Dreaming In Community
The Gemini new moon squares Neptune, offering us an opportunity for communal re-story-ation
Hey friends,
This week is overflowing with fullness: the New Moon in Gemini, Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and the Summer Solstice here in the northern hemisphere. It’s feeling very summery around these parts, with verdant roses busting out of their buds and dripping over adobe walls, social gatherings a-plenty, and watermelon-feta salads showing up at every potluck. Yum.
Sometimes I’m surprised at how the energies of the astrological season always shows up, even when I’m least expecting it. I’ve been going through a deep dive into some personal trauma and pain points over this past month, but despite all that I’ve still managed to find myself at lots of gatherings and met so many truly inspiring new people this month. No matter how dark the night of the soul seemed to be, Gemini’s social buzz didn’t neglect to bring me out of my covers, and it’s been so worth it. I’ve been truly impressed with this season for revealing connections that feel really emergent with potential. Thanks, Gemini twins. Thanks, warm rays of desert sunshine. :)
Today’s Gemini New Moon squares Neptune, and Saturn Goes Retrograde in Pisces
Today’s Gemini new moon is a dreamy, spiritual, and one. Chatty, social, communicative, Mercurial twin energy is confronted with a square to the planet Neptune in Pisces. Square aspects between planets are typically seen as “hard aspects”, but I like to see them as possibilities- doors that are closed, but through examining the contrasting energy, can be opened and walked through to a unified new vision. Neptune is the god of the sea, the psychic prince, the lord of the liminal. Neptune is the modern-day ruler of Pisces: both the planet and the sign are associated with dreams, the etherial, transcendence, spirit, consciousness, and water. With this planet squaring the sun and moon in mental Gemini, we may find ourselves today talking, writing, and thinking our way through an expansive, Neptunian landscape of infinite possibilities. This could feel truly uplifting and enlightening, or filled with delusion and illusion.
Saturn, the lord of time, karma, and responsibility, is also currently in Pisces and will be for the next couple of years. Saturn in Pisces is all about creating infrastructure around your spiritual dreams. Today, around the same time as the new moon, Saturn stationed retrograde, beginning to move in apparent backward motion through Pisces until November. Saturn retrograde in Pisces will give us time to slow down, reevaluate, realign, and revision the containers that we’ve been creating for our dreams, hopes, and spiritual worlds over the past several months. Saturn retrograde will call us to reflect and integrate our thoughts about what responsibilities are ours and which are not, potentially redefining our boundaries and how we go about manifesting our dreams.
This potent combination of Neptune and Saturn in Pisces and the Moon and Sun in Gemini energies asks us:
What does it look like to dream together… in community?
Writing this moon-cycle museletter (I love this term that was coined by the inspiring Veronica of Regenerist) has been so helpful at really tapping me into the energies and synchronicities of what is happening with the transits in the skies. I normally jot down what is channeling through during the 2 weeks in between the full and new moon or start a post here to riff on and edit down later.
These past couple of weeks for me have been so emotionally intense that I didn’t do that. I definitely thought I would miss this new moon post, but here on the day of, I find myself with some time to sit down to write. And what’s coming through is how prescient the theme of dreaming within community has been over the past few weeks in my life.
Here’s a little sampler platter of the ways communal dreaming has shown up of late…
1. Chatting with My Inner Demons
My friend Rei Chou, who writes and podcasts over at at the Rei of Light substack, offered to do a practice with me a couple weeks ago called “Feeding Your Demons”. This practice, founded by Buddhist teacher Lama Tsultrim Allione, employs principles of the Tibetan Buddhist practice called Chöd, a ritual that was founded in the 11th century. It is a five-step process that guides a person to transform their inner demons into protective allies through a sequence of questions and visualizations.
Rei led me through some breathwork and grounding exercises and then, through her imaginative facilitation, I found myself sitting next to a giant spiky blue monster on the couch. I was guided to ask my demon questions about what it wanted. I then was instructed to sit where the monster was sitting, and embody it so that I could answer. When I answered the questions, I again was prompted to come back to my original seat, and to send the demon energy until it was satiated, full, and complete. Next, I was guided to witness the demon transforming into a new being, to name the shape and age and color and texture of this being, and to ask if it was my ally. The little glowing bumblebee child creature that sat next to me seemed like a wonderful ally, and I was guided then to ask her some questions, and then sit in her seat to answer them.
In this practice of imaginitive, ritual theater, Rei held space for me to discover different parts within myself, and then hold an actual, physical conversation with them on the couch. Casually sitting on a couch and chatting with my inner selves, personified, felt so perfect for Gemini season, the season of the twins. It also felt so beautiful to be held in community as I worked out some inner processes, demons and allies, pieces of the collective dreaming. I highly recommend working with Rei- she is an illuminated energy worker, guide, and coach who helps people realize their dream ventures and live aligned, fulfilling lives. Check her work out here.
2. Going Into the Unkown, Together
Another big way that this Neptunian/Gemini energy combo has shown up was in celebrating the release of an book that I have a piece of writing in. The project is called Into the Unknown Together: A Community Climate Anthology for New Mexico. Just published in May, it’s a stunning collection of speculative fiction, art, and poetry focusing on creative visions for the future in response to climate change.
My dear friend Autumn Leiker came up with the idea for the project, and over the past year has collaborated with a team of editors, writers, artists, and community leaders to manifest the book. There was an open call for entries across the state of New Mexico, and a panel decided on 15 writers and 18 artists to include in the final publication. I’m honored that my essay “A Siren Song”, about my childhood connection to coyotes and other communal beings, was selected to be included!
The book launch party was a gorgeous event at the Reunity Resources farm here in Santa Fe, where the vision art was displayed and many of the authors read their works. I was moved to tears multiple times listening to the hopeful future-fiction from the perspective of this place I've always called home. There was a workshop by one of the authors, Teo Montoya of Indigenous Futures Podcast and the Hearth substack, about creating Personal Myth as Prophetic Practice, which encouraged everyone to “reclaim a process of meaning-making through personal myth that has the potential to support an emerging world in crisis and root us back into our eco-cultural communities.” Cool.
The tagline of the anthology is “The Future is Relational”, which came about as a uniting thread through most of the selected works. I’m so impressed with of the team at Into the Unknown, Together for creating a platform for these visions to be shared, these dreams to be worked out in community.
From the book’s introduction by Autumn:
“The work of generative imagination is at once incredibly serious and definitely playful. If we cannot imagine the world we want to live in, it is difficult, if not impossible, to move toward it. The clearer we can get on the future we want, the easier it is to say yes to anything that brings us closer to that vision. We can all strengthen these muscles of imagination.
What acts of imagination move us away from extraction, domination, separation, and toward reciprocity, restoration, and relational entanglement?
Learn more about the project and get on the list for the next print run of the book at intotheunknowntogether.com.
3. Sensory adventure with Experience Lab
A lovely new friend of mine, Cara Levick, runs a container called Experience Lab, which is a place to “share, experiment, workshop and play with ideas and visions in an intentional group space”. I have had the opportunity to participate in a couple of these experiences- a blindfolded personal sensory adventure and an embodied photoshoot session- and they were so nourishing, unique, and connecting. I absolutely love the idea of creating space to workshop offerings in community before they are fully fleshed out.
Cara writes: “It can be so hard to know what something truly is until it comes out of you and is expressed. It is often hard to find a place to give birth to these things to see what they really are and how they want to grow. For me having a platform like this for my own work has been invaluable.
What is new and brewing inside of you? Is it a teaching, a movement or healing practice, an unnamed experience you’ve always wanted to facilitate but have never known where to try it? Experience Lab is a safe place for these ideas to be born and experienced outside of the preciousness of your internal world.”
…outside of the preciousness of your internal world. Yes.
Beyond the specific aspects of today’s new moon, the desire to give up perfectionism, be vulnerable, and acknowledge that we’re all on this earth-ship together feels emergent everywhere I look. I’ve been chatting with several folks for a while now (included the lovely people above) about starting a center for Is this the dawning of …
The Age of Aquarius?
Harmony and understanding, empathy and trust abounding…?
The 1969 song “The Age of Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension brought this phrase into popularity. But what exactly is the Age of Aquarius?
An astrological age is based on the precession of the equinoxes and the backwards wobble of the earth's axis through the constellations. Ages are measured by the wobble of the earth's axis as the North Pole points down towards and marks each age or constellation in succession. This wobble takes 25,920 years to complete a full cycle, and in one complete cycle there are twelve ages of 2,160 years each. Currently, the North Pole at the time of the vernal equinox points to the constellation Pisces, and we are said to be in the 'Age of Pisces'. These ages flow backward through the astrological signs as the earth's axis wobbles in a precessional or backward direction through the zodiac.
We have been living in the Age of Pisces for the last 2000 or so years. Although there are many methods of calculation, and many astrologers say we’re on the cusp of a new age… the Age of Aquarius, a sign that is focused on progressive, scientific, humanitarian values. The Age of Pisces, where we saw the emergence of the current major world religions, has been centered on faith, belief, dissolution of self, and submission to a higher power for answers. By contrast, Aquarius is about improving the human condition through scientific research and technological connections. Aquarius, the water bearer, takes the unbounded water from the sea of Pisces, and pours it into canals and waterways that connect and support disparate nodes of human existence.
Whether we’re officially entering this Age now or whether it will happen in a few hundred years is up for debate, but there are stirrings of this new, collective Aquarian energy bubbling up from beneath the surface everywhere. We are collectively reaching an era of questioning dogma and top-down truth that has been handed to us by established social organizations, from religions to governments to corporations, and in a post-Covid world, we are in a unique moment in time where we see the potential for creating new mythologies, new relationships, and new ways of being.
And with that, I send you out to enjoy your peak of summer new-moon week. I’m headed down to some Father’s day lunch and checking out the celebration of Juneteenth on the Plaza.
For your somatic exercise this week, I encourage you to push play on the Age of Aquarius music video and turn it up loud. Copy their fresh dance moves, make up your own, or sing along at the top of your lungs. Then, use the wordsmithing power of Gemini to write down your visions of community for the future- visions for the next two weeks into the full moon of Cancer season, and also for the upcoming Aquarian age.
Be well, friends. As always, I’d love to hear what’s up for you as we soak into summer. <3