This Cancer new moon and Capricorn full moon ask us to root into care and rise into responsibility. We begin in softness—tending what’s tender—and move toward clarity about the commitments that shape our days.

The Ace of Pentacles offers new potential, Bat sharpens our sensing, and the with/out modernity card asks us to stop numbing ourselves to the harms we’re entangled in. This lunation’s small ceremony, the magic hour, is a daily pause for presence, while our rituals help us walk the woods with crumbs of courage—trusting our hearts to know the way.

These are material possibilities rooted in collective care rather than capitalist accumulation. These are the first spring blooms in a nourished and tended community garden. This is mutual aid and community healing watered by kinship and fed by land that still remembers what it is to be free.

You may think that the Narcissus flower (daffodil) pictured in this card is named for the Greek figure. The young man was so obsessed with his own beauty that he drowned in a pool of water, where a flower grew in his place.

It turns out, the mythological Narcissus was probably named for the flower, which was known for growing on the banks of pools, its beautiful face bowing toward the reflective surface, long before the story came into being. The name Narcissus refers etymologically to numbness, potentially referring to the plant's toxicity and ability to cause paralysis. This lunation, don’t let your vision for the perfect new venture, nor your fears of the challenges that we collectively face, to immobilize you. Savor brief moments of joy.

I celebrated my 43rd birthday on Tuesday, the eve of the Jupiter cazimi and the dark moon night before this Cancer new moon. During our celebrations (big gay drag party!) and all throughout this Pride month, I have watched my so very queer community dance and love and hope and sing together, while the world burns around us, and I have thought to myself, “This. I can be so incredibly brave for this.”

What can you be brave for? Find it. Cherish it. Watch it grow from tiny seedling to blooming flower, and fight with everything you have to protect it.

For my fellow neuroqueer cuties, this lunation, I want you to consider that your sensitivities could be a compass. What if your overstimulation is not a liability, but a bat signal? What if your pattern recognition is powerful?

After last lunation, as we learned to stand in our power and know when we are acting in line with our values, we move to learning how to assess when the people and environment around us can support those values. As a recovering “empath” I want to suggest that being sensitive is important—the world could do with a lot more sensitivity if you ask me. But it is also not enough.

Sensitivity is information, and like Bat, we need to be able to act on what we know, even if no one else can see it. What do you know that you know, even when no one else does?

How can we tend to ourselves and our communities with care? When is anesthetic medicine and when is it numbing for productivity’s sake? What are the numbing agents in your life that allow you to ignore the violence that keeps the current systems in place, and how can you learn to rely on them less?

I have recently completed a season of ancestor work, getting acquainted with and seeking the healing of my mother’s maternal line and connecting with my Irish roots. I have been keening. With their help, I have given up a 20-year daily cannabis habit and have reclaimed my dreams, which let me tell you, is terrifying.

Do you ever dream things that are true? I do.

Not necessarily the future. More like: I dream my friend is on ancestral lands and learning to make canoes. I find out when I tell her about this that she is travelling and doing ancestral work in the dreamscape, and two days later, when she goes for a long walk, she discovers the next door neighbor to the retreat where she is staying has a massive canoe-making workshop.

Small wonders to perk up the ears. What are the signs in your life that your ancestors send you when you need to be paying attention?

Each day around sunrise or sunset (or both), when the light is honeyed and diffuse, take a moment to step outside or toward a window. This liminal time—what cinematographers also call the “golden hour”—softens the edges of everything it touches. It reminds us that beauty and clarity often arrive not in the high noon of certainty, but in moments of transition.

The Ace of Pentacles shows us that new beginnings are seeded in these quiet thresholds. Our small ceremony during this lunation is a call to pause and reflect on what is growing in our lives. What small blessings are asking to be tended? What challenges are calling us into deeper commitment? Let yourself imagine what it would feel like to tend to those potentials with care instead of control, with trust instead of urgency.

As Bat reminds us, we don’t need full visibility to move wisely. What we need is attunement. Standing still for even a minute or two in the magic hour light, you can tune your body to these subtle shifts. Let the light kiss your skin and think about the values you’re planting into the world. Think about how numbness, like the toxin in the Narcissus flower, dulls our ability to respond. Let this light re-sensitize you. Let it remind you: times of change are sacred because they are fleeting. This too shall pass.

This is not a ritual of grand gesture. It is a ceremony of presence. This brief daily honoring of the fact that change, like light, arrives in slants and angles, is quiet, but undeniable.

Since the new moon moves into Leo early tomorrow morning, and it’s nearly midnight tonight, I’ve included some activities to do both under Cancer and Leo.

Theme: Rooted beginnings, care as strategy, planting emotional intentions

Theme: Creative courage, embodied joy, loving visibility

In fairy tales, children often walk into the forest with nothing but a handful of breadcrumbs or seeds to leave behind them. Not so much a plan as a hope—a fragile trail of memory, an ephemeral path on which to return home should the shadows grow too long. Sometimes the forest is escape. Sometimes the forest is exile. But it is always transformation.

This full moon in Capricorn calls us to ask what kind of world we are walking toward—and whether our current commitments are nourishing that world or leading us further from it. In Capricorn, a sign of structure, integrity, and lived responsibility, this lunation invites ritual not for spectacle, but for strategy.

This is the reckoning half of the lunation. After Cancer's quiet planting and tending, Capricorn helps us see what must be pruned to let our commitments root deeper. The Ace of Pentacles reminds us that material abundance is possible—but we must be willing to walk a different path to reach it. This ritual is a moment to pause in the undergrowth and scatter a few seeds for the ones who might come after.

Materials:

Ritual:

1. Begin at the end of the golden hour, just before the full moon rises. Find a place to sit, ideally outdoors—somewhere you can imagine a path unfolding before you. Light your candle, and call in your beneficent ancestors and helpful land spirits. Breathe deeply, grounding yourself in the knowing that you are not lost. Your heart knows the way.

2. On the first piece of paper, list the commitments, contracts, or responsibilities that currently occupy your time, labor, and care. Circle those that uphold your values and feed your spirit. Cross out any that betray them.

3. On the second piece of paper, write what kind of material future you’re walking toward—not what you want to gain personally, but what you want to co-create in service of community care and collective liberation. What does abundance look like when no one is left behind? Rewrite in a circle around this list only the circled words from the first.

4. Then place the first piece of paper under the bowl of salt, or bury it in the earth and say: “I return these borrowed burdens to the ground. May the weight of false promise become compost.”

5. Hold your breadcrumbs or seeds in your hand. Speak: "This is what I leave behind—not to find my way back, but so others might follow."

6. Extinguish your candle. Whisper gratitude to the beings in the natural world around you, to the spirits and to your ancestors. Hold your head high. Breathe deeply. Exit the space by walking a spiral path, outward from where you have buried your borrowed burdens, away from the ritual and into the world.