If time seems to be moving especially fast these days, you may have gotten swept up in the energetic vortex of the approaching New Moon. The chart for the exact moment of the New Moon (June 4, 2016, at 7:59 pm Pacific time, 14.53 Gemini) features the Sun and Moon in a close conjunction with Venus, all in Gemini; they are just past an opposition to Saturn, and all four are square Jupiter and Neptune.
It’s a configuration called a Grand Cross, with at least one planet in each of the four cardinal, fixed, or mutable signs. And if you’re wondering what that might feel like, just picture yourself stuck on one of those circus wheels where they strap you on, spin you around, and throw knives at you.
But!—since this Grand Cross lies in the imaginative mutable signs, here’s a lovelier, lighter image. Picture a brave, shiny little pinwheel, catching the high afternoon winds and spinning furiously. Eventually, the winds will die down. In the meantime, how do you keep the whirligig from blowing away?
Look to the New Moon chart again, and you’ll find an earthy grand trine involving Mercury, Jupiter, and Pluto. There’s your anchor. Just walk over to that big planter box on the balcony and stick your little pinwheel deep into the soil, where it can safely spin to its heart’s content.
The Gemini season boasts the perfect cosmic weather for exploring ideas. What do we want to learn? What sorts of people would be interesting to visit? Which are the books that belong on your summer reading list? Nothing in this month’s planetary picture should discourage you from brainstorming your Gemini heart out.
But at this particular moment, it may be the case that one idea immediately collides with another, and then another, and another, until your mind is racing and you feel like you did as a kid, spinning around and around until you collapsed dizzily on the front lawn.
Heed the sensible advice of Mercury, Jupiter, and Pluto in pragmatic earth signs, which wisely point out that you can do anything you want to do—you just can’t do it all at the same time. Focusing on just one thing is the best way to slow the wheel when it starts to spin out of control. You’ll need to focus, hard, on your single most compelling idea, and broaden that picture in your mind until it glows with possibilities. Then make a plan and—this part is key—take a concrete step, however small, toward making it a reality.
In keeping with Gemini’s insatiable interest in multiple perspectives, here are links to a collection of Gemini New Moon essays from my archives. I hope you enjoy them… one at a time!
© 2016 April Elliott Kent
Road Trip
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.
Read the full article…
A World in Motion
This many fast-moving planets in retrograde motion, for months in a row, must be telling us something. To slow down and reconsider before we act, perhaps. To read the fine print. To reclaim territory that we ceded too soon. To revel in slowness, in stillness….
Read the full article…
Happiness, Gemini Style: Stay Curious
What I love about Curious George is his insatiable interest in the world around him. Partly, he’s motivated by pure mischief, but mostly he’s just … well, curious; and his lively interest in the world leads him to see possibilities the rest of us might not consider….
Read the full article….
You Name It
You’re not your failures. You’re not your successes. You’re not the name your family gave you, or the cruel nicknames you were given on the schoolyard. At this liminal, magical New Moon, remember everything else that you are. Imagine yourself differently, and give that imagining a bright and joyful name all its own. It’s never too late to be someone new….
Read the full article….
