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ICYMI:
If you’re struggling creatively, I recently wrote about how art is an endurance game, and how AI shortchanges your own creative process.
My wife-to-be Meg Jones Wall and I are running a 6-month creative container for spiritually-minded artists called The Grove. Early Bird pricing is live!
Curious about the astrology of 2025? I’ve got a historical lecture for all you former Humanities majors, coming at the end of the month.
The Full Moon was exact at 4:01am Eastern this morning, at 23 degrees of Gemini.
I usually love an airy Gemini lunation. They tend to be fun and playful, encouraging us to get weird with our creative projects. To return to a state of child-like wonder over capitalist “what can this do for me?”
Butttttttttttttt this lunation is a little rough. It’s being impacted by never-met-a-boundary Neptune in watery Pisces, which frankly, I don’t love. On an elemental level, air plus water equals steam, or fog. It blurs our vision. And Neptune, specifically, is prone to flights of romantic idealism, as well as romantic delusion.
And there can be a fine line between idealism and delusion. It’s a line that we need to be especially mindful of this week.
If you’re on TikTok, you know about the drones that have been flooding New York and New Jersey. Anyone remotely familiar with how the US military operates knows that nothing — absolutely nothing — enters our airspace without our approval, and so these unidentified drones are almost absolutely certainly our own goddamn government (which as of this writing has denied knowledge of them). This has not kept people on TikTok from speculating about an alien invasion, or it being another country coming to either save or doom us.
The world is frightening right now, but we need to stay grounded. Distraction is one of the most effective tools that those in power can deploy against the masses, especially when the masses are coalescing around, or sympathizing, with a threat to those in power. I wonder what that could be.
Yes, ~the world~ feels like the door has completely fallen off its hinges. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope. That doesn’t mean people aren’t organizing, likely in your local community. Go volunteer. Talk to people who aren’t chronically online. Read a book and remember the lessons of history. (Like I said earlier this month, there is a predictability to tyranny.) Deploy that Neptunian idealism towards making things better. Personally, I’m taking old coats to our local food pantry for their annual coat drive this week.
And listen. I can get sucked into a TikTok rabbit hole as easily as the next person. I know how alluring explanations — any explanations — are right now. But let’s keep each other close. And always,
On a more personal, creative level.
This full moon has big 7 of Cups energy. Very good for dreaming and brainstorming; less good for those who are trying to sift and sort and discern and choose. Very good for taking a bath and listening to a character playlist; less good for detail-oriented revision. Plan accordingly.
And also: look back to the New Moon in Gemini, which was on June 6th of this year, to see what you were growing in the Gemini house of your chart. Here are some clues as to topics that may have been highlighted:
Aries Risings: your local neighborhood; your regular/daily writing practice; everyday communication; K-12 education; relationships with relatives, siblings, and friends who feel like family
Taurus Risings: your relationship to money; material/liquid resources; less tangible resources like Time; income streams - developing or consolidating
Gemini Risings: your self-expression, through anything from hairstyle to gender identity; energy levels and a general feeling of vitality (having it/not having it); new regimens for the physical body/health
Cancer Risings: subconscious dreams, beliefs, and desires made more clear; mental health; old, forgotten ancestral patterns and traumas; visiting, working in, volunteering at, doing involuntary time in hospitals and prisons; finding spaces of spiritual retreats, such as at ashrams or monasteries
Leo Risings: friendships & relationship to community; professional organizations; the internet and digital organizing; volunteer work
Virgo Risings: legacy work; “what you’re known for”; showing up as an authority in public, or reacting to authorities in public (e.g. bosses, parents)
Libra Risings: higher education - pursuing, teaching in; systems of organized belief, e.g. organized religion; astrology; traditional publishing & legacy media
Scorpio Risings: shared material resources, such as inheritance, taxes, alimony, child support, royalty checks; shared emotional/psychic resources, such as grief, mediumship, and liminal work with the dead; client work; professional collaborations that are more project-based
Sagittarius Risings: long-term relationships, typically that involve contracts and paperwork (marriage, literary agents, business partners); your beliefs, values, and practices around such committed relationships
Capricorn Risings: your day job and/or the labor you exchange for money/benefits; daily scheduling; chores and errands; physical health - the maintenance of; chronic pain and illness; pets; activism for labor rights and/or healthcare
Aquarius Risings: your erotic energy; creative work; sex; more casual dating/flirtation/erotic relationships; relationships with significant children in your life; your children themselves, if you have them; sports and games; pleasure and play
Pisces Risings: home - the literal space, also what it emotionally is; family, and who counts as family; parents, grandparents, and primary caretakers; direct, recent ancestors; cultural heritage; roots
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Dreaming and brainstorming: basically the only things my level of focus has allowed this weekend.