Once, all people were a people of the moon and counted their seasons in relation to its cycles. Once, all people knew the rhythm of their town’s tides, the angles of the Sun, and the moon’s great power to balance what is seen with what is unseen. I’d like to imagine that when we lived according to the moon, the cyclical nature of our lives would have been more apparent. We’d grow heavy with the wisdom of a moon full and wake hungry for knowledge when the moon was dark. We’d know that heartache lasts a long time but not forever and that what began when the moon was last new would not look the same when the moon was new again. We would have, in a sense, lived drinking from the same river of information and, in our cupped hands, we would have held the moon’s luminous reflection.
What if, this month, we lived as moon people? What if we worked toward awe, a manifest gratitude for the subtle power of darkness—how it covers everything that lives and keeps its secrets? In darkness, there is rest and within rest, replenishment and transformation. That is why all animals sleep, why some animals melt themselves down to liquid in a sack and burst through winged. Darkness is life-giving and, when the moon is new, night is the darkest dark of all. What if this Gemini new moon is here to offer us a different go at life? My friend Bekah used to call Geminis “Butterfly Boys,” and today, I think that the new moon is a chance to be butterflies. Today, I feel the new moon weaving her chrysalis over us, a blanket made of the same atoms as our bodies, and she wants us to burst right through and take the form we’ve been dreaming up—the form we’ve felt ourselves to be all along.
Geminis are masters of reinvention; Geminis will take you home and dress you up in their love. Geminis are Stevie Nicks up all night taking photos of herself, her own muse, saying, “I would begin after midnight and go until 4 or 5 in the morning. I stopped at sunrise, like a vampire. I never really thought anyone would ever see these pictures.” A new moon in Gemini is a moon that wants your muse energy, your fluttering from flower to flower, your eyes locking with other eyes like ancient texts sliding between library stacks, which is to say—an invitation.
Mercury (God of Gemini) is in Cancer and the information you exchange now—your calling cards, your texts, your tarot reading—will be charged with emotional resonance and mood. Geminis forgive easily when Cancers do not, and so this moon is a great time to learn that holding on to past betrayals is less about wisdom and more about the desperation of regret. In practicing forgiveness, we can, under the new moon, learn a new way to share our truth with others.
The new moon in Gemini loves change, loves newness, loves to build a community of like minds. It has no time for regret, it folds regret up like a small paper boat and lets it sail out in the great river where many paper boats float. If these boats were to one day unfold all at once, they would tell the story of a people who forgot about cycles and what love is worth. Erotic love, familial love, self-love, these tutelages of self which are not without pain and certainly not without pleasure. But, this month, we are moon people and live by the law of cycles. We celebrate what we grieve and what we cherish, we wake in the dark and are hungry for information, for the next new thing that will feed us beauty and tremble us with power.
