From the Center of My Life Came A Great Fountain

New moon at 6° of Gemini

Rafaela Mascaro is an illustrator based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her subjects are diverse, but always drawn me in with their bright candy colors and pleasing shapes and possibilities. Looking at them is like a shot of vitamin C. They capture the incredible luck of the creative lifeforce and its continuing renewal.

At 8:02pm PT on the of evening of Monday, May 26th, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 6° of Gemini, Zodiac sign of the Twins, or Lovers. Gemini is mutable air; adaptable, changeable air. As the final sign of spring in the northern hemisphere, it rules the transition from spring into summer, a time of great fertility, energy, and proliferation. The light is peaking, the air is breezing, and the bees are contacting all the flowers, collecting their sexy messages. It’s all very heady and heightened and lightened. As an archetype, Gemini’s territories are consciousness and communication, all that requires co-ness or twoness, at the very least. It’s ruled by Mercury, loquacious god of magic and intellect, translation and travel—all that moves and goes between. Despite is highly verbal reputation, Gemini is not just about literal language; it’s about how our own minds work; how the psyche operates by splitting into conscious and unconscious, subject and object, rational and intuitive, literal and figurative, self-that-is-thinking-a-thought and self-that-is-aware-of-the-self-that-is-thinking-the-thought. It’s that splitting that makes individual form and reflection and learning and evolution possible. While on some other level of reality there may be a great unity or One Truth, and we may long for that, on the Gemini level, there is only multiplicity, multiplying. There is only forever complexifying complexity. If you hang out here for long, you forget about the destination entirely, and just joyfully, compulsively devote yourself to living the open-ended process. You will still end up somewhere, but wherever it is, no matter how great it is, you won’t want to stay. Because the spiritual gift of Gemini is the desire to keep moving, to keep discovering new perspectives and ideas, new wonderings and metaphors. In Gemini, we don’t just tolerate change, we genuinely and innocently revel in it. We are in our essence, shapeshifters, in an ever-expanding, ever-changing world.

This new moon is coming at a delicious time. By which I mean, a time when we desperately need this new moon’s support to replenish our mental resources and creative energies. This spring has overseen the rapid growth of so much that is awful, ugly, and destructive. It’s overseen the growth to good and beautiful and hopeful things too, but damn. Those in power in the U.S. have been dissolving our collective systems of social protection and advancement at a wild and punishing pace. Enlightenment has been painful, draining, even as it’s the only way forward—the truth will set you free, right? But first it will fuck you up and hurt your heart and then tough-love-you into growing-the-fuck-up. Some of us have been going through intense personal losses and initiations, too, in the midst of all the collective upheaval, or because of it. If that’s you, I want to formally acknowledge you, on behalf of the human species. I see you. And I see myself. I formally acknowledge me. Next time we see each other, if we have that kind of relationship, we won’t have to speak. We can just bow down low in mutual admiration and respect.

We are just in it, the widening gyre! I’m guessing if you haven’t been given a proper break in the last few months, like time to put down all you’ve been carrying, time to check out, time for retreat into healing ceremony or grief work, you’ve been discovering some very real limits. The dissociating kind of limits. The spending hours on your phone scrolling or playing games and not having any conscious control over it kind of limits. The return to old, slightly destructive coping mechanisms kind of limits. The Scorpio full moon brought some aid, but it was in the way of getting us to feel even more. That may have helped move some stuck or stagnant emotions, and/or it may have blown a few circuits.

Over the last few days, there was an important shift. On Saturday, Saturn, planet of boundary and form and Earthly Order, left Pisces and entered Aries for the first time in 28 years. It’s now sitting at 0° of Aries, the degree of reincarnation. It is still in close proximity to Neptune—only a degree away—so the forces of Cosmic Water and Dissolution/Resolution are still softening Saturn’s edges, tempering its practical and earthly ambitions with the aspirations of the soul, making things a little slippery and dissolve-y. You will likely feel this big shift nonetheless. Aries, sign of instinctual energy and personal agency and fiery action, has been granted some serious new power—the power to organize and get its shit together. While technically Saturn is in its fall in Aries—Aries is home to all the parts of us that don’t want to grow up—it also knows exactly what to do here, at the foundation of physical being and future growth. While we won’t get the full effects of this transit this year, (Saturn still will retrograde back into Pisces in September,) we will learn a lot in the next few months about what has been pre-forming behind the scenes, or gestating in the imaginal Pisces womb, that is now ready to surface and fight its way into the real world.

So all of that is in a loose sextile to this new moon in Gemini. And Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, will have just entered its home sign the day before this new moon, so all of Gemini’s powers are available. Jupiter, sky god planet of faith and spirituality and loving-kindness and resources for expansion, is also in the last two weeks of its transit of Gemini. This is a profoundly lucky set up for a current of manifestation. I’m sure a lot of the witches reading this have already been getting ready, musing on what to use this confluence for. It’s Gemini, so this new moon will be especially be a blessing on projects and healings that involve communication, and inner communion, and learning processes; reveling in all our unique forms and parts, mixing and multiplying and evolving them, cross-pollinating everything; using questions like keys, opening portals to new ideas and ways of doing things, expanding consciousness and possibility; the mind flowering and sending out words like golden little puffs of pollen. And of course you may just want to use this beginner’s luck to support what Saturn is trying to carry into the world—at least part of it—your soul dream. Your next chapter. The world’s dream, and the next chapter for all of us.

The Sabian symbol for this degree of Gemini is “an old-fashioned well with a bucket and rope, under the shade of majestic trees.” It speaks of trusting in life and nature to fill us back up. It reminded me of my favorite of Louise Gluck’s poems, “The Wild Iris.” I pulled the title of this letter from it. Sometimes I repeat the first lines of this poem over and over, like a reminder of something important, like a spell that can conjure a change. Louise crossed over just a year-and-a-half ago, joining our other poet ancestors, but she is still singing to us through her spirit and her work. So I will close another one of these moon posts with a poem, because her words are so exquisite, and really capture something true about this moment, and about how incredible it is, that nature keeps coming through on its wild promise of rebirth..

"The Wild Iris"

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little.  And what I took to b
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now for paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of Gemini writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some journal prompts and specific suggestions for ritually working with this auspicious new moon, and some creative writing prompts brought to you by Gemini’s conversational energies, to put in your seed collection.