See the column to the right for today’s Moon sign. This text is for days when the Moon is in Gemini.
- Today’s Question:All of them. Question everything.
- Today’s Gods: Mercury, messenger of the gods and all-purpose trickster.
- Today’s Guides: smart alecs; toddlers who ask “why?” every two minutes; interviewers; writers; monkeys; birds; brothers and sisters;books and newspapers;con artists; twins; butterflies; the wind.
- Celebrity docents: Russell Brand, Judy Garland, Spalding Gray, Frank Oz, Alanis Morissette, Bill Moyers, Paul McCartney, Mel Blanc, Johnny Depp.
- Today’s assignments: Pay attention, and keep the conversational ball in play.
Years ago I spent a long weekend in the tiny country town where I’d grown up, to attend a reception in honor of my aunt and uncle’s golden wedding anniversary. Halfway through the party, when I was starting to get a little bored, a life-long friend of my parents sat me down and gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life: for an hour or so, he told me stories about my father, who died when I was eight. These were sketches of a real, live, breathing man who had actually existed, who had friends and adventures and even a nickname! No one in my life had ever really talked to me that way about my father; it’s always been “the husband,” “the brother,” and of course, the mythical absent father. The rest of my family remember him in their own ways, not necessarily with words. Born with the Moon in Gemini, I need stories.
Later, a childhood friend showed up and pulled me outside for a visit. We leaned against her car, sheltered from the miserable summer heat by a grove of shade trees, and she talked to me at length about her recently failed marriage. She was beginning to ramble, and I was growing fidgety, until I was distracted by the sound of the wind rustling through the trees, that beautiful whispery sound…and then, from that small but crucial distance, I could hear the quavering emotion beneath my friend’s droning litany: she really was about to splinter into pieces. I stood there for awhile, perfectly balanced between two voices I dearly loved, the familiar voice of my childhood friend and the voice of the wind in the trees. Had I focused on either voice to the exclusion of the other, I couldn’t have heard either of them so well.
When the Moon is Gemini, your attention easily wanders… not because you don’t care about others, but because you’re listening to so many stories at once. Stories of a distant loved one, of a childhood friend, the whispers of trees, ravens in raucous conversation. Or a heartfelt ballad from Gemini Judy Garland: