No matter how old you get and how long you've been out of school, there's nothing like the end of May to make you feel just a little bit freer. We've been conditioned to let loose, to breathe easy, to act as if some of us don't have work the next weekday morning. School's out for summer, baby, school's out forever. Gemini season wants you having fun, flirting, running around in a sunny field wearing shoes adorned with funny pom-poms, which are highly impractical. But why not embrace what Gemini has got to teach you about letting go?
With Mercury in Gemini for most of the month before moving into Cancer, you'll have plenty of time to sort details out and make sense of them before you start wondering what it all means and how it's going to impact you. Mars in Cancer and Neptune in retrograde might have you swimming deep in your feelings, but you'll be wise to keep your emotions far from your actions. In fact, I'd encourage you to keep the ruminating to a minimum. Sometimes the best course of action is just being present. Sometimes the less time you spend trying to figure it all out, the clearer things become.
It's rare that any of us ever feel like we're walking into the world with a clean heart, but wouldn't it be nice to act as if we are? Besides, what have we got to lose in a world like this? We have each other, and we have whatever of the natural world is left. Anyway, when all else fails… covfefe.
ARIES
With summer coming on in waves, the sun high, and the days long, it’s hard to spend your hours laboring on something that doesn’t bring you pleasure. Yes, many us must work to make ends meet but you, dear Aries, have worked yourself threadbare. It’s a lucky thing, then, that threadbare is the perfect amount of clothing for the season. Aren’t you entitled to a little fun? Aren’t you craving the illusion of freedom—floating in cool blue water, feeling music vibrate through your body on a dance floor, summer’s first berries bursting in your mouth?
When exhausted, tense, uncertain, it can take a long time to feel like one is right where they should be—even if that is exactly where we always are. Pleasure and rest are important, so make time for both; schedule it in like it is your job to care for yourself (and it is). With your ruling planet, Mars, entering Cancer, it’s wise to tune in and self-improve. Ride your bike, learn a new skill, or brush up on an old interest. A home-improvement can be a great way to channel the energy, get frames for sentimental postcards, start a garden, rearrange furniture.
Keep it small and let big decisions simmer a little longer before settling on an answer. Try a little tenderness, a little patience, and move as slowly as your Aries temperament will allow. When Mars in Cancer moves too quickly, your actions can come packed with emotional weight and sting much deeper than you could ever mean them to.
TAURUS
When love drips into your bloodstream, it makes the world worth looking at a little longer. Suddenly, each open bud is a miracle, each stalk sumptuous and thick. It’s a turn on, really, walking down the rainy street when the trees are slick and their bark is stretching for miles into the sky. When Venus is in your sign, Taurus, it’s time to drink from love’s cup.
If you’re partnered, good. Let this be the month you actively behold your lover. Look at them naked. Making looking an art, let it consume you and your time, be the romantic you know yourself to be. There’s no reason to hold back, to test anyone, to see if your love is true. What’s truer than being alive together? What truer than the risk?
If you’re single or complicated or anything, that might have you wandering the streets on your own every day marveling at gardens. Venus is your ruler, and you are love’s servant. Serve yourself, trail your hand across each tree trunk, light a candle for company. Your heart is a tight bud at the height of spring. It’s going to open. It’s a stunning, hopeful color.
GEMINI
Have you had a hard time saying what you mean lately? Or maybe it’s not so much about what gets said but rather what you wish you had the language for. It’s been a big transitional time, hasn’t it, Gemini? Lots of moving and job changing, self-revelations and new relationships. For someone as flexible as you, it might be easy to pretend that the impact of change is minimal. After all, you’ve thought it through and you have a working philosophy of life and how It goes.
Probably, you made a list or journaled about it, maybe a bulleted note with pros and cons has really illuminated your inner emotional landscape for you…. but I doubt it.
The truth is, although lists are good companions, and words can give feelings a name, until you let yourself fully experience and face the impact of what’s been shifting in your life, you won’t know what it means for you now and certainly not for your future.
Don’t be afraid, Gemini, you’re much stronger now than you were before, you know yourself better, and you’re more discerning about who gets your energy and your time. Trust yourself to know what you’re capable of handling, when you need to tap out and when you’re ready to try again. Emotional landscapes are tricky terrain, the kind most hikers attempt over the course of years, returning each time just to go a little further.
CANCER
Mindfulness, if we practice it, is easier practiced alone. You can walk along the beach and think about the ocean, how it has laws we tamper with but cannot break, how its expanse of color and shushing sound give you a sense of peace despite the fact that the ocean is neither peaceful nor kind. We are not so easy with others. The manifold possibilities of the way people react to us make our mindfulness practice a difficult one.
People, like the ocean, are both rhythmic and turbulent. But just because a crab comes from the sea doesn’t mean it can handle a hurricane. A storm is not so easily forgotten underwater, with strong currents and turbulence continuing for weeks after. What I mean is, when a person endures emotional turmoil influenced by another person, it affects them deeply and for a long time. It changes you, and it changes the way you treat your life.
The crab that survives the storm doesn’t hold it against the ocean. It returns to the water time and time again. If you want to walk alone in this life, Cancer, you are more than equipped to do so. It’s an auspicious time for you, a time of empowerment and independence. But, if you have a great love or a life friend who walks beside you and you mean to walk with them, walk mindfully. Look at them the way you might look at an ocean, expansive, always changing in ways you cannot see. Forgive the storms, especially the ones that almost destroyed you. Forgive yourself for wanting to be destroyed.
LEO
Everyone makes a bad investment from time to time, Leo, that’s how we play the game. There’s no reward without risk, not in money and not in love. How much you stand to lose or how much you’ve already lost after all bets are down won’t be what defines you. There’s always more than one loser in a game, after all, and a winner doesn’t stay at the top of the wheel for long. You’ve got to learn to lose gracefully, to count your losses as lessons and rise wiser. Pick up your pride and your ambition because it’s either a shield or an anchor.
Wouldn’t you rather move forward? Aren’t you tired of being stuck in the same muddy water? You wanted something better than where you came from. You wanted openness, options, freedom. You wanted to make something new in the world and have it be valued. Okay, so do it. Make making your mission and let someone else worry about what hasn’t worked, what will never work.
If there are forces that let you down, if there are people in your life who you keep trying to bring up with you when all they want to do is stay down, you’ve got to let them be who they are. Your tenderness won’t change them, and your resentment won’t either. To care for people, to love them, to work with them, is to see them for who they are and not who you want them to be. When you spend all your time and energy pushing people to change, you don’t leave any for yourself. And maybe that’s a coping mechanism, a trick to make yourself believe you’re doing your best. But your best begins with you.
VIRGO
Family is a funny thing, Virgo, and you know it. The narrative many of us are fed about what family must mean to us is often vastly different from our lived experiences. And, although some of you reading out there might—against all odds—have had an idyllic upbringing, most of you know that to come from people is to come from ruin. Ruins can be beautiful, of course, ruins can be remade into whole new structures. Ruins can be rebuilt on, preserved, historically charming, but they also carry the weight of the past into the present day. A new town built around ruins is never quite new, is never without shadow.
This month, it will be important to think about what family means to you, and what you’re ready to let it mean. If family is a place of refuge, then it might do you well to go there and rest. Let the shadows and the light of who are mingle and feel at home with whom you come from and who knows you best.
But, if family is a troubled place, a ruin that threatens to ruin you at every turn, then you’ve got to access what you’re capable of calling home. Are there people in your life who want to be a harbor for you, who always are and have been whether you’ve always been able to appreciate it or not? Is there a world where you feel safe to be your brightest and most generous self? If that world is a project, an art form, a city where no one knows your name—return there. To feel valued, value what’s yours.
LIBRA
Not everyone can admit they want change but everyone craves it. A loop, even a comfortable one, will start to wear on your senses. That’s why we interrogate the surface of a placid lake, why we pick fights, why we try something new even though there are plenty of old standbys that will serve us. We crave knowledge, experience, beauty as a startling force of newness. But, when we get these things, when we get what we want, what do we do? We look for something familiar in them.
Libra, have you spent the past few months romanticizing what is far away, what isn’t yours or can’t be? When a player is dealt cards, they can play the hand they’re dealt or they can trade the hand in entirely for a new one. There is no guarantee the new hand will be better—there is no guarantee the player was even meant to play the game. But, you are an agent of your own life, no matter your obstacles. How you play the hand you’re dealt defines what cards will be played back to you.
What I mean is, is there something you want that you already have? If the answer is yes, then don’t take it for granted. Don’t push anyone or anything away when you need it close. No one likes tests they didn’t sign up for, and everything we have we stand to lose. As for change, well, change is inevitable but you only get different results when you begin to act differently.
SCORPIO
How long are you going to be hard on yourself, Scorpio? I know it comes naturally, intense self-critique and self-denial, but it’s not what the world wants for you. While your various mailboxes fill up with opportunities and praise, while all the hard work you’ve done this past year finally begins to pay off, you’re still sitting there wondering if you deserve any of it—if you’re strong enough, smart enough, lovely enough, to be the person your employers and collaborators believe you to be.
I want to tell you, you are. I want to tell you that the love we put into the world is the love we get back, and you have been tireless in your giving. I want to point out the friends who care for you, who are kind to you, who value your presence and never take it for granted. You might feel lucky to have such generous people in your life, but luck has little to do with it. You have called in your circle with grace, and they have come because they recognize your heart.
I want to tell you these things not to boost your ego or to rebuke you for your lack of gratitude. Neither is necessary. Instead, I want you to take a good hard look at the source of your suffering. Whatever is inside you or around you that makes you question your worth—makes you ask for less as if you deserve less—it’s only as powerful as the power you grant it.
SAGITTARIUS
When you were a child, Sagittarius, what was the life you envisioned for yourself? Was it fantastical, full of cowgirl adventures, endless trysts, unknown lands? Was it fierce but conventional, a vision of yourself as a powerful woman in a pantsuit or a widely-known author?
Close your eyes and conjure these images, the ones you stored in the folder of dreams. Can you call in your child heart? Imagine what it felt like for her to dream these dreams, to imagine these possibilities.
Now open your eyes and take stock. Note the life you have built around you as if you are that child. Write down what she would think of the work you do, the home you have chosen to call yours, the people you surround yourself with and the ones you love.
If there are moments of pride, encourage them. Let yourself feel glad for what’s been accomplished. And, if there are moments of hesitation, parts of your life that you feel shy to share with her—fear disappointing her with—sit with these moments. Not everything in our lives is under our control, and even your child-self knows this. She will sit with you in moments of longing and show you her dream folder. She will help you draw up new dreams whenever you want.
CAPRICORN
If someone looked up the word industrious, they'd probably find your picture underneath. Yeah, you know to work hard, down to the bone, how to do the most with the least while still somehow looking your best. This drive, this dedication to a future self, it has served you well for most of your life. While you might not have gotten as much recognition or glamour as your peers, you've definitely garnered admiration and respect.
Respect is something you know how to trade in, too, and you give it to those who you deem deserve it. For the most part, this system works well. For the most part, you know your worth.
It's just that with all your drives pointed toward work, toward trading in social graces and opportunities, you might have lost track of the parts of you that are softer. You might have forgotten what it feels like when someone touches the small of your back and you sigh into the strength of their hand. You might have forgotten what it's like to take a bath and lay naked in an open room, reading poems and feeling like a beautiful animal. It's necessary work, the ritual of softness, it gives you strength when you need it most.
AQUARIUS
It's hard to open yourself up to new people when people aren't willing to see you. It's hard to be vulnerable when people take vulnerability for granted. It's hard to be understanding when you keep feeling misunderstood. I wouldn't take it so hard, Aquarius. After all, just because you're ready to share who you are, doesn't mean everyone's ready to see you.
Some people have their own things to work out, some people have only so much emotional energy to spare. It's important that you keep your eyes out for people who are on your energetic wavelength. While you've spent these past few months working hard to realize your dreams, to trust in your heart's desire, to take big leaps of faith, you might have also unknowingly assumed that once you paused to catch your breath—the people you needed most would be right there with you.
Unfortunately, people have their own emotional pace, and it's our job to accept it. It's also our job to remember that no matter how alone we feel, we're never alone at all. You might not have the support of the people you want, but you have all the support you could ever need.
PISCES
It's a good thing you know how healing works. It's a good thing you recognize that a non-linear trajectory doesn't mean you're failing. It's a good thing you have faith in your recovery, in your commitment to self-care, in your path toward emotional sustainability. It's a good thing you're so smart about your heart and what it needs to feel peace or you'd be having a real hard time right now. You’d be tempted to lean into old patterns that harm you. You’d be tempted to forget just how much you’ve grown toward your best self.
Maybe you should write down all that you know about taking care of yourself. Maybe you should make a list of everything you do that makes you feel good. Something like a gratitude list but put your pride into it. Don't forget a page dedicated to all the people you've called into your life who make you feel valued. You were so smart to trust those people, to let them in. Don't forget a page dedicated to all you’ve got to offer: the ways you'd like to show up for others, to be the friend that you need them to be to you.
Maybe you should write all of it down now, you know, in case there's a moment in the near future when you start to feel like you're aren't quite as powerful as you actually are and you need a reminder. It’s good to be prepared, good to know that when the world lets you down, you can count on yourself to get back up.
