Soulmate—Sun in Gemini—May 21st
I had embraced you… long before I hugged you—Sanober Khan.
The steadiness of Taurus behind us, we experience the mercurial quality of Gemini as the Moon joins Mercury and Venus in Gemini today, joined by the Sun on May 21st.
In Gemini we encounter the Other that comes in the guise of the Soulmate, the phosphorus twin flame who burns into our life wearing the red thread of fate coiled around a finger—the thread that is spun and tied in an eternal loop around the fingers of those destined to meet by a primordial lunar goddess.
Soulmates rarely appear by choice. Soulmates plunge into our lives like shooting stars. And when they do, there’s a feeling that drops into our belly like warm honey, flows through our heart like a scented summer breeze. There’s a recognition that pulls us towards one another across lifetimes. A divine Grace that directs us with absolute certainty towards a life we would never have imagined. A sublime sweetness that takes away the ache of loneliness, softens our willfulness, smooths our edges.
Soulmates appear in many guises. So often the timing is all wrong, circumstances impossible. So often there’s madness and confusion, reason abandoned, an ache that curls like ivy around the crack in our heart.
Author Brian Weiss offers this small crumb of comfort: “sometimes, Soulmates may meet, stay together until a task or life lesson is completed, and then move on. This is not a tragedy, only a matter of learning.”
Beneath the popular astrological descriptions of the breeziness of Gemini, the fun-loving and fickle eternal child, 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. A story that ends with nothing more left to say.
The numinous image of the Twins is mirrored by the Lovers card in Tarot, depicting the awakening of a partnership of equality. Also, the strands of individuality, separation, and loss that is woven into love knots. In the round of the Zodiac, this is the first meeting with the Other, the Twin Soul.
Like so many stories steeped in patriarchy and dominion, that form the bedrock of our civilization, the enduring stories of Soulmates are threaded with the pathos of loss and separation, woven with duality and ambiguity.
Sibling-Soulmate stories underline Rome’s foundation myth and draw us into the story arcs of fiction and movies like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, SK Tremayne’s chilling story about the death of a twin, The Ice Twins, and the marvellous Harry Potter books.
Twins in myth and fairy tale, are similar at first glance, then reveal themselves to be fundamentally different. The story of Castor and Pollux, and their beautiful twin sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra is a brutal story of theft and revenge, kidnapping, murder, and loss. 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. Siblings betray one another, they lie, they steal, 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.”
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 in our everyday human encounters with friends and colleagues, lovers and husbands. Those sympathetic similarities that draw us in; those polarised differences that repel. As the Sun moves through Gemini expect these themes to be highlighted as our Gemini planets are nudged to think a little differently about finding a twin flame or a Soulmate. The well-worn sweaty T-shirt study by Claus Wedekind showed that the pheromones that attract us most are from people who are genetically very different from us. As the magic sparkles begin to flutter and the golden glow fades, we may find that our Soulmate is both our Jekyll and our Hyde.
As many countries ease restrictions, Mercury and Venus move through sociable Gemini this month as we make space for new relationships, new family configurations; as we move through our grief after months spent shepherding someone through illness, after the loneliness of confinement. We’re reminded that Gemini rules the lungs and the hands as we breathe new energy into those parts of our lives that may still feel cling-wrapped in fear and we re-connect with those vital, resilient parts of ourselves that press up against the warm urgency of longing to touch again. When our world has become precarious, when our natural impulses coil tightly inside us, it may be hard to feel connected to each other as we did before. The old ways of living on this earth have become harder to justify as the long shadow of the pandemic stretches across shrinking glaciers and warming skies.
The Sun’s passage through Gemini may highlight the fissures in our relationships, yet the winds of change swirl as two planets in air signs pause and track backwards. Saturn goes Retrograde (May 23 – October 11) consolidating boundaries and foundations, adding solemnity and maturity as it isolates the planet it contacts. We may find that we deepen our relationship to ourselves during this introverted time, that we seek privacy and silence while we gestate what needs to emerge from the trauma of this pandemic.
Mercury backtracks at the end of this month, (May 29 – June 22) symbolising a turning point and a time when a protective chrysalis is shaped around an area of our psyche, depending on where these planets are moving through our birth chart. Pluto moves Retrograde (April 27 – October 6) stirring toxicity in our relationships, dredging secrets, exposing misuse of power, drawing our attention to those anemic areas of our lives that need a transfusion. Jupiter dips into familiar Piscean waters on May 14th amplifying our longing to escape into fantasy or denial, perhaps inflating empathy fatigue, addictive behaviour, or pain. Saturn and Uranus are still in square, a sky story that speaks of liberties curtailed as the old ways of living on this earth become harder to justify, and as the long shadow of the global pandemic stretches across shrinking glaciers and warming skies.
This month, Mercury-ruled Gemini appears as the winged messenger, delivering choices which are seldom packaged in black and white, choices that arrive on the restless wind and arc through the air like the ideas that tumble through our minds. It is in the light and the dark of our relationships that we encounter our human complexity and discover the light and the dark within us.
May the motif of the Soulmate enrich our imagination this month. May the winged sandals of Mercury carry us towards those extra-ordinary encounters that bring everything into focus. May the mythic Twins preside over those soulful tugs that herald of radical change in the way we live and the way we love.
Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology consultation: ingrid@trueheartwork.com