The Cancer Oracle
You find yourself on the water, bobbing along on a boat toward the shoreline of an empty sandbar. You’ve been out in the sun and the wake all day and now the moon is rising above you. Every muscle is feeling languid, leisurely, a little bit sore from water activities, inching toward pleasantly exhausted. You’ll sleep well later. But the moon is so beautiful tonight, you’ve decided to drag the boat onto sand one more time to watch it a while before you head home for a shower and a very large sandwich.
You’re just about to hop onto land when you see something glistening in the waves from your boat. Right where they lap onto shore, there’s a gentle sparkle moving with the water. You haven’t seen anything like it before and you can’t explain it, but you know you need to find out what it is. There’s something important about it for you right here, right now.
You dip a finger into the shimmering water and see a small opening in the sand below. As you bend over and squint, trying to get a better look, an ancient crab spirit scuttles out of the hole sideways to look at you. You jump back in surprise, but there’s more surprise in store: The air all around you fills with sparkling silver light as the crab leaves its hole and beckons you onto the shore.
You have found The Cancer oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.
The Cancer oracle says:
People don’t even realize that, if you wanted to, you could tear them to shreds. You see to the quick of them. You note their emotional tendencies and what sets them off. You register their vulnerabilities and what they need to feel safe, comforted, and cared for.
You’re a cutie patootie with a sensitive, caring, big beautiful heart. Yes you are and you know it, even if the hearts you decorate with are black. Even if you hide the gooey interior under an armored shell. As is your right, when you have so much tenderness to protect. Even if you reject pastels and fuzzy pillows and whatever else a Cancerian is supposed to love, you still nurture people. You still make things nice and strive to be in harmony with everything around you. But let anyone try to mess with you or - worse yet - someone you love. They’ll get the razor-sharp pincher side of the crab in zero seconds flat.
Your emotional depth doesn’t just mean that you cry at old movies. Your loyalty is fierce and felt in your very bones. Your resilience is unmatched, and you’ll go toe-to-toe with a bully if you have to. After all, if anyone manages to injure your feelings, you just grow new ones back. You have a mystery to you, like the moon that rules you. Anyone who thinks they had you figured out at sweet, innocent, accommodating, nice… has a whole other side waiting for them if they step to you cross-wise.
No matter what kind of mood you’re in, you help others to excavate their own emotional plumbing. Not only that, you also help them come up with something they can do about it. Your particular form of alchemy is to turn revelations from slippery inner terrain into solid and practical real-world solutions.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that, for all their bad rap, tears are also a serious alchemical tool. Tears bring the inner outward. They make the body aware of what’s going on internally. And they’re very handy for weeding out a secret meanie’s true nature in real time.
You move expertly through waves of intuition, gut feelings, moods, and subconscious waters, then bring it all back down to earth again. Truly, you are a being of water and land, of both emotions and actions. You breathe comfortably in both domains and magically making people feel right at home right wherever the two meet. That makes you sparkly shiny brilliant to the people lucky enough to feel the preternatural levels of your genuine care and warmth.
You’re the one who sits down to a huge dinner table, notices in an instant that someone three seats away from you feels off, and dares to ask them about it. You coax them out of their emotional hidey hole and, if the tears do come, you just say pleasantly: Tears are pretty much the same thing as a salt face mask and therefore, actually, a form of self care. Heck, you might even cry with them so they feel less alone. Minutes later, you both will be back in the comfortable flow of group conversation with guards down, new memories made, and your mutual favorite dessert already ordered - with spoons for the whole table.
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About the Artist
Bailey Lewis is an experiential storytelling artist (MFA, University of South Carolina) who combines words, images, and reimagined materials to create intuitive story experiences. Her art has been exhibited and published internationally, and she is the author of award-winning stories which have been featured in The Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site for more about Bailey’s work.