience of Cancer does a lot to shape your experience of the summer months.
I have Cancer in the 12th house, the house of self-undoing. I have a difficult relationship with Cancer. You may have gotten a hint of this earlier when I described the transition from Gemini season to Cancer season as a high-speed car crash.
The 12th house isn’t an easy place to be at the best of times, but I have Mars and the moon closely trine in air signs. My Mars is in Gemini, and my moon is in Aquarius. Together, they love to spend Gemini season putting aside emotions and getting high on the airy intellectualism of the moment. Talking to everyone. Learning everything. Doing everything.
In Gemini season, everything feels possible. Even perpetual motion.
But like Jo ONeill said recently, “the 12th house is the later that you have been saving your emotions for.”
As someone who has the 12th house in watery Cancer, the realization that I can't just sail through the (seemingly) clear, pure air of the mind forever hits me like a tsunami every year when the sun leaves Gemini. I crash at the end of June and spend July picking up the pieces.
One of the things astrology is meant to do is make the unconscious conscious, and I am determined to use what I know about the relationship between Gemini and Cancer to do Cancer season differently this year. If summer is the time when we step back and allow what we’ve planted to grow, I can see Gemini season as the on-ramp to the highway. It is a rush season necessary to get up to highway speed before I shift into cruise control for the summer.
This new way of seeing Cancer season crystallized for me after I stumbled on a quote by astrologer Jaír Griffin. He said, “You don’t grow plants. It’s impossible to make anything grow, no matter how hard you try. You just give it the conditions to thrive, and it’ll bloom on its own. The same goes for you.”
So much of my resistance to cruising patiently through Cancer season comes from a misguided attempt to control things. In the agricultural year, Cancer is the season when plants really start to take off, but they aren’t producing fruit yet. If you judge a plant’s productivity by how it’s doing during Cancer season, you’ll rip up a beautiful garden that could have fed you through the winter.
This is what self-undoing looks like for someone with Cancer in the 12th house, it’s a lack of faith in your ability to create an environment conducive to growth, to nurture things until they can thrive on their own.
With this in mind, I’m determined that this year will be different. My focus during Cancer season will be on tending the things I’ve planted, encouraging them to grow by making sure they have an environment in which they can thrive, surrendering to the work I’ve already done, and gathering my strength for the harvest rush in the fall.
*The growing season for strawberries is short… If you don't live in a place like California.
**Astrology inescapably uses the seasons of the northern hemisphere as a metaphor. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, I see you… and ask you to go along with the metaphor even though it doesn’t match your seasonal calendar.
Related Articles
