Mars in Cancer

Someone says something unkind about a person you love, and before you have decided to speak you are already on your feet.

The fall

The tradition calls Cancer the fall of Mars, where the planet of open fighting is least at ease. Cancer is a water sign ruled by the Moon, all shells and tides, and Mars here cannot charge straight ahead. It circles. It waits for the right moment. It fights best when it is defending something, a child, a friend, a home, and worst when it has to ask for something for itself.

Protecting

That is your power. For your own people there is almost nothing you won’t do: the late-night drive, the difficult phone call on their behalf, the stranger you told, very calmly, to leave them alone. You notice the threat to someone you love long before they do, and you move to cover them without being told.

Asking for your own raise, your own time, your own share, is another matter. You find it much harder, and you can put it off for years.

Sideways anger

Your anger rarely comes out straight. It comes out as a mood, a door closed a little too firmly, a sharp remark about something else entirely. People around you sense it long before you name it, and some of them spend a whole evening wondering what they did. When it does finally break, it is bigger than the thing that caused it, because it is carrying everything you swallowed on the way.

The tides

Your drive follows your feelings. When the tide is in you get through a week’s work before lunch. When it is out you can’t start at all, and no amount of willpower helps. You work best on things that matter to your heart and in places where you feel safe. A family business, a small team you trust, a cause with faces you know: there you are tireless.

Being held matters to you as much as being wanted, and closeness has to come before anything else.

The people you have protected don’t always know how many fights you fought for them. You know, and you would fight every one of them again.