Cazimi and Full Moon dispatches from the Oaxacan Coast
I spent the Cancer Full Moon in Puerto Escondido releasing baby turtles into the waves and racing dolphins in a fishing boat.
As the Full Moon in Cancer rose over the fishing village of Puerto Escondido — my outpost for January — months of Mars rx tinfoil edges gave way to softness, balminess, and the magic of those lunar flows. What a blessing to experience this congruence between the languid nights in Puerto and such a lush Moon — a place where I can be a full time mermaid and actualize my Venus in Cancer.
Anything metal greens my skin in this humidity, so I’ve taken to wearing freshwater pearls as my main adornment. The cocktails here are dyed magenta by the Jamaica flower: Venusian ambrosia. Sometimes a Full Moon is a portal and we’re absolutely not in the arid Mexican highlands anymore.
Every morning I take my coffee and scribble writing notes in a cabana by the beach, watching the fishermen stroll by with their morning’s catch: swordfish slung over their shoulders the size of fawns. Puerto’s version of the pigeon — the grackle — is black, sleek, its feathers gleaming with the luster of celluloid or an oil spill. Even their birdsong is strangely mechanical: typewriter clangs; internet dial up signals. They patrol the restaurant patios with a style lost on other scavenging birds.
Most evenings I eat an entire fish on the beach, then nurse a mojito at a drinks stand in the Zicatela night market. The people watching is fine here indeed in the glare of naked halogen bulbs, while Soda Stereo blares on outdoor speakers. Linen beach wear and crochet bikini tops are sewn, pret-a-porter, for tourists and Mexicans alike. You can have your name wood burned on a tiny keychain surfboard. Teenagers gather around ancient pinball machines, strewn on every street corner.
Almost every parked truck has an icon of Mary strapped to its grill, flanked by palm fronds, braided grass, and hibiscus flowers. The modern equivalent of sirens carved into the helms of ships, perhaps. The practicality and functionality of ritual in Mexico is something I find deeply moving.
Can we talk about the Cancerian urge to create a lacunae of calm — my mojito post with the vaguely French wire backed chairs — amidst the mercurial unfolding of port life and commerce? Vettius Valens says of the sign: “a proclivity for sojourning and wandering abroad.” My Cancer stellium has indeed got stuck in feedback loops of such intercontinental drifting. Carmen San Diego pilled.
Over Mars retrograde I’ve been questioning this compulsive pattern of severances, exile, leave-takings. My father’s struggles with bipolar disorder transformed us all into fugitives, as my childhood spanned three provinces of Canada: was he outrunning something or was his illness running through him? Those sudden squalls of flight and haste were perhaps a compensation for the Saturnian winters of his depressive episodes. And yes: I still feel “safer” when one winged sandal is already out the door, for better or for worse.
Mars isn’t far from my Leo IC in the third house: my chart’s root system in a place that’s often blurred in transit. The house of paganism and the quotidian nature of ritual, where the capricious Moon finds her joy and altars are scattered on the run. Home is more often than not my favorite soap smuggled into the hotel bathroom, or a mandala of crab claws, sage tufts and abalone shards left on a dune in Malibu.
Truthfully, I’m having days where I yearn for more anchorage. A bolt-hole somewhere where I can at least gather my possessions in one place (they’re scattered between Nelson, Cranbrook, and a storage locker in the hinterlands of Barcelona). Except I’m in a 12th house annual profection, whose strange metaphysics seem to demand planning life a month at a time.
Or two weeks, which is when my books are due back at the exchange run by an enigmatic Dutch man: his filing system, a box of cards warped by the humidity, onto which you write your email, book titles, and rubber stamp the date. I chose Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking from his ragtag collection — a memoir about the shocking deaths, in quick succession, of her husband and daughter.
Poring over her chart later, I’m not surprised to see that she’s Cancer rising with a Sagittarius stellium. Those signature high cheekbones and aloof lunar elegance. Her chart ruler, the Moon, is stationed in the 6th house of slavery, strife, and ill health. The lives of people with planetary aversion (planets that cannot behold each other; ships passing in the night) seem to be dominated by the mysteries of suffering and bereavement. Such a cruel and unusual loss must feel like a cosmic glitch, but Didion holds these complexities with wry humor and bewildered grace.
Yesterday I met up with the mother and daughter I was chatting with on the plane from Mexico City — the icebreaker being an active volcano in the middle distance. We took turns swimming the glassy rollers of Playa Caranazillo and I thought it was exactly right that I should find myself in the company of women —mothers and daughters — under this Cancerian lunation.
Flowing between evening swims, drinks, and stories of a beloved dog who passed while they were coincidentally camping in my birth town of Kamloops, I was reminded of the moon’s supple and mysterious joinery. The lunar triumph of connection — fleeting tide-pools of congruence. A blessing after months of Mars’s sadistic games with knives and timeline origami.
As the first lunation of 2023 (a year ruled by the Chariot’s centrifugal sphinxian engine) my hope is that this rhythmic lunar propulsion will carry us through the mysteries of a year of momentous cosmic shifts. Austin Coppock likens the second decan of Cancer to walled gardens, salons of philosophers, and hermetically sealed cauldrons protecting alchemical processes.
Seek out your sacred holding vessels over the coming weeks, even if you’re sojourning alone in exotic climes while trying to figure out where to live “for real”. Find your mojito stand. Your favorite table dappled in the shade of lilting palm fronds. A ritual as simple as carving out an hour or two everyday to write can become a form of prayer under these energies.
As the Full Moon peaked, I found myself on an endless sweep of golden beach with one of Puerto Escondido’s many tortoise hatcheries. The Mesopotamians elected the tortoise as their avatar of Cancer, so this was a ritual I couldn’t resist. Covered cabanas protect the eggs which could otherwise be cooked in these rising temperatures. Apparently the heat also affects the sex of the turtles, with males only being produced in cooler temperatures.
Of the turtles that hatch (and the mother lays dozens of eggs) only 20 percent will survive infancy and fewer still — ten percent — will mature into adults.
They find their way to the sea by the light of the moon, the vibrations of the waves, and even electromagnetic fields. The Cancerian urge to intuit the etheric waves that underlie all biological urges and processes…
After the informational spiel, delivered by a rather chic Mexican zoomer in a felt bucket hat, I’m given my tortoise in a halved coconut shell, asked to give her a name (I choose Plata — Spanish for “silver”). Then you walk with this overwhelmingly vulnerable creature to a point about two meters from the surf. You tip your coconut shell and pray that the ley line GPS in Plata’s forehead will find that blood-beat of the sea. Its crashing iambs. And indeed, little Plata knew to make her way in the direction of the hissing waves (I had absolutely no idea how their force didn’t rip her apart). I’m handed a driftwood stick to fend off circling seagulls and wait for a good wave to finally take her under — to ferry this creature home.
Observing this miracle — the sheer, bewildered persistence toward life by something so tiny — I was reminded of the true tenacity of Cancer. The willingness of this tortoise to throw itself into the roiling maw of Poseidón himself. Cancer, remember, is cardinal water: the true pioneers of our emotional realm, the unconscious, and the full spectrum of human experience. Joan Didion bearing her grief well: alchemizing it into luminous prose.
Plata made it, by the way. Made it under at least.
As this full moon culminates just before a Mercury cazimi, revelation is hot off the starry presses — so keep your notebook or audio memo app handy. If you feel intuitively pulled to pick up the phone, proclaim your intentions, set a boundary, open a chink in your armoury, or to simply get something off your heart — do it this weekend. And trust whatever you need to feel safe.
I rose with the cazimi at dawn for a boat ride along the coast. and was gifted with the sight of a simultaneous moon set and sunrise — the night sect giving away to the day sect over the water’s scarab foil. A fisherman named Rapahel hopped into our boat, cigarette in hand, casually bumming a ride to his craft the next bay over. It’s truly the port life for me.
Deeper into the ocean, we saw breaching whales, flotillas of jellyfish, seagulls skimming the waves with their wing tips, and even manta rays leaping from the water (I had no idea they could do that ). After a swim beside the boat, I spied a yellow-bellied water snake cheerfully hydroplaning along the water and then gone with a stylish flash of its tail. I prefer my danger noodles out of the water personally, but still… what a sight! A pod of dolphins raced our boat at one point — the cazimi pulling all the stops. Not quite a golden chariot, but a fishing boat will do.
Mercury stationed retrograde in Capricorn just as 2022 came to a close, reminding us that all art goes quiet in the end. Except we still have Mars chaotically hacking the binary code of our timeline and without the guiding hand of Mercury to make sense of it all. Or to clean up the mess in quantum aisle 5. We ease into 2023 as slowly and gently as possible. It's ok to make things up as you go along for a while, waiting for crucial intel to drop. Our psychopomp is on its own rogue mission now to unravel just how much the basic bedrock of our lives has shifted since the pandemic.
Stationing at 24 degrees Capricorn, just a couple degrees shy of where Saturn and Pluto made their grim faustian pact in 2020, we’re starting to connect the dots between the debris of these past few years. Six years of Saturn in domicile has scarred us all. Remember that Saturn dries and petrifies; it demarcates and isolates. Traumatized, we’ve tunneled into the predictability of algorithms and endless content, as drifting the frictionless simulacra fantastic has become a collective cope for the trauma of a truly alienating epoch. The more time I spend in the soft sea breezes of the Oaxacan coast, the more I realize how deeply I’ve been wounded by too long a tenure in screenworld.
Over the cazimi, I finally had a sense of victory — however ambiguous — as the ocean opened her trench coat of exotic wares and I remembered how hard I’ve worked to earn this fleeting moment of grace. How far I’ve had to drift from everything that was familiar and safe in Barcelona. Falling asleep later in my balcony hammock, as hymns drifted over me from a distant parish, this is the first in a long time I’ve felt content wandering alone. Or felt like writing stories again. Poetry. Not sure how long I’ll be in Puerto, but this timeline will absolutely be intuitively guided.
Let this Moon remind you that there is still an undertow of meaning, momentum, and rhythmic benevolence even as Mars continues to glitch out in the cognitive dissonance of a truly sadistic retrograde. Plata probably won’t make it, but in one dimension she does. Her shell fractals outward into Saturn’s iron carapace and plastron: time observing and holding itself in its own arms.
Cazimi blessings from Oaxaca to you all! xoxo
Holy shit, mama. Thank you for these words. And this heart.
Divinely led and perfectly penned.
I would name my turtle Sueñito.
May your pen never run dry. Your writing is exquisite... it changes people.