A hen works the dirt with her feet, turning it over in search of food not for herself alone but for the brood she is provisioning, an unglamorous, repetitive labor performed daily and without any single dramatic payoff. Still inside Mercury's decan and, for one more degree, Mercury's term as well, before Jupiter takes the term boundary at twenty.
Jones set the scene down from Wheeler in the 1925 Balboa Park session that produced all 360 degrees between morning and evening; the reading attached here, naming a practical concern with the everyday nourishment needed to sustain one's outward-reaching activities, is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, notably more grounded and domestic than the abstractions of the two degrees just before it, a reminder that Rudhyar's more metaphysical style was not his only register. The shadow, if there is one, is scratching that never turns anything up, effort spent daily with no guarantee the ground holds what is needed, a risk any provider recognizes. Cancer could not ask for a more literal image of its own core business than a mother bird working soil for food to keep her young alive, unglamorous, unfinished, and repeated tomorrow regardless of today's result. The scene also has no weather in it and no threat overhead, which is its own point: Cancer's nurture is mostly this, ordinary and undramatic, closer to daily maintenance than to any single rescuing act.