Uranus in Gemini: Making Space to Think
Three days after Uranus went into Gemini, I stood in an empty field in Montana. There is a particular kind of silence you only find on land that used to be at the bottom of the sea. The summer sun was piercing and blisteringly hot, yet there was a part of me that felt like I was in the frigid deep, searching the darkness for lantern fish and giant squid.
The silence was literally deafening. My ears ached for sound, but my soul soared over the plains, tracing the ridges of the distant mountains towering over the grasslands in every direction.
I only had a few days in Montana before I had to turn around and make the two-day drive back home. But in that small slip of time, I experienced eternity sitting on the porch sipping coffee, soaking in the sunshine with an abandoned book on my lap.
One of the great joys of a vacation is the way your perspective shifts whenever you step away from the keyboard. I always return to my writing and my astrology practice with a fresh sense of purpose, excited and full of inspiration and plans.
When I got to Montana, I knew that I was desperately in need of a new vision. While I enjoyed the hours spent thinking about nothing in particular, none of the clarity I was looking for came to me. All I had was silence. And an enigmatic dream about a Native American man who gave me a hooded falcon and told me not to take the hood off until I left Montana.
I thought of that dream as I drove home, across the border into Idaho, through the Craters of the Moon, around the round grassy hills of Eastern Oregon until the Columbia River cut through the landscape like a silver knife. No vision, no revelation, no clarity. Just silence. Silence that felt so necessary, so like home, I felt like a stranger walking in my front door.
I knew that things couldn't stay the same, but I didn't know what needed to change. No clearer on the answer, I cried the night before I went back to work.
In the morning, I returned to my usual routine. After breakfast and a nervous meditation session, I picked up my phone to craft a social media post. I opened Threads, and I recoiled at my home feed, my mind filled with a silent scream as piercing as a falcon's.
Only connect… but how?
When people talk about falcons in Oregon, they typically mean the peregrine falcon. Peregrine is an archaic word that means “alien or stranger.” In astrology, “peregrine” is a technical term that describes planets that have no dignity or debility. They are exiles, strangers in a strange land, entirely dependent on their hosts for their survival. Planets in their rulership, exaltation, detriment or fall get all the attention, but most planets are peregrine most of the time.
Astrologers started using the term “peregrine” for planets in the Hellenistic period, a time when people’s relationship with the land was changing. Before the conquests of Alexander, people were deeply connected to the places where they were born. To leave home was to leave the protection of gods and family, so it was avoided as much as possible. Alexander’s empire connected people from different places and cultures into one big kingdom, and it became more common to travel.
With this new freedom to travel, it also became more common for people to complain about feeling alienated. There was even a back-to-the-land movement that emerged from the longing people had for the simplicity of the past and the desire to return to their small hometowns.
Uranus in Taurus found us in a similar place. Rebellion took the form of leaving the big city to start a farm or work remotely and refusing to return when employers started making demands. Spiritualities with a close connection to the land like witchcraft and Paganism increased in popularity as people looked for a connection with the ground beneath their feet.
And yet, we are learning that the geographical cure isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to physically remove ourselves when our minds are inhabiting the same old spaces. How do you connect to the land or the people around you when you’re used to living in a big city where wearing headphones outside can be vital for your survival? How do you build community with the people in your local area when it’s been generations since your people knew how?
When I got back from Montana and opened Threads, every post I read was from someone who was hurting, sending their pain and frustration out into the world like a message in a bottle, hoping that someone would find it and send back solutions or empathy. As far as I could tell, nothing ever came.
"This is not okay. We are not okay," I said to myself and put down my phone.
Uranus is the planet of the rebel, and Gemini is the chattiest sign in the zodiac.
When we talked about Uranus in Gemini before the ingress, conversation orbited around the idea of rebellious words. Punk rock is going to return! Edgy will be cool again! The neo-Victorian thing we’ve been grappling with off and on since the 90s will finally die, and people won’t be afraid to tell the truth!
I may be a bit biased. (As a teenager in the 90s, I unironically wore a t-shirt that said “Punk’s not dead!”) But I don’t think we have a difficult time with edginess in our communication. Coming back from Montana wasn’t the first time I stepped away from social media and felt like I was falling into a mosh pit when I got back.
We know how to scream. We know how to tell the truth. What we don’t have is the sense that words are capable of doing anything.
When we type out a post and press publish and that post gets other people to nod along, we feel like we’re part of a movement. But nothing ever actually changes. One post at a time, the energy of frustration that might lead to change is siphoned off. No longer under such intense pressure, we relax just enough to dutifully go back to work.
As Uranus goes into Gemini, we don’t need more words. (We had more than enough words when Jupiter was in Gemini last year.)
In the days after I came back from Montana, I thought hard about why I use social media, what I’m trying to accomplish. I knew that I didn’t want to contribute to the collective thrashing around, and I had an instinct that the silence that I found in Montana was somehow the answer.
I remembered what political theorist Hannah Arendt said about the rise of totalitarianism. At the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, she was surprised to find that he was a simple bureaucrat, not a comic book villain. His ability to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity came from the simple fact that he was unable to think.
How well can we think, really? How much of our ability to cope comes from the way that we use noise to fill the silences that would force us to face the reality of this moment?
I noticed that all of the content creators I admire behave like mystics, pointing through words into silence and peaceful embodiment. As a Taurus, the idea of peaceful embodiment in particular appealed to me. I thought I could do the same. I created a reel on Instagram that was a thinly veiled attempt to convince people to stop scrolling and breathe. It felt deliciously subversive.
Then, one by one, every single one of the creators I admired announced that they were going on sabbatical. The one exception was the poet Andrea Gibson, who had the audacity to die.
Was this a call for me to go on sabbatical? I wanted so badly for the answer to be, “Yes,” but I knew in my heart that the answer was, “No.”
Uranus in Taurus taught us to unplug. Uranus in Gemini is teaching us how to bring the nourishment of rest back into everyday life.
The reason I’m not being called to go on sabbatical right now became clear, ironically, while listening to a podcast episode by Asia Suler about how to take a sabbatical.
Asia said that the purpose of sabbatical is to create space. You may go into sabbatical with a project in mind, but the essential work is to create the space. Sabbatical allows you to have the openness you need to be flexible and respond to the deepest needs of your soul.
Times of sabbatical are necessary, especially for creative people, because these are the times when we journey within. Like Joseph Campbell’s hero, we step away from the ordinary world and return with the life-giving wisdom our community needs.
The wisdom that feeds our souls should feed our art, but it has become the norm that we step away completely to recover from an ordinary world filled with fear of the future and of the stranger. When we return, we are unable to bring with us the treasures of silence because we don’t know how to connect with those who never left.
In his book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino speaks to life in this predicament. The protagonist Marco Polo is speaking to the Great Khan about the fear of the future. Khan wonders if his society is headed for the abyss. He wonders how to live if that is the inevitable end of the story.
Marco Polo says that Khan shouldn’t be worried about the future. The end times he is afraid of have already arrived. We are all living in “the inferno.” The answer, he says, isn’t to leave the inferno. We can’t. Inferno is just life, the pain we cause just by living with each other. Instead, we must “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
If sabbatical is all about creating space, the real challenge is to create sabbatical in the everyday. It’s to remain present with the real problems of the real world without becoming lost in the noise and unable to think.
I hope that the artists I love who have stepped away from us will return to our world with wisdom. Even dear Andrea. But some of us need to stay here and keep the fire going, so there will be a place for them to return to–and people able to hear what they have to say–when they get back.
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