Dear reader,
This month begins with a new moon in Gemini and even if information hasn't already been swirling around you like a tornado made of texts, emails, and psychic transmissions, get ready for it to be taken up a notch or two. Gemini energy is all around us this month beginning with Sun in Gemini and Mercury in Gemini. Then, Mercury switches out for Venus in Gemini and the new moon—of course, the moon.
Gemini is ruled by Mercury, and so whether it's creative collaboration or romantic intention, communication is the name of the game. Gemini loves playing a game, especially where words are involved, but that doesn't mean they can't attune themselves to the room. Mutable, which is to say relational and adaptive, Gemini energy only likes to trick people when a treat is not too far behind. This month asks us to become more aware of the ways we can use language to connect, to distance and to self-harm. Venus' turn in Gemini is flirty and curious. It runs up to every rose hoping to find the most potent mythic one. It doesn't take a lack of scent personally. Meanwhile, Neptune retrogrades again, and a full moon blooms in Sagittarius. There's lots of intuitive possibilities here, lots of heavy psychic energy for those who welcome it. There you go again, seeing crystal visions. You don't have to keep them all to yourself. You can tell us how to get Congress to move forward on impeachment, you can start a new band, buy new recording equipment, write a zine… Gemini shit.
Admit you love it,
G
ARIES
Softness, it appears, does not betray weakness, no matter how many Westerns and spy movies have taught you otherwise. While you might be the cowboy of your own inner terrain, our environments rely on relation and can only survive through interconnectedness. When I say softness, I mean the tree that knows it is wiser to bend with wind. I mean that the ground which has been broken by roots and new growth, is now enriched by what has been seeded within her: nitrates, worms, soil fertility, the memories all living things carry, the earth reciprocates. What can you learn from her, dear Aries? You mean to expand, to grow your resources and your emotional reserves. What you're learning, whether you want to accept it yet or not, is that endurance is not all.
Earth does not endure, she adapts. Have you ever watched that video of how wolves changed the rivers in Yellowstone? How, in returning to that thirsty land, they brought back the balance between predator and prey, and in doing so revived a whole ecosystem?
What parts of yourself have you tried to kill off? What parts of yourself did you deem too wild, too free, and ultimately too vulnerable for a world that demands order and resists deviance? If you perform hardness, you ask to be seen as hard. You reify the belief that what is free within you is a threat. Freedom, whatever it is, is not reactive. It doesn't ache to burn down what it loves. It doesn't strive to break down the body it lives in. Freedom lives on the other side of shame and self-fulfilling stories of inherent lack. The most creative parts of you live inside your fierce need for love and affection. Wolves are pack animals, they survive through and toward relation. You are being called to return to the dry lands, to take your place in the family of thing, to ask for softness when softness is called for: a reassuring hand on the shoulder of the warrior returned.
TAURUS
How do you do it, Taurus? How do you hold so much grief and so much pleasure in the same body? Are you the walking embodiment of Earth? Have you felt her loss as your loss? This space rock packed with bodies cased in boxes that barely break down, that serve the living rather than respect the needs of the dead—whose bones ache to return to the earth—dust to dust, as it is written and said. And yet, the lush green mountains of the South, that rest their canopied shoulders despite the memories their trees carry. And yet, the red dirt in the rivers sparkling with flakes of mica, the stones that live beside their sibling stones—each supporting the other.
I know, what is inside you and what is around moves slowly like tectonic plates. You carry the weight and burden of what was done to you, what you allowed, and what you forgave. Still, Eros lives in you and through you. The body broken sings where it breaks and remembers the other side of pain which is surrender and in surrender, joy.
Joy comes, Taurus, although it rarely wears the pastel colors of your spring season. Joy comes on a vibrant and bright streak, like daybreak, like a bruise. Try to return to your body for your own sake, Taurus. Not out of duty or shame or fear but in service to the survivor in you who craves pleasure for its own sake. Pleasure in service to life doesn't put what is dead inside you in a beautiful box and bury it, it doesn't need to be witnessed on social media, it won't be fed by the momentary adoration of strangers. Pleasure is the dark soil inside you hungry for the bones of what is lost, to claim them as inseparable from you, to break them down and make them a new and fertile ground.
GEMINI
Happy Birthday, twin star. It's your season and I promise you, if you slow down for five minutes at any point in your day (outside of sleeping!), you'll feel it. Gemini energy is flowing all around us, shifting through our communication centers while collecting crushes, love notes, and dates along the way. This revival, this rush of activity, this abundance of ways to say "yes" and new inspiration isn't always so easy to hold. Especially if you're the kind of Gemini that has had to make some rough choices in these past few months, the kind of Gemini that had to reckon with just what you are and aren't willing to let take up space in your life and your heart.
Gemini, you've been going on 10 a long time trying to ride over the waves within you like one of those surfer babes from Blue Crush or an enlightened bro on a jet ski. The month's new moon will mark a new cycle for you, a chance to turn your dial way back and stay present with everything that's been going on in a way that feels safer, less open to emotional harm.
On the other side of this new moon, with your ruling planet moving steadily into Cancer, you might find you hunger for answers quelled by a deeper need to understand and experience what you already know. This won't douse your curiosity, it will deepen it, as is often the case when a student leaves the classroom and finds the patterns of the world they have studied as if from the outside have always already been embedded inside them. Get out there and dance, fly your freak flag, risk looking like a fool. Why not? The dance floor is yours this month, Gemini, and you might find that letting the music and the people around closer to your heart will get you much deeper into the groove.
CANCER
It's been an informative season for you, hasn't it, Cancer? You've been gathering details left and right, most of it having to do with your skillsets and interests. This month, you'll feel the pull to deepen your relationship to information, to recognize the ways that it works on you—not as a fulfillment of some overall taxonomy but, rather, offering lens after lens that enhances your perception of yourself and your world. You have the opportunity, now, to experience the information you've been collecting as a resource for boundary building and future-envisioning.
Imagine that language, its power and meaning, is the tool you keep in reserve. This month focus on the ways can you communicate what you need to thrive and are not willing to accept with your actions. What agreements do you make against yourself? How often do you stand out in the rain saying you would rather be dry? If you want the work you do to change you've got to change your work. Waiting for the world to rearrange around you is a losing game. By the time you get what you want, you'll be way over wanting it.
There are people who might not know the stalwart spirit in you but I know it. I know, too, how quickly that spirit rises against injustice. I know you'll risk your life to protect what is precious to you. I wonder what you'd risk to protect yourself or what is precious within you. Understanding what it is you want in the world takes a long time and desire changes shape with us. Still, there must be something you believe your life is and could be. You've been learning how to take up space with humility and with integrity, how to share your talents with a public eye. In what ways can you fortify your self-confidence in your inner world so that that stepping into the spotlight feels empowering rather than an added vulnerability?
LEO
My dear lion, I promised you things would get easier, and haven't they? Not easy peasy lemon squeeze-y, mind you—although a few squeezed lemons and a lot of sugar wouldn't hurt right about now. No, easier as in hurdles either leapt over or no longer relevant to the course, as in tension finally giving way to nervous laughter. Ease as in acceptance and, through acceptance, another way to live. Leo, wherever you are at this moment, working a late night or on the road, I know you can feel yourself returning to yourself.
To return is not to heal, my love. To return is choose presence and, in choosing presence, prepare for the work of staying alive. And, maybe there's a kid part of you that thinks that's you've been doing all along with your outings and adventures. I can't tell you staying high or drunk or obsessed with the story of a stranger isn't being alive. I can only suggest that you know, as well I do, that whatever kind of life that is—it only feeds old ghosts.
So, Leo, consider what life might look like if it was feeding you, filling you up to brim with beauty you could feel. Wasn't there a time that, looking out at a landscape or sunset, you were filled with an incredible love for yourself—for how small you are under the big sky, for how much love you have inside you to offer to this world, its deserts, dogs, and brilliant ideas? What did you dream of for yourself when you allowed yourself to dream? Those dreams were seeds, for who you've become even if they never materialized into what you thought. Now is the time to take what you have learned from your losses and move forward with determination and courage into the light of consciousness.
VIRGO
I know you've got a lot on your plate, Virgo. In fact, if one were to glance at you for a short minute, one might think they saw a juggling act—one person with plates stacked on pins stacked on plates, perhaps on a unicycle. One would not be entirely mistaken. Yet, if I know you, and I think I do, I'd bet that wherever you are, reading this, you've been chastising yourself for not getting further ahead sooner, for not only claiming the big piece of pie but eating it without hesitancy.
If you are holding to the idea that whatever you are offering is not enough I say to you, au contraire, mon frère because I feel silly and I want you to feel silly too, holding yourself to impossible milestones and goal posts when you're a human being who needs rest and love and time.
Virgo, work and its many forms of achievement, is not all. Security is hard to come by without money but it is impossible to come by without community, without emotional nets and mutual systems of care. You, my friend, are a master of systems. You know where every bag clip is and every child's Crayola set, and every kind of tape one needs to fix on fitting to another. This month, imagine that your systems of labor have slowed down, that scores are harder to come by and levels longer to reach. Take these things as facts of context rather than indications of your own measuring up. Look around you at your systems of nurturance instead. If you yearn for them to expand and strengthen, you'll have to do more than show up for social media or late night hangs. You'll have to make a concentrated effort to be real about what you have offer to others and make sure that what you offer is the realest part of you.
LIBRA
Imagine you are on a plane somewhere. Down below, the cities get smaller and smaller until they are not so much cities as electric circuits and working motherboards. You can trust the animated map to tell you what you're flying over but, from where you're sitting and without any other information, what you fly over and past could be a place you've know intimately for most of your life or a piece of land you'll never set foot on. Emotions can be like that to, can't they, Libra?
One day, you live inside what affects you and every step, every storefront, every song on the radio incites you to go over it one more time: what was said and what was meant, the kind of stories human beings so easily spin for themselves about what they "know" when knowing nothing feels too much like spinning wildly. But in given time, it can be impossible to imagine you felt so deeply and so intensely about what inspired.
If you look, you might find journals full of dramatic circumstances that threatened to wreck you (but they didn't, not fully); and, the words the cut you to the quick you have no memory of hearing now. Our memories are selective, after all, our minds allow us to keep that which it deems useful for a future self and what we believe our psyches can handle. Given all this, it wouldn't be too wild, too renegade, to choose to board the airplane now—or at least this month—and fly out high over the emotional terrain. You can have distance, if you want it, from the thoughts that won't stop coming. You can fly over what obsesses you and witness the electric spark of it, the circuit running fine without you there to record and respond to its many concerns. The air is a great place to go so that you might feel your wholeness separate from your anxiety. Distance is not erasure and it is not a solution. It is a gift.
SCORPIO
Just because you know something, doesn't mean you've got to share it. In fact, it might be better if you kept it all to yourself. Not "better" as in kinder to the person who this information is about (although kindness is encouraged here), but "better" as in ultimately more empowering for you and more in line with who you are becoming, rather than who you've growing out of. You're growing out of meanness, aren't you, Scorpio? Or, if not meanness, then whatever veil laced with disdain you used to drape over yourself when you were around people whom you did not trust to see the soft bare part of you and still call that part powerful.
It doesn't matter so much anymore, does it, Scorpio, who can and can't see the power in your most present self? You know what you've lived through, what you've learned, what you're capable of in the right circumstance. You are very close to your power even on the days you feel farthest from it. Your strength like a shadow clipped to your hill, sometimes booming in front of you and sometimes trailing thinly behind.
In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz encourages us to "Be Impeccable With (our) Word." It is the first agreement and one of the hardest to commit to. Words are a powerful tool, after all, and it's not always clear what needs to get fixed and in what way. So, to agree to be impeccable with your word is to agree to say what you mean, to refute gossip (to not gossip about others and to not gossip about yourself), to aim your speech toward truth and love (I am reminded now how claiming a boundary and some acts of refusal can be a claim toward self-love). On practicing the first agreement and telling people difficult truths he has said: You don't have the right to try to fix other people's points of view. You don't need to be right and make them wrong because of what you believe. They have the right to suffer if that's what they want to do. Many times, people don't want you to tell them the truth; they only want you to tell them what they want to hear. You have to be wise enough to understand that when they ask you something, they are expecting a certain answer. You can go along with the game or not; it's up to you.
This month, if you don't opt out of the game altogether, try to observe yourself playing it.
SAGITTARIUS
Okay, sure, you can keep avoiding the elephant in the room. You can even decide that you belong to a new faith, a faith devoted to both servicing and evading said room elephant. In this new faith, the elephant is at once exalted and non-consequential. It is both everything about the room and something to be looked over—like an old newspaper pile. In this new faith, you get what you want: to hold on to the situation that mandates the elephant because the elephant's impact is muddied. Does it have no power at all or is its power unstoppable? This will work for some time. This might have been working for a lot longer than you thought possible and that, in and of itself, has convinced you of its acceptable nature.
It'll work until it won't. And, when it won't, you'll start to feel locked out of the temple you built. You behold the elephant with immense suspicion—how did it arrive? how does it expect to be fed?—because you feel far from the faith you once built for exactly this reason: The closer you get to your heart, the more all faiths start feel false compared to what your gut knows. It will grow harder and harder to walk around it, to accept it as part of what must be.
When you get to feeling that way, Sagittarius, or if you're feeling that way now, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that whatever faith you built to protect what you thought you wanted is crumbling. I'm sorry that there's really nothing left to do but acknowledge your gut: what you feel, what you know, what rises up in your mind the moment you rest your devout guard. The closer to the muscle, the more dangerous. But, Sagittarius, all your life you've risked danger for one rush, maybe two. Can't you risk something, now, for the sake of authenticity, for the sake of your own mental well-being? Wouldn't that be a slow and steady thrill?
CAPRICORN
When someone is looking for creative support, when they need a second eye or, an accountability companion, you are an easy bet. The work of others can feel sacred to you, even in its ordinariness. Under your keen eye, daily tasks transform to tell the story of a life or a person you've come to adore. You help your friend write the letter, not be putting words in her mouth but by giving her space and freedom to write for no one else but herself. You note how she bends each page, to fit the narrow envelope, with a soft attention—not enough to truly line up the edges but enough to make it fit.
Do you offer the same kind of tenderness to your own story? Do you watch yourself hold the paper steady with one hand while you write what you wish with the other; how you write slow so as to make your script more legible even if the only one who sees that page is you? There is a lot of grace in one life, Capricorn, and while you can savor the efforts and contributions of those around you, still you don't extend yourself the same sweetness.
You deserve that sweetness, Capricorn, you deserve to feel your own eyes on your restless hands, rubbing into the palm, tapping on the skin that grows callused. In the month to come, there will be more and more reasons to take your dreams seriously, more and more evidence that the energy and attention you've given to your intuition is a fruitful enterprise. All these reasons and evidence should give you validation and hopefully some pride, but just keep this in mind: no matter how much more you commit to the big picture, no matter how many more clients you get, or offers you receive, you deserve the same amount of sweetness. You deserved sweetness when you were sitting in your room adding a stamp to a postcard and you deserve sweetness before the day begins and the clients arrive. Don't use your strength or success against the woman you were before you felt either of those things. She had other gifts.
AQUARIUS
Your spirit is restless, isn't it, Aquarius? You feel the currents moving over whatever piece of land you occupy and it's almost like, if you raise your sail a little bit, you could fly out wherever the winds take you. Traveling, touching the ground in new and unfamiliar terrain, dipping your feet into moving rivers, it sounds delicious. It sounds like one way too feel like you're making changes when, really, you're just changing the scene while leaving all internal catastrophe on the back burner for when you return, if ever. And, I'm not here to claim that traveling does nothing. I'm not here to argue that moving cities, apartments, or even running routes, won't create some large shift for your future self. The butterfly effect comes from real scientific study, after all, and it's what makes our lives almost predictable but not quite. In whatever sense that we presume ourselves free, we rub up against fate's many doors.
The fact of a doorframe, the act of walking through it, is not the same as knowing how you came to that door and who you hope to become on the other side. Free will, it appears, can be an umbrella term that houses impulse decisions and escapism but—and I hope you do forgive me turning to a new symbolism—once you crowd enough things under the umbrella of self-preservation, you'll have a harder time making sure the important things stay dry.
What are the important things, my star? What does the soul crave underneath the impatient grumbles left over from a rebellious youth? Aquarius, if you find yourself pushing back harder than usual; if you feel yourself slowly dispersing emotionally, like a mist amongst your friends and lovers, unsure of what the water would look like if it pooled together; if you feel too much and just can't seem to feel enough—these are signs of your body calling you home. Imagine it, the four wind deities (the Anemoi) gathered up inside you and whirled into a cool, clear stillness. They would carry the knowledge of every body of water they've touched, every land mass, every mountain peak. What would they find inside you, what part of you aches to be known?
PISCES
We know time is a construct and even the most rigid and formulaic amongst us will admit that an hour can fit a lot more for some people than it can for others. This is especially true of people who must share their hours with those who depend on them. A mother, for instance, can take an hour from three different lives (ex: a care-giver, a writer, a teacher) and Tetris them all into one square 60-min block. It's true, too, that the hour one spends taking a test can feel like 20 minutes. Unless you've got all the answers, that is, because then it can feel like eternity. Time, whether it's linear or not, has a lot of say over the course of our days. It can teach us what we value and who values us, what isn't worth our attention and what must take precedence when the minutes start to wind down.
Pisces, if you've been feeling like you're in the exam room, hurriedly trying to fill in the bubbles as best you can before the alarm rings or watching impatiently as the second hand touches every dot while your paper lies confidently completed in the corner, know this: time is on your side.
Time holds you accountable for all the moments you say yes when you mean to say no. Time teaches you that your word is sacred and when you give your word out of fear—you commit a small violence in the temple of your love. Time teaches you that your energy is precious, that you can only spend so many hours standing up for the idea of yourself before you fall exhausted into the reality of who you are. Time is on your side because it is only teacher you can't spurn due to your authority issues, the only guardian whose laws are older than the expansive universe in your heart. Your over-commitments, your under-estimation, your fear of missing something you had been fine missing all along, time holds you in place with both hands and sings: "I am the one writing this story."
