With the Sun in Gemini and the Moon in Sagittarius, it's time to stretch our minds, bridging the local and the universal, the practical and the spiritual.
The Gemini part of our mind deals with the neighborhood, sisters and brothers, the local scene, the practical affairs of daily life, and our creative handling of them. The Sagittarius part widens our mental scope to take in the world: the thoughts and customs of people in other countries and the higher laws, theories, philosophical views and religious principles that guide our important decisions. Gemini is the school near home, Sagittarius is the university or the remote field work site. Gemini handles the details, Sag the big picture. It can be quite challenging to focus on both at once! So this time of year can be one of mental overstimulation and strain, but also tremendous creative potential.
Years ago at this Full Moon I was in Herne Bay, a beautiful seaside town in England, enacting the spirit of this Full Moon as sincerely and literally as possible. I'd come all the way from my home and neighborhood (Gemini) in the U.S. to leap into the academic world (Sagittarius) in Great Britain! (I do this only for your sake, dear reader, to demonstrate these astrological principles in the most effective way possible.) I visited the University of Kent at Canterbury, meeting with the faculty in the new program inCosmology and Divination to work out how I might enroll for a Ph.D. there, writing my dissertation on the planet Uranus.
I showed my fledgling ideas, like young birds in a nest, to my faculty adviser (Sagittarius) and wrestled with the enormous adjustments I'd have to make to spend part of each year in England while keeping my home and office running in Baltimore. Meanwhile my two astrologer friends there incorporated me into their household and neighborhood, acting as my "brother and sister"(Gemini), helping me find the bus routes and linking me up with practical sources of help for my proposed great leap across the Atlantic, while letting me help them shop, keep house, entertain colleagues and weed the garden. On the actual day of the Full Moon we took part in a conference on "Astrology and the Academy" which celebrated the return of astrology to universities after more than three centuries of exile.
At that Full Moon, I remembered an ABC Nightline report about the work of Marla Ruzicka, a 26-year-old Californian who wasdocumenting civilian deaths in the Iraq war (having already done so in Afghanistan). No official agency was counting the innocent casualties, nor was there any organized program to help their survivors, so Marla flew to Iraq, recruited volunteers and took up the task herself. She checked with hospitals, cemeteries, morgues, and military posts to get leads about the number and identity of victims, then went from village to village and house to house, condoling with the bereaved families and documenting the names and ages of the dead and how they had been killed. Her reports ultimately went to the United States Congress, with the aim of getting direct assistance to the survivors. Marla made the world her neighborhood, the villagers of Iraq and Afghanistan her brothers and sisters. Tragically, Ruzicka lost her life to a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2005. But in the last years of her life she used her Gemini skills (interviewing, counting, documenting, finding her way around the neighborhood) to help ameliorate problems of people far from home, as an expression of her Sagittarian values and ideals. AsRolling Stone magazine wrote, "She stands as a youthful representative of a certain kind of not-yet-lost American idealism."
Now, reader, few of us will ever achieve such a personification of Sagittarian ideals as Marla Ruzicka, or go to such lengths to be a brother or sister to strangers around the world. But you can, at this Full Moon, take a little time to reflect on the higher ideals you would like to be living out in your everyday life. Listen to the chirping of the tiny birds high up in your tree, the talents or ideas that might take flight and make a difference in the world. Tune in to the part of yourself that is ready to cross frontiers and learn new ways. Get ready to fly!
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