He ain’t Heavy—Sun in Gemini—May 21st —June 21st
The road is long, with many of winding turns
That lead us to (who knows) where, who knows where?
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him—yeah
He ain’t heavy—he’s my brother—The Hollies
Maya Angelou once said, “I don’t believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”
Working at it can be a Herculean labour that may erode our energy, gnaw at our resolution to untie the knots that keep us bound in conflict or rivalry. Yet, whether we’re twinned, a resourceful only child, a pioneering first born, a cossetted baby, or the lost child in a family too big or too poor to give nurture, we’re engaged with the mythic story of The Twins as the Sun moves into Gemini on May 21st.
Gemini is a metaphor for separation. Through Gemini we encounter the power of two, the conundrum of choice. Gemini is the kindred spirit whom we love with all our heart, or the bitter rival we hate with a hatred that curls like ivy around our broken heart.
Beneath the popular astrological descriptions of the Gemini as talkative, fun-loving and fickle, lies a story of loss and longing, a life-long search for something or someone from which we feel separated. A story that’s so often punctuated with long stretches of aloneness. A story that stumbles into the sinkhole misunderstanding. of A story that so often ends with nothing more left to say.
Siblings betray one another, they lie, and they steal, and they envy. Siblings love one another with a love that is different from the love we have for our parents. Brenna Yovanoff writes so poignantly, “I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”
Brothers and sisters have soared like bright stars in sport and entertainment, often scattering star dust as they crashed and burned, or staying bonded in public while enacting childhood rivalries in private—the Gallagher brothers of the band Oasis, the Hemingway sisters, the Everly Brothers, the Carpenters, the Bee Gees—enacted these painful rivalries. Their birth charts depict the complicated bonds that kept them frustratingly tied, longing to be free. “Some things, however are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Some doors, once they’re opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once its been lost, can never be won back,” writes Alice Hoffman.
As the Sun moves into Gemini on May 21st, a cazimi Mercury, also in Gemini, becomes supercharged at a quicksilver zero degrees. This is a signature for new beginnings, new connections, new choices that may become apparent after the New Gemini Moon on June 3rd. If our Gemini planets are not weighed down by the earnestness of Saturn, dissolved by Neptune’s salty tears, overwhelmed by Pluto’s dark power, or transmitting an Uranian idea from the collective cloud, we’ll draw the energy of the Gemini archetype into our lungs, bloodstream and bones, feeling the energy of our environment, communicating through words and perhaps juggling our multiple interests with dexterity and lightness of being.
Mercury in Gemini aids our ingenuity, eases communication, he also swoops into the stillness of our lives with messages, sounds, communications, that like wailing sirens, pierce our stillness, shatter our calm.
If Mercury in Gemini is the wind that shakes the barley. The Sun in Gemini is the Light and the Dark Twin. Brexit-backing Boris Johnson (Gemini Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars) has taken a political stance in direct opposition to that of his younger sister, journalist and television presenter, Rachel Johnson. She’s adamant Britain should remain in the EU and is quoted as saying she does not want to see Brexit “rubbing out my children’s prospects and chances of living and travelling and working in Europe.”
Gemini is a Mercurial sign, as changeable as the wind, as restless as our minds that dart and dance, waking us from our much-needed sleep, calling us from our meditation. As we read, watch television, or flick through Instagram, as we crave more and more stimulation, more learning, more data gathering, we feast on the words, the ideas, of Gemini. In our obsession with social media, we gorge on gossip, we witness, we observe, and we choose. Spiritual teacher, Caroline Myss’ Gemini Moon conveys the archetype of the Storyteller, the Data Gatherer. She writes, “the challenge is for us to decide whether to make choices that enhance our spirit or drain our power.”
This year and next, Pluto (the Dark avatar that destroys, corrupts and exposes corruption), Saturn (structure, authority and tyranny), and the South Node (a regressive pull to the past, limiting beliefs that keep us stuck and stagnant in an outmoded place of apparent comfort) are in conjunction in Capricorn (big business and government; authority issues in our own lives). 
As the old order crumbles, may we stay centred, resolute and calm. May we sink softly into the silence of understanding, may we begin to re-write our story, gathering cherished memories of that little hand we held so tightly that first day at school. The sandcastles we built, those holidays that stretched into the infinity of the bluest of summer skies. Gemini highlights our very first relationship between near-equals. Our brothers, our sisters, our twins. Kindred spirits that encircle us in that sweet spot of belonging. Those choices that enhance our spirit and nourish our hearts.
Let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
William Shakespeare.
I post regularly on Facebook. I will gladly send you these posts featuring more regular astrological updates and the lunations if you prefer to direct your time and energy away from social media.
For private astrology readings please email ingrid@trueheartwork.com
For those of us who like our lives anchored by certainty, the world may seem a precarious place right now. As our plans are sucked into the undertow, we may be cast adrift from the raft of our faith.
Chiron, in our birth chart, represents that place where we are maimed, irrevocably scarred, by the unfairness of life, where we discover that bad things do happen to extremely good people and that what goes around doesn’t always come around in any satisfactory or just kind of way.
In Pisces, Mercury drapes our dreams in silken images that sparkle and inspire. He withdraws from worldly concerns, submerged in fantasy, delighting in music, art or poetry. He aids emotive expression of our thoughts, our feelings, our heartfelt concerns. Yet, we can also be prey to delusion, confusion and misunderstandings in those deep and often murky waters where the two fish swim.
In myth, Innana (Venus) is stripped of all her valued regalia and exquisite clothing. She enters the Underworld vulnerable and exposed. In modern times, the Underworld is a symbol of our own unconscious where we may encounter a truth that reverberates viscerally. The trial of these 40 days and 40 nights are a cosmic reminder for us to dissolve, discard, out-worn values and beliefs. To re-organise, re-examine, re-prioritise those things we value around a more truthful, authentic place that rests in the hearth of our heart.
In 
Venus in Scorpio demands that we love deeply and bravely. And when she emerges once more as the glittering Angel of the Morning, may she find us awake to new possibilities, fully aware of what we truly value, and extravagantly generous in our loving.
So often we hit a wall. Collide with an immovable force that profoundly alters the trajectory of our life: the accident, the lawyer’s letter, the termination of our employment, the conversation with our doctor that leaves us hemorrhaging hope. Physicist Stephen Hawking who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his twenties once told the New York Times, “my expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus.”
The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little—Jon Kabat-Zinn.
The 
For those of us who carry the imprint of the Virgo archetype in our birth chart, we will inevitably encounter the duality, the complexity, the tension, associated with the Earth Angel, weighted with the detailed task of seeding the potential in every idea, every action; the never ending task of trying to create order out of chaos.
e encounter the Prostitute Archetype, in our own lives, and in the corridors of power. This month, we may contemplate how easily we can be bought, bargained for. We might ask ourselves, where do we negotiate our power, trade our gifts and talents, when our survival is at stake?
Virgo is also associated with the Alchemist, the Sisters of Mercy, the Wise Virgin who tends her oil lamp with due diligence. She’s Vasilisa, the Beautiful who separates the poppy seeds and corn from the soil. She is aligned with The Hermit IX in the Tarot and the anchorite who holds the lamp of inner guidance as we prepare for a major change in our life direction.
This is the Solstice, the still point of the Sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future. The place of caught breath—Margaret Atwood.
Frank Baum’s “There’s no place like home,” and the clichéd “Home Sweet Home,” reflect our heart’s longing for safety and belonging as we pause in the dreamy haze of mid-summer heat, or close the curtains against the raw chill of mid-winter. As Uranus moves through Taurus, one of the manifestations will be the issue of land and affordable housing—a place to call Home.
I post astrology updates regularly on Facebook, and offer private readings on Skype or in person, so do please connect with me, I’d love to hear from you—ingrid@trueheartwork.com
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe…
Some of us may realise that the harshness and discord in the world reflects our own internal state. That the rocks and thorns are on the pathways of our internal landscape. Some of us may know that there are no heroes who can save us from ourselves. That our quest as women, is not to attempt a hero’s journey, to try to be pseudo-men. That modern heroines require a skill set that pays the mortgage and the school fees.
This Valentine’s Day, millions of people will demonstrate through chocolates, music and flowers, their longing to love and be loved. “Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved”, writes author Alain de Botton.
The archetype of Saturn is redolent of prisons. Pluto is accompanied by a primal, shadowy fear that’s hard-wired in every living creature. Pluto is life and death. Pluto is survival. Tapping into the core scene of the Saturn/Pluto energy of this time, Hard Sun, the pre-apocalyptic BBC drama, depicts a world that faces certain destruction in five years. It’s a prophetic vision of love and survival that resonates with the zeitgeist of Pluto in Saturn’s sign.
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down—Toni Morrison 
For many of us this year, we will have to bow our heads to the necessity of getting out of bed each day and finding something to be truly grateful for. We will yoke ourselves to the inevitability of change: children who leave home, a lover who no longer loves us, a dear friend who moves far away, a beloved parent who now needs the same vigilant caring as a toddler. As we eat of the bitter herb, may we know that there is milk and honey also, in the acceptance of things as they are.
Ananke is an ancient goddess, and the resonance of her name has its tap root in the ancient tongues of the Chaldean, Egyptian, the Hebrew, for “narrow,” “throat”, “strangle” and the cruel yokes that were fastened around the necks of captives. Ananke always takes us by the throat, imprisons, enslaves, and stops us in our tracks, for a while. There is no escape. She is unyielding, and it is we who must excavate from the depths of our being, our courage, tenacity, and acceptance of what is.
