Open Your Heart Like a Flower, Open Your Mouth Like a Bell

New moon at 16° of Gemini

The wildflowers of Big Sur…

This Thursday morning at 5:37am PT, the moon does dark and renews herself at 16° of Gemini. This is the last new moon of spring before the big rush of summer, the season of unravelling and revealing and expanding outward; the season where it all bears fruit, or doesn’t. It feels like this moment is one when we get to draw our energies back and in, before another big surge of growth. We might not want to slow down, contract, and recenter right now, but if we can, at least briefly, we will be rewarded. Imagine an arrow being pulled back in its bow, loaded up with potential energy, carefully aimed. Gemini is the sign of the cosmic twins and the Lovers, an archetype of dualities. It’s mutable air, transitional air, “change is in the air” air, and you can really feel its essence right now. At least I can. In my own backyard, the weather shifts by the hour. Everything green has deepened its roots and is now growing up and out. There’s warm breezes and cool cross breezes, bright sunlight and deep rain showers, pollinators everywhere — the bees and other insects flying from flower to flower, having flower sex, spreading DNA around, ensuring that everything multiplies.

That’s all very Gemini, which is here to ensure a kind of diversity of experiences and forms. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, master of language and magic and traveling between states and worlds, which gives it its highly intelligent, highly verbal, highly flexible and flighty style. Wherever Gemini rules your chart and life, you are likely to have some of its verbal and mental gifts, and also some gifts for resisting simplicity, for choosing complexity and the adventure of wholeness. Mystically speaking, Gemini is about the nature of wholeness and separation and unification; how each of us is a whole being that also contains multitudes. In this way, we are each a perfect reflection of the universe itself—this unified field that somehow splits and breaks and separates into parts, to become conscious of itself, to generate many varied forms and have many new experiences, all while still, on some level, being an interconnected, inseparable whole. Gemini is maybe more focused on the dividing into multiple varied forms that hate and love and long for each other part of the equation. Its opposite and complement, Sagittarius, is more tuned to the unification, the cohesive big picture, but they both imply the other, as opposites do.

However you slice it, Gemini encompasses so much of the drama of being alive. It speaks to all this tension and unsettledness within us, all this seeking and longing, all this irrepressibleness and curiosity, all this pressure to evolve and individuate. It encodes many secrets to the conscious and creative life. It wants us to adapt continuously to changing circumstances, and to claim our right to be that changing circumstance. It might never finish anything, but its not bothered by that, because Gemini loves an ongoing process; it prefers it. Ultimately Gemini is preaching the gospel of neuroplasticity. All of the spring signs do—Aries, Taurus, and Gemini—but right now it’s Gemini’s turn. And Gemini says, we cannot change or release the past, but we can forever make new ways forward. All knowledge is incomplete and provisional. Be teachable and updateable. Stay open. There are no permanent, fixed answers. No feeling is final, no definition is sacred. Consciousness is a living, breathing experience. You might be already whole, yes, but you are also evolving into something new, a new whole. Your the story isn’t finished. Get up and out and look around. Follow your heart. Follow your questions. Go let the world change you. Go change the world.

Like all new moons, this Gemini new moon is a time to begin again, to start something, to make a new vow to yourself and your life. All your familiar routines might be breaking apart right now, and a current of manifestation is kicking off. You can hitch something to that current, something that you would like to bring into being, or evolve further. This new moon is joined by Venus (love, beauty, relationships) and Jupiter (spirituality, resources, expansion) and Gemini’s ruler Mercury (language, magic, shapeshifting), and conditions really don’t get better than this. The only constraint on this astrology is a reality checking square from Saturn (form, limits, discipline) — but Saturn can only help with manifestation projects. It makes clear the limitations under which a new form can be made, and it can give us the discipline and grit to passionately and effectively deal with reality, overcome obstacles, and help our vision adapt to life on earth. What would you like to call in? What would you like to create next? What new version of your life is just ahead?

Beloved Gemini Prince, embodying all of it with so much style it hurts

A quick shout to my book of poems, Open Your Mouth Like a Bell, published on Write Bloody, which got a nod in this newsletter’s title. Gemini rules my 5th house of creative projects, so this book, like everything else I make, was a complicated undertaking, one of several projects that had to be made at once so that any of them could be made at all. One of its epigraphs is the most Gemini thing ever, a translation from the alchemical text The Secret of the Golden Flower: “Because of the warmth of my cinnabar heart to liberate the world, I do not refrain from talking a lot.” Sigh. It’s still so perfect. Happy new moon friends!

The poem that kicks off Open Your Mouth Like a Bell (Write Bloody).

Ritual & Writing Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)

First, A Brief Word on the Neuroscience of Manifestation