Secret Third Thing
Full Moon in Gemini
Our luna friend has come to a beautiful culmination on this lap around its orbit. The full moon in Gemini is taking place in the late hours of the evening and leading us onward in our dance with balance. And could there be a more fitting energy to end our calendar year than with a full moon in Gemini? Let us explore.
Though we begin our astrological journey on the energetic new year, the first day of spring, we mostly keep our time through the Gregorian calendar, which posits that our year ends in December and begins again in January. And here at the end of this calendar year, we’re nearing completion of that cycle. Interestingly, the tarot card representative of the year 2022 has been The Lovers, which is the corresponding card of Gemini. The Lovers is a card that depicts ultimate balance of opposing forces - yin and yang, masculine and feminine, light and dark, above and below.
Here now on this full moon, we are tasked with understanding how balance of duality shows up in the realms of our emotions, intuition, and inner landscape. For with the influence of Gemini, how we think, conceptualize, categorize, understand, and come to know these realms is the ultimate task at hand. Harmony within is the order of the day.
We delve deeper here to explore the lore of Gemini as the cosmic twins. Long greek mythology story short, the twins were born of Hera. One of these twins was the son of Zeus, making him immortal, and the other was the son of a human king, making him mortal. These twins were inseparable, embracing the world in its fullness with curiosity and a quest for knowledge. When the mortal twin is killed in one of their adventures, the immortal twin shares his immortality, and the two of them swap places each day. Alternating between the experience of being dead and alive, here and gone, mortal and immortal, living in this world and the underworld. Forever imparted with the wisdom the duality of life and death, these twins speak to the nature of our duality as humans - in the world but not of it, of the earth but ever on a journey to transcend and elevate our mortality.
Among this duality, we exist in the space where the two join together to make not one, but three. And so our moon in Gemini encourages us to look for ways to blend our opposites. To think beyond polarities and fixations of either-or to a space of both-and. We are, of course, in this way, invited into a space of wholeness.
The twins of Gemini also serve us a lesson in reflection. When we look in the mirror, we encounter the very nature of this duality. We see ourselves, separate, from a different perspective. When we hold a mirror at a variety of angles, we can see the lens of many perspectives. And these mirrors may come in all forms. How might the world change if everything you encountered was a mirror, a reflection of some component of you? This is a lovely concept to grasp if you’re, say, sitting oceanside in the midst of a beautiful summer sunset, staring into the eyes of your beloved. It’s perhaps a bit less tenable when the mirror is the person driving in front of you who just cut you off, or the corrupt political leader spewing hate, or the over half-a-million square mile patch of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean.
It is perhaps our nature to wish to separate ourselves from these things. To split ourselves in two, divide this half from that. We look away from this reflection because we do not like how it looks or even because at times it is too unbearable to see. The devil is in the details, as they say, and the longer we look…well. But the interesting thing about our Gemini lore is how instead of leaving his twin for dead, the immortal brother shares some of his immortality so they both could continue to live in part. This way, balance is restored and obtained once again.
When we return to our inner landscape, how might this practice translate? What might it look like to give some of your unsavory parts of self a little of the savory components? How might you offer some softness to your rough edges? How might you validate the great invalidator of your inner critic? Could it be possible to show love the part of you that is power hungry and greedy? What about the dead parts of you, waiting to be imbued with the spirit of life? How about opening the door to your worst moments, letting them have a seat at the table, offering them tea and cookies? In this way, we get to be the thing we need and the one that needs it.
Take this reflection from Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are:
Pogo said, 'We have met the enemy and they are us.' This particular slogan now appears a lot in the environmental movement. It isn't somebody else who's polluting the rivers — it's us. The cause of confusion and bewilderment and pollution and violence isn't really someone else's problem: it's something we can come to know in ourselves. But in order to do that we have to understand that we have met the friend and that is me. The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame someone else.
"It's a little uncertain who is 'us' and who is 'them.' Bernard Glasssman Sensi, who does a lot of work with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn't work with the homeless because he's such a great guy but because going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with the parts of himself that he's rejected. It's all interrelated.
We work on ourselves in order to help others, but we help others in order to work on ourselves.
We are reminded again of our Sagittarius friend, as we delve deeper into the throes of the fiery three-ring circus. Remember, Sagittarius helps us to temper our experiences - to gradually mix various parts together in order to create balance. In this way, Gemini and Sagittarius work together to balance each other out - one on a quest to have all the answers and one on a quest to push past the answers towards an even greater expanse.
As we embrace this full moon wisdom, we can start to explore where our own out-of-balance discrepancies lie. To clue into some of these unharmonious, imbalanced aspects of yourself, follow your anger. What really pisses you off? Where’s the thing you can’t stand? The stuff that really grinds your gears? And why? Let the anger guide you toward what is in need of your tending within, and to give it a little of whatever it’s lacking. In fact, this moon is experiencing a strong influence from Mars (the god of war), so anger may well be front and center. Where’s the fight, the tension, the conflict? Which aspects of yourself are coming forth, guns blazing? And what might it take to bring an element of balance to conflict - not passivity or resignation, not aggression or force, but a third, creative option to help you embrace the tension?
If you get stuck, it may be useful to get beyond the world of words. Move your body, create an art reflection, light a candle or a fire, make a meal (alchemy in action), and if all else fails, breathe - the transformative powers of embracing opposites lie in each breath we take.
Full moon blessings!