A study of contrasts.
New Moon in Gemini, May 26, 2025
We are the complexity within unity. If you cannot know the difference between a hand and the shadow it casts, you become confused. You don’t know if the shadow moves the hand or the hand moves the shadow, you don’t know what influence you have in the world. If the hand is attached to me and I can move it, I can move the shadow. The shadow is not attached to me but it moves with my hand, so does something move me from the shadow?
We are confused when we look at the phenomena of life without perspective. If the shadow and the hand are one, we do not see the role of the sun that casts the shadow. We are fixated on the wrong thing, making up stories that immerse us in a world of trying to influence what is beyond our grasp.
The shadow and the light are one. The hand upon which the two play is its own. When we know the shadow and the light are one, and we know it is our hand that shapes them, then we have opportunity.
The moon and the sun initiate a new cycle in the season of Gemini. Here the terrain is about what walks together yet is not the same. Here we experience shifting moods, ego states, and relationships with those who share our day to day lives. Somehow I am the same being at all times and yet in each moment there is a different facet of me that comes forward. In one moment, I am full of irritation and blame. In the next moment, I am full of remorse and confusion about my behavior. In the next, I am joyful and laughing. These are like clouds that pass across the sun, and though I am always the sun, I confuse myself with the clouds, and I do not recognize that the clouds are ever-shifting. I experience them as though they are a permanent truth when they are not. But to withdraw and to try to only be sun and ignore the clouds also is not good, for the clouds are somehow also me, and the space between sun and clouds is self.
In my country, we are experiencing the rulership of the Gemini principle. A confident and seemingly iron-clad statement one day gets later undone by another statement that comes across equally as confident and iron-clad, and we’re all expected to pretend there was never a contradiction and simply go along with what is being said in this moment. That is a political manifestation of the energy coalescing in this moment.
The ruler of Gemini, Mercury, is with the sun and the moon in this moment, and so these tendencies are clarified. There is a gift to having such a concentration in that we can really witness and work with the gifts of this energy. There is also a risk in that we can lose ourselves and forget there are other perspectives. I keep thinking of the statement attributed to the Buddha, “The mind cannot watch itself.” That feels relevant here. We may not realize we ourselves are constantly shifting opinions and perspectives, confusing the continuity of our consciousness with that of our moods, attributing to our perspective more certainty and objectivity than it warrants.
Mercury makes a gentle sextile to the Saturn and Neptune conjunction in Aries, bringing our minds and our words to the process of dissolving and remaking the maps of the world that is occurring. We are having so many conversations and exploring these from many angles. If there is no objective truth or overriding principle to which we can all agree, then all we have is bickering and questioning and assertions. It feels like every measure of truth and validity is being thrown up in the air, and we can bemoan that—and I certainly do, I fucking hate it—but that doesn’t change what is happening. Speak up for the truth that matters to you, lest it get dissolved.
The other influence that feels softer and more in the background is Jupiter, also still in Gemini, forming a friendly relationship with the north and south nodes. These nodes reflect a process that feels collective—we’re all dealing with it—yet often somewhat in the background. In this formation, we are leaning into our dreams, ideals, and fantasies while letting go of our tight grasp on purity and perfection. As I write this, I think about the clips on Instagram I’m seeing of wellness influencers encouraging us to drink our urine and eat shit while simultaneously worrying about parasites in the body. The fear of parasites is the terrain of Virgo, who has a very valid and respectable awareness that not everything in nature is healthy for us and processes of purification make our food and environments safer.
Yet along with this fear is the Piscean yearning for wholeness and integration, fantasizing that what our bodies literally excrete because it’s unneeded waste contains a material to make ourselves whole. There are spiritual paths that call upon the practitioners to consciously break taboos to open up consciousness and release unconscious fixations and open up life-force, and eating one’s own shit is such a practice. Taboos exist for valid reasons, to avoid well-known and documented harms. To consider these taboos deeply and then choose them consciously seems powerful, and if it is your path, but I encourage you to consider whether the breaking of a taboo could physically, mentally, or spiritually endanger yourself or another. If there is a risk of harm, consider using the imagination instead, which is a Piscean realm in which anything can be done safely.