Taking the Waters
Remediation for the Planetary Inflammations of June and July 2026
The last weeks of June 2026 usher us into some of the most volatile energy of a volatile year. We are navigating a new energetic environment this year, one that is fast-moving, inflammatory and abrasive. It seems like a good idea to start refreshing your survival skills, finding ways to create pockets of peace in our lives and guard them well, ways to nourish, nurture, repair and regenerate ourselves and our communities, because you are more resilient when you are well-nourished and well-loved.
One way I create pockets of peace in my day-to-day is by reading: lots of cosy mysteries* to escape, but I’ve also been reading anti-fascist essays from the 1930’s, and Marxist-Feminist analyses of the meaning of work, the body, and women’s labour under capitalism. This is affirming what living in this woman’s body in this sometimes terrible culture for oh these 60 years has already amply demonstrated to me. Our culture fails to honour the fundamental human work of gestation, nourishing, sustenance and care of other humans, the fundamental work of culture, craft, and foodways, of emotional care, community-building, support of children and elders. These foundational tasks of culture have been stripped of honour, first by being assigned only economic value and now finally by having even their economic value stripped away. These pillars of culture and society, care-work and nurturance, are now unpaid or vastly underpaid, hidden and dishonoured, assigned a low status, devalued, and degraded. We have all but forgotten how to properly and honourably care for ourselves and our communities, and our performance of care-work is often accompanied by feelings of degradation and shame, or at the very least, a sense of being “unproductive” and undervalued.
In such a social environment, you are left confused about how to effectively nourish yourself, physically, emotionally, spiritually. You are left without the skills and without due respect as you navigate community building, community care, child-care, elder-care, self-care. You are vulnerable to bad advice or bad takes about care-work. You are underfed and underprepared for times of conflict and inflammation, such as the time we are entering now.
The archetypes of the Zodiac are rich repositories of meaning and symbol, holding wisdom about the many facets of our human life. Through image and story, they open pathways for us to access inner resources, they are imprints of ancestral wisdom, reservoirs of cultural knowledge, and access points into the natural wisdom of cycles, seasons, and the other-than-human realms. Astrology is a tool for understanding (and predicting) the quality a of time, of the chapters of your life and the epochs of our collective experience. Beyond that, it is a tool of remediation. It can answer not only What are the energetics of this time? but also How can I live in and through this time with best outcomes, and how can I best access resilience, grace, and wisdom?
Astrology tells us that we are currently entering a cycle of air and fire; fast, inflammatory, un-embodied. Astrology tells us that a cycle of disruption and war is opening, a time of big ideas with little grounding, a time of rapid permanent change, a time of impulsive action and re-action, revolution and upheaval. In popular astrology I have seen this framed as a time of liberation and awakening; yes, and, it’s helpful to look back at other historical times of liberation and awakening and ask: What was the immediate aftermath? What was the lived experience? What was the cost of change?
The Wisdom of the Holy Well
In times of war, social upheaval, plague, and displacement, places of pilgrimage and sanctuary become even more important. Among these, across cultures, the sacred wellspring has often served as a sanctuary, neutral zone, place of refuge, place of healing, peace, and escape. During WW1, the holy spring at Lourdes in France became an official destination for recuperating soldiers, and in WW2 Lourdes provided refuge for over 2,000 children displaced by bombing. The Zamzam Well in Mecca has historically been a place of safe refuge during conflict, plague, and upheaval, as have, the step wells of Western India and the Suzan (sacred springs) of Japan, and the source waters of the Oshun River in Nigeria.
What sign holds the wisdom of the holy well? Cancer, of course. Cancer is Cardinal Water, the very image of the spring, the place where the pure groundwater emerges into daylight from its mysterious, sometimes centuries-long journey through the Capricornian bedrock.
Our Cancer House and Cancer placements can guide us towards the sacred spring within, the place we can return to source in inner pilgrimage, to restore, regenerate, repair, heal, and nourish ourselves. Our Cancer House is the place where we can draw on healing inner waters to restore ourselves and be re/sourced enough to pour back into the community during this time of change and disruption. As we move through his month of June 2026, the transits offer subtle guidance to help you find the holy well within and access the wisdom of the Cancer archetype in your own life. I’ll look at exactly how to work with these transits, but let’s start with a deeper understanding of the re/sourcing activity of Cancer.
Everything Begins with Water
In our contemporary astrology and even since Greek times, we have given the beginning of the zodiac to Aries, the cardinal fire, the spark of ignition that lives at the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere.
But in more ncient times, before Hellenistic astrology, in the time of the Egyptians and the earliest Greek astrology, that beginning point in the zodiac, the beginning of all things, was given to the sign of Cancer, the cardinal water sign. The Thema Mundi, in Greek astrology, was a symbolic natal chart for the cosmos. This perfectly ideal natal chart with every planet in rulership, was given the rising sign Cancer. We don’t know for certain why, but one thought is that in ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile, which was the great symbolic and literal nourishment of the people, the community and the spirit of the land, happened every year at cancer season, and specifically at the time when Sirius was at 15 degrees Cancer and rising with the sun in the morning.
When ancient people thought about the nourishing beginning of the cosmos, they thought about that watery source of nourishment: the flooding of the Nile, the return of water and fertility to the land. Cancer time was seen as source-nourishment and associated with both annual and cosmic beginnings.
So we’ll see this association with sacred waters infused throughout Cancerian symbolism and myth. But it starts here with the Thema Mundi and Cancer on the ascendant. If you happen to have 15 degrees cancer ascending, how beautiful. You have the same rising sign as the whole cosmos.
The Deep Resourcing of the People Upholds the Strength of the Collective
Across cultures, the archetype of the Great Mother correlates with the Cancer archetype, especially in her role as nurturer and protector of the state. This is the Artemis of Ephesus with her many breasts (or eggs or udders or testicles) and her mural crown, providing fertility from her body, and structure and protection from her wisdom, her image representing how she holds abundant nourishment for the state. And this statue, interestingly, is one of a long tradition, extending to the Renaissance, of depicting the city or nation or church upheld and nourished by a female figure: Tyche crowned with the walls of Corinth, Saint Agnes holding the city in her hands, or Mary holding the church fathers under her skirts. The Cancer/Capricorn axis is where we manage our traditions and cultural and governmental institutions, Cancer holding nurturance of and loyalty to the collective, and Capricorn providing the enduring structures to hold the collective safe. Without that interdependence, state structures cannot provide for the thriving of the people, because the collective will not be re/sourced and nourished at the roots.
Economic and government systems, our Capricornian structures, are currently cut off at the root. And this is one of the reasons that I feel like this Cancerian knowledge and wisdom for us right now is so important; not technological advancement or military “strength” or great stores of capital wealth, but simple connection to source as collective care. We’ve lost sight of what is that’s underlying the state, and all material wealth: our connection to nature, our connection to source, our connection to each other.
All over the world, holy wells and sacred springs have been stopped up, buried, built upon by institutions like the church, or by commercial enterprises; and in recent years, dried up to muddy trickles*, lost to a changing climate. We have reclamation work to do; in our environment, in our nations, in ourselves. As you do this inner excavation, you’ll find evidence in your Cancer house, both of the places where you’ve allowed those holy wells to bubble up and to nourish you, and the places where you have built obstructive structures on top of them. This brings the reclamation work home. And the work of 2026 is so much about those challenges to our Cancer places, as Saturn and Neptune move through Aries, squaring those Cancer placements, disturbing the watery softness with fire and speed. How can we move through this dynamic, fiery epoch of change, while still staying closely sourced by the deep Cancerian communal wells of nourishment and beauty and sacredness?
Pilgrimage to the Holy Well: June 2026 Transits as Remediation and Intercession
This is the scenario: While the generals and power mongers make their battle plans and the agents provocateurs stir up the crowds, the healers, luminaries, and holy ones, with a trickster god tagging along, take a break from worldly things and make a pilgrimage to the sacred springs.
The outer planets are all at work in our Aries and Gemini houses, accelerating change and sowing conflict, contagion, and inflammatory responses, testing our limits and forcing rapid growth. In the meantime, both benefics, both luminaries, and our magical messenger all visit the sacred spring of Cancer, and remind you how to better re/source yourself. Jupiter, Venus, Mercury (in his shadow period), the Sun, and the Moon all grace the House of Cancer this month. Follow their paths and listen to their wise advice; you’ll enter the summer season more hydrated, relaxed, fed, and at peace with yourself.
Mercury as Intercessor
Mercury joins Venus and Jupiter in Cancer on June 1st, and will stay for an extra-long visit of three months due to their* retrograde in this sign in July. Mercury’s job is to connect, translate, and intercede. As psychopomp, Mercury/Hermes is the soul’s guide to other worlds, including the “other world” of the future. After many years of watching Mercury’s transiting influence, on my own chart and life, and those of clients, I have come to see how valuable is their role as guide and translator, as we move through the changes of longer, impactful cycles. Mercury’s retrogrades follow an elemental pattern: they spends a bit more than a year retrograding in each of the elements in turn, creating what Gary P. Caton calls the Mercury Elemental Year. This year is a Water Year for Mercury, with their retrogrades occurring in Pisces, Cancer, and Scorpio. What is the role of the water signs? To emotionally metabolize experience, to remediate fire, to deepen embodied wisdom and compassion, put simply, to help us feel.
When Mercury retrogrades, they are doing more than throwing a wrench in your tech life and travel plans. They are opening space for magic in your life, leading you on the backwards winding trickster’s path of wisdom, and simply giving you a chance to change your mind. When they retrograde in the water signs, they are giving you a chance to recalibrate emotionally, to slow down and tend to feelings, communicate with more tenderness and emotional intelligence, nurture your nervous system, commune with spirit, go deep, make poetry, and speak from the heart. This watery assuagement and gentle recalibration of the emotional body is exactly the remediation you need now. It is the buffer that allows you to enter more gradually and safely into this novel environment of speed and combustion.
As Mercury walks a labyrinthine retropath through your Cancer house, pay attention. What recurring issues or patterns are revealed around your emotional communication? Is there new or repeated information coming in around how to nourish and protect your nervous system or your emotional peace? Sometimes astrology can be very literal. On the days last week that Mercury passed through the earliest degrees of Cancer, conjoining my natal Moon and trining my Saturn, I received results of a blood panel. This new information (Mercury) allowed me to begin to heal (Moon) disabling (Saturn) nerve (Mercury) inflammation (current air/fire energy) through nourishing (Cancer) minerals (Saturn) that will rebuild bone (Saturn) and connective tissue (Mercury). Resolving a chronic pain issue is absolutely going to help me receive the rest of this year’s energy with greater resilience. Astrology is amazing! So look now at all the messages Mercury is bringing to your Cancer house, the subtle and the literal.
The Sweet Balm of the Benefics in Sacred Union
You’ll be hearing about “the luckiest day of the year” coming up, as Venus conjoins exalted Jupiter in Cancer. This special meeting happens every 13 months, and always gets lots of attention, like a celebrity wedding. It is absolutely an auspicious day, and the anticipation and aftermath of this union spread a rosy glow over these first weeks of June. We need it this year, more than ever, a chance to rest in optimism and remember that life is also joy, sweetness, and beauty. It makes me think of the heightened love affairs and rushed marriages that historically often preceded major deployments. It’s a poignant moment of expansive grace, bookended by conflict. This transit is welcome as an auspicious day, and as a respite from challenges, and it is also has longer term consequences as a re-set of the Jupiter/Venus synodic cycle and as a chance to revisit the challenges of the Mars Retrograde in Cancer of 2024.
The conjunction ends a one year cycle and begins a new one. Conjunctions are always an opportunity to look back at lessons learned and wisdom received during the last cycle. The Jupiter Venus cycle involves our access to abundance, our creativity, our expansion and flow. I made this graphic so you can review that dates and grace received during the last cycle, and begin to look forward to what’s next, as a new cycle is launched on June 9th.
This same area of your chart, late Cancer, was activated in difficult ways in the winter of 2024/2025, as Mars retrograded over those degrees. What conflicts, injuries, and inflammations were you dealing with during that time? What was broken then can be mended now. How have you healed? Now is the perfect moment to celebrate that healing, and memorialize those losses.
Summer Solstice, the Wellspring of the Year
A few short days after our lovely benefic conjunction, the energy starts to shift. By the end of the month, we will be feeling the intensity of the upcoming Mars/Uranus conjunction, with that intensity beginning to ramp up with he New Moon in Gemini on the 14th.The Cancerian blessings aren’t quite over yet, though; with Solstice on the 21st, the Sun will warm and brighten your Cancer House for a month. Every year, this energy heightens our sensitivity and sentimentality, as well as our capacity for empathy. This year, the Cancerian qualities I encourage you to lean into are empathy, the ability to self-soothe, and the ability to withdraw into emotional privacy and protection when needed. Schedule lightly through this season, plan to spend time in, on, or around the water, schedule your self-care now so it will be on your calendar when you need it. Encourage your loved ones to do the same. It’s ok if you need to pull your circle in a little tighter this month, to conserve emotional energy. Listen to your intuition and extend your empathy. Nourish your nervous system in all the ways you can.
We Can Practice Compassionate Resilience in These Times
Deepen into and savour these gracious Cancerian energies while you can. The times ahead will challenge our resources in so many ways. Empathy, compassion, self-nurturance, and knowledge of how to access to the wisdom and comfort of Source: these are Cancerian life-skills. Nurture those skills in yourself now. Take a bit of water from the holy well to carry with you , to place on the altar of your heart.
Have you read Elif Shafak’s novel There Are Rivers in the Sky? The perfect book for this moment. And she speaks of rivers under our modern cities that were built over. It is a gorgeous book/meditation on water as connector.