In the Space Between Worlds

New Moon in Cancer
June 27, 2025

There are moments in life that feel like thresholds—quiet, uncertain, suspended. Nothing has fully ended, but something else hasn’t yet begun. In those moments, there’s often a pull to keep moving, to fill the silence, to make meaning of the in-between.

But what if the threshold itself is sacred?

The new moon in Cancer invites this question with tenderness. Cancer is the moon’s own sign—watery, internal, deeply feeling. It doesn’t rush us toward clarity. It draws us into the subtle, the remembered, the sensed. Into the hush of memory. The softness of home. The shape of feeling before it has words.

New moons mark pralaya—the great pause between cycles. Not destruction, not disappearance. Dissolution. A natural emptying. The pause between inhale and exhale. The moment before form reclaims itself.

And still—it’s uncomfortable. Dissolution rarely feels safe. It asks us to sit with uncertainty, with no clear next step, no perfect plan. It stirs up that old question—what now?—before the silence has had time to speak.

I had just come back from volunteering as a counselor at a summer camp for kids with Crohn’s disease—a condition I live with, too. Every year, we arrive early, before the campers, to settle into the container we’ll all share. There’s a subtle unraveling that happens there—a letting go of the identities we carry in the outside world.

During camp, we’re given new names. Mine is Spirit, a name passed on by a camper long ago. And for that week, Spirit is who I become. Not Bari the yoga teacher, not the stepmother, not the patient. Just Spirit—fully present, light-hearted, deeply human.

That version of me lives in joy and service. She isn’t managing or navigating or explaining. She’s just there. Alive and attentive.

And then, of course, camp ends.

We take down decorations. Pack up bunk beds. Say our teary goodbyes. I drive home, drop off my co-counselor at the airport, and pull into my driveway. My dog greets me. My husband opens the door. And just like that—Spirit dissolves.

Or so it seems.

But what I’ve come to understand is this: dissolution doesn’t mean disappearance. It means integration. Spirit doesn’t vanish. She folds back into the fabric of who I am. She becomes part of the rhythm I return to. The part of me that laughs more easily. The part that doesn’t perform her way through connection.

This is the teaching of the new moon.

The space between roles, between cycles, between identities—it isn’t empty. It’s alive. It’s where we compost the old and quietly seed the new. But to receive it, we have to resist the urge to fix or define it. We have to let it be. To trust that the pause is not absence. It’s preparation.

So here I am, returning to myself again.

And as I sit with this soft Cancer moon, I feel its wisdom echoing through the silence:
You are not what you do. You are what you are becoming.

And sometimes, the becoming begins in stillness.