Gemini New Moon: Road Trip

When you’re young, everything that happens is new. There’s no telling which joys, triumphs, tragedies, or heartbreaks are random events, and which are the first installments in storylines that will play out across your lifetime. As a child, even into your teens and your twenties, you’re still figuring out what your stories are.

Gemini and its ruling planet, Mercury, are astrology’s storytellers, delineators of your life’s narrative arc. Enter your thirties, and you begin to recognize recurring plotlines—the sorts of people who capture your heart, and how those relationships typically end; the habits that are maddeningly hard to break; your distinctive pattern of achievement and failure. In your forties, there is often a strong pull to escape from some of your stories. And by the time you reach your fifties, you’re more or less resigned to them, even philosophical. You’ve seen examples of most of what will tend to happen to you, and it can get a little boring to watch more of it play out—but sort of comforting, too.

We tell ourselves stories about who we are, and after four or five decades, sometimes we just want a new story. I’ve wondered what it must like to be someone like Mick Jagger (not that there is anyone quite like Mick Jagger, of course, but you know what I mean), who has been playing Mick Jagger in public for fifty years, singing Satisfaction and leaping around the stage like a manic jack in the box. Does he ever just get sick and tired of the whole Mick Jagger thing?

Most mere mortals do get tired of being ourselves, at least a little bit, at some point. It’s a feeling that has been known to provoke dramatic gestures, especially if you’ve built a life based on denial of your essential or evolving nature. If you’ve seen someone walk out on a successful career, for instance, or a long marriage, you might wonder how things ever reached such a drastic denouement. But you can be just as trapped by success as by failure. And as a client once remarked to me, the sweetest part of a happy marriage—the fact that there is another person who knows your stories as well as you do and who has a certain investment in them—can also make you feel you have little freedom to rewrite your life if you get the urge.

It’s so easy to trivialize Gemini, to dismiss it as a fickle, gossipy, lightweight sign. But that is a young person’s way of looking at it, the perspective of someone who hasn’t yet learned about the tyranny of definition. When you’ve spent decades writing, editing, and telling your own life stories, you begin to see Gemini quite differently. Is it fickle to decide that you want the opportunity to explore something new about yourself, or is it a response to something primal and creative? Is it intellectually lazy to gossip about other people, or is it simple curiosity and fascination with fellow humans?

The Gemini experience is like a “road” movie, in which two or more very different characters, thrown together by chance, set out on an adventure by train, car, bus, horseback, or spaceship. By the end of the film, they’ve developed an appreciation for one another and a better understanding of themselves. But usually, the story ends with them going their separate ways.

The late critic Roger Ebert wrote about the peripatetic protagonist of one of my favorite road movies, Paris, Texas, “He loves and cares, he empathizes, but he cannot touch. He does not have that gift.” The most unfortunate perception of Gemini, I think, is that those with planets in this sign lack feeling or caring. Nothing could be further from the truth. But feeling is one thing, and touching a life is quite another. Each of us carries the Gemini gene, and most of us limit our close relationships, instinctively understanding that once we’re involved, we’re less available to new experiences. Once we’ve decided to be one thing, we can’t be another, no matter how much we might yearn to. For better or worse, commitment is the enemy of reinvention.

Each year, at the Gemini New Moon, we embark on a road trip for which destination and outcome are entirely beside the point. The Gemini season is for learning and reinvention, not for decisions. It’s the season of summer camp and internships and backpacking across Europe, and long drives across desolate highways, where there is nothing but room—room to be someone different for awhile, to let your imagination breathe, and to create a new story for yourself.

© 2015 April Elliott Kent

7 comments to " Gemini New Moon: Road Trip "

  • Michelle

    I love this article! I myself have a Gemini rising and moon. You explained it so well! 🙂

  • Alexandra

    One of your best “hitting the bullseye” articles! Timely, gentle yet provoking, and best of all it’s easily relatable.
    Thank you!

  • Jan

    I have the Gemini sun conjunction mercury, plus moon, Uranus and north node in Gemini in my chart. I love to read about Gemini issues. This was a very nice essay, April. Thanks.

  • Doreen

    Hi April. I enjoyed your lunar phase talk at UAC and loved your singing. This article is thoughtful and lovely. I’m not sure I agree that commitment is the enemy of reinvention. I can see how it can be true , but not always. Sometimes commitment to a practice,say meditation, or a person, can be the fertile ground that allows us to grow ,expand and reinvent. Thanks for your clear and thought provoking writing.

  • susan thornton

    Perfect, to the point and quite timely for this new adventure I’m staring in the face. Thanks for the permission to look at this as a summer camp adventure full of fun, new experiences and opportunities to reinvent myself!

  • Lisa

    I was born with my Gemini New Moon conjunct my Taurus Sun. Mercury is under my sun sign Taurus, but in my first house and rising sign Aries. Lots of deliberate but rocket speed thinking. And would I rather talk about, than feel my feelings!

  • Suzanne

    As a Gemini Sun, Venus and ascendant, I’d agree that commitment does feel like it stymies reinvention. It’s kind of a curse to feel that way since so much of what we hope to reinvent never actually gets changed — sort of like the list of resolutions that remains eerily static from year to year. A friend of mine once described Geminis as constantly existing on a mental hamster wheel, running and running only to end up in the same place. That’s why the road trip is the perfect Gemini holiday. It feels so full of purpose. But the real purpose is the glorious feeling of freedom that comes from venturing forth — away from whatever and whoever we want to leave behind, including a tired version of ourselves. Maybe the wheel returns us to the same spot where we began, but oh, to feel the wind in our hair.

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