Creating Meaningful Connections: Growing with the Moon

fractal connections

Crescent Moon in Leo
June 12, 2013 2:55 pm EDT

First Quarter Moon in Virgo
June 16, 2013 1:24 pm EDT

Gibbous Moon in Scorpio
June 20, 2013 2:28 pm EDT

Full Moon in Capricorn
June 23, 2013 7:32 am EDT

Today, we rest in a dark moon time after the New Moon.

Seeds in the ground, we've begun a new cycle of growth. Already, we're pushing against the boundaries of our wrappings, sending out rootlets and wondering what lies ahead ... because we can't. quite. see it. (yet)

If you haven't made New Moon wishes, today is perfect. The Moon is strong in her home sign of Cancer, ready to listen and lend her nurturing support. This cycle looks to be busy, with lots of bright energy for getting stuff done, so, best to be prepared and focused!

The Theme for this Waxing Cycle: Making Meaningful Connections

This waxing (growing) lunar cycle began with the New Moon of June 8 and culminates with the Full Moon of June 23. During these next weeks, the Sun remains in Gemini, moving closer and closer to Jupiter, the guy who makes everything bigger, brighter and buzzier.

Mars and Pallas Athena remain together in Gemini too, energizing a connection between thought and action, helping make sure at least some of those ideas lead to something concrete.

LOTS of energy for connecting, communicating, networking, exploring, crafting, brainstorming––and, yes, flirting, laughing, lighthearted trickstering, and getting distracted. At this time of year, playfulness is a good thing! Possibly hard to stay on task, easy to get carried away by whatever arrives in the moment, so keep your goals in mind.

At the Crescent Moon of June 12, the Moon in creative, passionate Leo channels that shiny Gemini into personal expression. Make sure your unfolding intentions reflect your own style, your own heart light.

This cycle is not all about fun, games and butterflies, though. Mercury, ruler of Gemini, has moved into nurturing, emotionally connected Cancer. Venus, Ceres, Vesta and Eris also move through Cancer now. Venus and Mercury, in fact, stay close together throughout this cycle.

This Cancerian energy links our emotional selves into the scintillating thinking of Gemini. We want our connections and communications to reflect our values and feelings. We want to know where home is, to protect what means the most to us. We want to feel safe.

This pulls our attention to meaningful connecting, not simply whatever shows up in our perceptual field. Between now and the Full Moon, pay attention with your inner as well as outer radar.

This is absolutely the time to make new connections––to people, ideas, organizations, projects, whatever––but before allowing yourself to be distracted, check in with how it feels.

Ask: Does this new bright shiny feel right? Is it aligned with my values? Does it resonate with my heart?

This can be a tricky balance, one we'll be exploring. Gemini keeps an open mind, ready to consider any and all possibilities. Cancer is much more reserved, preferring the tried and true. Which makes this cycle a wonderful time to explore our set points and triggers in this area.

Ask: Where do I feel I can boldly go, exploring new areas fearlessly? Where do I feel a need to pull back, stay safe, not take risks? Are those places good for me at this time in my life, or do I need to expand in some areas and maybe pull back in others?

Opportunities for Healing

This is a time for building meaningful connections, not necessarily easy ones. It's true, Gemini tends to prefer easy––and there are other energies out there.

Giving added weight to the realm of emotions, Chiron the wounded healer continues to flow energy to Mercury and Venus during this cycle. So, emotional buttons may get pushed, which opens up opportunities to make internal connections. When we gain new insights into our inner landscape, it releases energy and opens doors.

And then, we've got Saturn in Scorpio and Neptune in Pisces continuing to flow energy together. They will be players in the coming Full Moon, so don't count them out. (Actually, never count Saturn out, and keep an eye on what Neptune's up to as well.)

These two, Saturn and Neptune, will make sure we don't stay in shallow waters too long. Scorpionic Saturn pulls us deep within. Cosmic Neptune expands our connections outward.

At the First Quarter Moon of June 16, the Moon in Virgo asks whether we're paying attention. If we've become too distracted from important goals, this Moon will gently guide us back. Well, she can be gentle. If the inner critic pipes up, move to a more compassionate place as you refocus.

By the time we reach the Gibbous Moon of June 20, the mood could feel a bit more serious. The Moon's in Scorpio and she's tightly conjunct the North Node, the path into the future, the place we all have approach-avoidance issues with.

The Gibbous Moon will be a checkpoint. Are we on track, on task, moving in a good direction? Where are we missing important stuff? Look into Shadow for the answer to this, because Scorpio is all about the things we'd rather not see.

The lightheartedness of Gemini is still around, still potent. We're reminded of the old stories in which a bit of humor, some trickery, clever strategy at the opportune moment, were what saved the day.

If we've made those meaningful connections, within and without, we'll be ready.

A Serious Supermoon

When the Full Moon arrives, she'll be in pragmatic, serious-minded Capricorn. This Full Moon of June 23 will be a Supermoon, the largest of this year. She's be at her closest point to Earth, looming large in the Summer sky.

Arriving just after the Summer Solstice, this Full Moon is a yin reminder in the midst of high summer yang. Winter will come. We can't be grasshoppers all the time. I'll be writing more about the Solstice and the Full Moon, so this is just an early head's up: Gather ye rosebuds!

We're in summer now. It's good to kick back, relax, vacation, celebrate. It's wonderful to explore, connect, and communicate. And we remember this season is one turn in an ongoing spiral. We remember who we are, where we're heading, and what we need.

This cycle is about the balance between the serious and the playful, the inner and the outer, the bright and shiny and deep and shadowy. We celebrate them all!
    

New Moon in Gemini: The Council of Me

New Moon in Gemini
Today (June 8) 11:56 am EDT

When the noon siren goes off today in my town (yes, we still have one), it will welcome the New Gemini Moon.

Already, the tribe is gathering––the Moon's emerged from her long void-of-course time in Taurus, waking from her rest deep in the quiet Earth. She's connected with Pallas Athena and Mars, and draws near to the Sun.

With both luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, in Gemini, along with Mars and Jupiter, Pallas and Eris, attention focuses in on me. What am I connected to? Who and what are in my networks? What information is at my fingertips? Where can I find more?

On a national level, everyone in the US who uses a cell phone is wondering how they're connected to the NSA via their metadata.

On a global level, we're chapulling, connecting to the people of Turkey as they connect with each other to stand up against violence and tyranny, and fight for their rights.

This is also a very personal New Moon. We look to see where we're connected outward, even as we're drawn inward.

Mercury, ruler of the New Moon has moved into home-based Cancer, trining Chiron the wounded healer.

How do connections and networks become tribe and family? Does my time looking outward (cruising the internet, say) bring me more security, more nurturing? Or am I dissipating my energy in a search for novelty?

Venus, also in Cancer, activates a Grand Water Trine with Neptune and Saturn. Sometimes trines are so easy, we don't notice them.

But this one includes Saturn in Scorpio connecting to Neptune––together, these two carry strong manifestation mojo––connecting to Venus, goddess of relationships and creativity. I don't think we'll be able to ignore this amount of energy pouring in.

How do my networks support and nurture my creative passions? (Or maybe the first question is, do they ... ?) How does my style of relating and connecting foster deeper, more personal relationships? (Or maybe, does it ... ?)

Sitting with one foot in Gemini's world of bright and shiny, and Cancer's world of soft, safe, and secure, we look through both sets of eyes to see how each supports the other.

And (this is a BIG 'and'), our most vital connections and relationships are within.

The smallest amount of reflection quickly reveals the many voices within our psyches. Whether we think in terms of inner critic, inner child, inner parent; or balancing seven chakras and their various needs; or dialoging with archetypes; or using an astrological lens to connect to our Sun, Moon, Mercury, everyone, we experience ourselves as many.

At this New Moon, I will be setting an intention for a stronger, clearer, more balanced relationship with my own inner council. These last lunar cycles have showed me how impossible it is to ignore the reality of my own inner experience, the memories and patterns stored in my body, the stories (good and bad, true and not so true) that help define my experience of life.

Stepping into the life I want for myself, the one I hope for, calls me into connection with all that I am.

Ancestry, personal history, and life in all its dimensions and realities are within and around me. The strong Gemini energy helps me see my personal web of life, and how it connects to the whole.

Overwhelming? Kind of. And yet, there's power here. Opportunities. Movement. The resources to strength the present connections I wish to keep, and forge new ones as well.

As we move toward the New Moon, where are you feeling connected? Where are things lighting up for you? Look there for the new ideas that can carry you into the next bright shiny time of your life.
    

New Moon in Gemini: Seeing Through New Eyes

a scene from the film Small Change

New Moon in Gemini
June 8, 2013 11:56 am EDT

We've turned the corner, sliding home toward Saturday's New Moon in Gemini.

Tomorrow's Balsamic Moon (4:25 am EDT) in fiery Aries gives us the energy boost we need to keep going, letting go of whatever's in the way.

What will this New Moon be like? New ideas, new connections, new perspectives, lots of energy. Coming in at 18 Gemini, tightly conjunct Mars and widely conjunct Jupiter, the New Moon is also flanked by Pallas Athena and Eris at the beginning and end of Gemini.

Over these last weeks, our world's been turned upside down, more than once. If we're paying attention (as opposed to, say, keeping our heads in the sand), we can't possibly be seeing life exactly as we were before. This is a good thing!

You can never solve a problem at the level at which it was created. ––Albert Einstein

So, at this New Moon, wishes and intentions focused on seeing the world anew will be strongly supported. I encourage everyone to take a new look at your birth chart. Where is 18 Gemini? That's where you will see new ideas and connections popping up––or where you may be most in need of an update.

This New Moon falls in my Tenth House, which is career and who I am in public, and aspects my Mercury–Neptune conjunct in my Third House of communication.

Time for me to rethink how I present myself to the world (... as an introvert, marketing is not my strong suit).

Also time for new connections between my inner and outer worlds, where ideas and inspiration come from and how I communicate.

Gemini is also craft––our skills, how we work with our hands, sleight of hand magic. Gemini is youth and enthusiasm, puer rather than senex. Gemini is humor of the lightest, punniest kind, the trickster at work. Gemini is transactions, exchanges, and deals.

Any and all of these can become the focus of wishes and intentions. Where do we need a lighter touch? Where have we become stodgy, tired and out of date? Where do we have tricks up our sleeve we've been hiding, even from ourselves?

Gemini New Moon energy can point to anything from realizing it's time to get a new cell phone, to suddenly seeing the world in completely new ways. Either one. Or both.

Planets shifting into emotional territory

And ... there's something else important going on here, something we're already feeling, "feeling" being the key word.

Even as the New Moon energies focus strongly in light-hearted, playful Gemini, planets are shifting focus into the emotional territory of Cancer. Mercury led the way, entering Cancer on May 31. Venus joined him yesterday, June 2.

Already, our thoughts are turning toward home and hearth, tribe and ancestry, relationships. The shift brings our emotional connections into the mix, alone side our thoughts and ideas.

Emotions are heightened by Saturn's ongoing retrograde through Scorpio, and Neptune and Chiron in Pisces. Right now, in fact, Venus and Mercury are triggering a Grand Trine in Water with Saturn and Neptune, a pattern that continues through the New Moon and beyond, as planets continue shifting in the Moon's home sign.

So another aspect of this Gemini New Moon focuses attention on how we think about feelings.  Do we listen to our emotions? Do we heed their messages? Do we repress or deny them?

That Grand Trine, especially the presence of Saturn in Scorpio, will make repression and denial increasingly uncomfortable, if not outright impossible. Best to update our emotional life as needed, embracing any changes that are called for, however painful it might be in the short term. As I've written before, Karla McLaren is my go-to author on emotional stuff, check her out!

Emotional excess?

Although we're urged to 'live from the heart,' our modern culture doesn't tolerate emotions well. Tears are only permitted at certain occasions, and only from a few people, for a brief time. The modern pose tends to be detached, objective, ironic, cool. This New Moon will ask, how's that working for you?

In a letter to a young writer, Anaïs Nin championed emotion as a gateway to creativity (quoted in an essay by Maria Popova):

Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. 

Check also where the sign of Cancer falls in your birth chart. This is a place where emotion is strong, and where the New Moon will also be pouring energy. We're not meant to live on the sidelines all the time. Sometimes we're called to wade into the depths and dive deeply.

When we see a confluence of Scorpio, Pisces and Cancer––all three Water signs––we're looking at all levels of emotion. In Cancer, we have personal emotions: Our connections to family, ancestry and tribe; our feelings about home, hearth, and personal security. We want to protect those we care about and feel responsible for. We want to nurture them, and be cared for in return. This is a sign of the personal mother, the one who loves us as individuals.

In Scorpio, we enter emotional depths. Scorpio is the place of the subconscious, the primitive, atavistic underpinnings of feeling. Scorpio is where we are deeply connected in ways we can't articulate, the place where we can be hurt the most. This is the Shadow, what we don't want to see or acknowledge.

In Pisces, we connect with all-that-is. This is unconditional love, the heart center, the teachings of the great spiritual traditions. Of course, Pisces is also a place of confusion and delusion, depending on how discerning we are. Getting to the high side of Pisces calls for discipline and honesty.

As the personal planets move through Cancer (with Mercury and Venus already leading the way), we'll have the chance to explore how we connect to the subconscious and the infinite through the personal. This is not always easy. No one pushes our buttons like family.

If you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family. ––Ram Dass

The emphasis on Cancer's personal emotional sphere will be just as intense as the other zodiac gatherings we've experienced so far this year. Just before the New Moon, Neptune stations and turns retrograde in Pisces, an especially powerful position.

Later in June, Mercury begins his second retrograde of the year, in Cancer. Jupiter will also enter Cancer in late June, bringing his expansive emphasis into that sign. And Saturn continues his stately progress through Scorpio.

This New Moon initiates a process of emotional updates. We can accept with grace, or we can resist. I'd go with the grace option, myself.

The intersection of Gemini and Cancer

When these two energies interact, we can become childish. The eternal youth, the puer, does not handle feelings well. He wants what he wants when he wants it, dancing away from anything uncomfortable. Peter Pan is allergic to responsibility of all kinds.

Or, we can reawaken our childlike hearts through loving and protecting what is young, tender, and in need of care.

One of my favorite films of all time is Trouffaut's Small Change. It's French title, L'Argent de poche, means "pocket silver," a very Gemini kind of image for things that are small, close to hand, and vulnerable. 

This is a film about children and their lives, a series of short, poignant, sometime hilarious scenes that weave together families in a small French city. I was going to link to the Wikipedia article, but it gives too much of the plot away, and makes it sound like a rather boring documentary. Instead, I suggest you watch it––or watch again, if it's been awhile.

In the film, children live the lives of children, and the adults do the best they can to keep up. Towards the end of the film, a schoolteacher who has just become a father makes an impassioned speech about how the rights of children are vital for all of us. This is where family, personal emotion, and society come together.

Turkish emigres in London

In the news now, ordinary people in Istanbul march together by the tens of thousands against brutal police, an action that began to protect trees and grass––an open park slated to be bulldozed. A small action to protect what is tender, expanding into something the world is watching.

As in other people's actions in recent years, we see the importance of new connections (Gemini) between people fostered by new technologies that are not controlled from above, accompanied by an upwelling of feeling for what is near and dear, and the willingness to take protective action (Cancer).

At each New Moon, we're invitation to step into something new. This very Gemini New Moon, accompanied by emotional depths, offers new connections between thinking and feeling. Solving the immense problems facing our world will certainly require both. Perhaps now we can begin with the personal and expand beyond.