Cancer Season & the Sacred Wellspring | Bronwyn Simons

The Spring House: Approaching Solstice

As the light stretches toward its peak and the days grow long, we arrive at the cusp of Summer: a place both radiant and hidden. Solstice is not only a celebration of the sun’s ascendancy, but also a pause. Solstice is a moment lasting three days. The Sun stands still and time seems to shimmer. Beneath this golden moment, lies water.

This is the season of Cancer: cardinal water, the beginning of water, source, holy well, great mother. Sacred springs rising from the earth. Cancer-time takes us each back to our source.

My early childhood, in the 1960’s, was spent in rural New Brunswick. My parents were artists and academics. Their mid-20th Century bohemian lifestyle playing out against the backdrop of 19th century amenities. The old farmhouse rattled in the winter winds, the wood-burning cookstove was the centre of family life. We had indoor plumbing, just (there was an actual pump at the kitchen sink) but many of our neighbours (artists, draft-dodging hippies, and traditional farming families) did not. 

A little bit further down our raggedy iron-red dust-dirt road bordering the Bay of Fundy, lived a young couple, in an old clapboard farmhouse like ours, but without the plumbing. The young homesteading woman was someone who my five-year-old self idolized.  With her soft voice and shimmering long hair, her quiet poetry, her way of addressing me as an intelligent and thoughtful fellow human, she earned my devotion and affection. 

And she gave me the gift of one of my most beautiful, vivid, and powerful child-memories.

This is a stand-alone image, like a dream image. There’s no context. Just she and I, walking through tall summer grass towards a small lichen-grey out-building, the spring-house. She opens the grey door to the shadowed interior. At the threshold a huge flagstone slopes down into dark water which burbles up over it. The dry hayfield sun-smell of our walk is overpowered by a clean wet mineral smell so beautiful I can still feel it in the cavities of my forehead, lifting and opening my senses even now fifty years on from that moment.

Well-springs are sacred. There’s no why to this. Visit an old, wild or barely-tamed spring, anywhere in the world (though they are rare now) and you will feel that mineral truth in the bony cavities of your skull. Springs are sacred. The beginning of water. Source, holy well, great mother.

Today I want to speak about Cancer not as a sign, but as a landscape, as a sacred country you carry inside you. Cancer is cardinal water: a beginning, a wellspring. She is the first emergence of feeling, the rush of milk, the voice that says come home.

Before the Zodiac began with Aries, before the hero's cry of I am, ancient astrologers placed the cosmic beginning in Cancer. In the Thema Mundi, the symbolic natal chart of the cosmos, the Ascendant is not Aries, but Cancer. The sacred rising of the fertile floodwaters, the gush of amniotic fluids signaling birth, the coming of nourishing rains, the heliacal rising of the water-bearing stars. Water is life.

Cancer is not merely the keeper of home and hearth. She is the protector of waters, of the hidden spring, the source that continues to flow, even when forgotten. In the natal chart, she marks the place where you may have armored yourself against feeling, but also where you still long to return to re/source yourself.  The house Cancer rules, and the planets it contains, point toward our inner wellsprings: the places we seek nourishment, the temples we may have built over living waters, and the quiet instinct that still knows how to find the pure source and draw from it.

The sign of Cancer holds memory, moonlight, deep nourishment, a quenching of our thirst for home. 

We all carry the story of the well within us. Some of us tend it, some of us forget it. Some of us build great structures that cut us off from its waters. But the well is still there.

Seeking the sacred source of Cancerian waters within can bring you closer to your own instincts and truth. Understanding the importance of our symbolic waters within and also our actual earthly waterways and pure sources of water may help with the terrible but necessary work of acknowledging the enormity of environmental and human losses in these times. And to having the courage to contribute to 11th hour resistance and healing work. Cancer is after all, also the sign of the people, and the human family as a whole.

To walk into Cancer Season is to walk toward that inner wellspring. Cancer season is the time to go inward listen, begin again, not with fire, but with water.

May this Solstice bring you closer to that sacred, hidden place.

May you be nourished.

 Your journaling prompt, should you wish it:

I find my source and build my well in…

If you'd like to learn more Solstice lore, learn about Cancer as the Sacred Wellspring and where she lives in your chart, dive into more Midsummer journaling, explore the Wheel of the Year, and try some solstice magic (gathering dew! incubating prophetic dreams!) You'll want to explore my Summer Solstice Guidebook Zine, instantly downloadable!

[Get your Solstice Guidebook Zine →] 

If you want to go deeper with what this ingress means specifically for your chart: which house it is activating, what it is healing or being restored for you, and how to work with the Wheel of the Year in your chart, I  would love to sit with you in a reading. A one-on-one session is where we can trace the exact path of these transits through your life and find the holy well in your own chart.

[Book a Reading →]

And if you want ongoing companionship through the transits as the year unfolds, including monthly calls, a teaching community, and a place to bring your questions, The Astrology Salon is open for new members now. We are going to navigate this year together, with depth, creativity, community, and as much joy as we can.

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