The Names Of Desire | Gemini New Moon | Monday | 5.30.22 | 6:30am
“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” - Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury
The Gemini new moon brings with it the joys of following curiosity and playing with names. It invites us to heretically forego names, maps, and systems of knowledge as we’ve inherited and known them. With that release, a portal opens into regions of ourselves we’ve been waiting to explore and name as our own.
In healthy Gemini fashion, we can let curiosity leads us onward here. Thanks to Mercury’s ongoing retrograde and a seductive glance from Neptune, we may find ourselves in the presence of the illusions and narratives that have kept us wound up and spinning circles. Luckily the friendly aspect between Mercury and Neptune also offers helpful ways of approaching these illusions. We could imagine them from a different vantage point, say as a film projected onto a screen, instead of as fear/fantasy projected onto other beings. We can see how illusions may operate for us and how those narratives may have become stuck in the past, and over the course of this lunar cycle we can contemplate and choose our narratives carefully to create a new present reality. Any intentions you set for these changes get a boost from the sextile the Mars Jupiter conjunction makes to this moon, so keep your pen and paper nearby today, and record your inspirations.
About this Mars Jupiter conjunction, it may tempt us to throw ourselves into overdrive. You may want to go fast and hard but frankly, from a full-sky perspective, this is not the time. Thanks to Mercury still retrograding, the moon being dark, and Neptune casting beguilingly glamorous daydreams upon us at all hours, for the next 2 or 3 days we’ll fare better by going slowly and bending deadlines as far away from ourselves as possible.
Instead, as the polymorphous being of Eros comes out through Mars and Jupiter, cultivate Gemini’s hidden talent for listening and learning. Get curious about what you feel, and after deep listening, seek out conversations about what you learn.
See what it means to explore the regions beyond how you’ve been conditioned to repress desire, because in the way that a solar system organizes around the sun, you can trust that the organism of your body will organize around desire. Resistance and repression do little for you or your environment. This is a rich time to locate the mysterious seeds of your desire, and to name them in ways you’ve never heard them named. If you have to resist something, resist the binary, capitalistic framework that has been naming our desires for us for centuries.
The contemplative days surrounding the dark moon also help us to trust that the changes necessary to bring our desires to fruition will begin happening their own pace. The task of creating change is not all on your shoulders. Mutable Gemini facilitates change with ease, and puts us in conversation with Octavia Butler, who dreamed through the religion of Earthseed that god is change. Patterns that need to change will, and as you set intentions, rest assured that support will come to you through the many beings all around you. Writing from the voice of her ancestors, Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote “there is no you i don’t surround.” Can you feel that you are and always will be held by beings who want you, and your evolving process of becoming, to be here?
A note on the theme of pleasure as it plays out through June: Taurus currently hosts Mercury, Uranus, and Venus, who traipses queenly through these verdant fields. This sphere of the sky is Venus’ own dimension, her hometown as it were. She knows how to resource here, and as her basket becomes heavy with all she gathers, what she goes home to create is a deeply relational pleasure, wherein all the beings she invites to be around her can be involved in the co-creation of gratification. And in Gemini season, when things proliferate, we can be sure there will be many conversations and moments of co-creation to be had, with our human an non-human companion alike.
While we chatter with these many beings, Mercury’s current square to Saturn creates the tension necessary to renew the ways that we cultivate conversations. Renegotiate how you interact with the voices that tend to block you from feeling pleasure. Reassess what pleasures you’ve indulged in historically that tend to block you from being authentically relational. See what it means to stage conversations in which every voice, including yours, is laterally respected as equal. No hierarchies.
Throughout June, Venus invites us on a pilgrimage toward our pleasure. Encounters with these pleasure-centric conversations will only multiply throughout the month, and so will your capacity to listen and affect change as desired.
Happy listening, happy naming,
Amalia