Yesterday at 5:09 pm EDT the Sun left Taurus and ingressed Gemini. Gemini is the first air sign of the zodiac, and the first mutable sign, coming at the end of spring. It’s as though Gemini not only starts loosening up the current season, but it also asks us to hold the ending season and the one about to begin in our consciousness simultaneously.

Simplified chart section showing the few planets left in Taurus (lunar South Node, Mars and Pallas Athene) and planets gathering in Gemini (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Black Moon Lilith). Mars will arrive just as Mercury leaves for Cancer. View glyph key here.

Mercury rules Gemini, and its current presence here lends great mental agility (though its square to Neptune last week seemed to throw many of us for a loop).

One of the first things most people learn about Gemini is that its symbol is a pair of twins, yet the dualism those twins represent can be one of the trickiest concepts to get comfortable with.

Western culture typically wants things black and white, yes or no. Many Eastern cultures and religions seem to have an easier time with the concept of holding opposing or multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Dualism might actually be one of the most fertile facets of this sign, but making use of it can mean seeing, acknowledging and embracing sides of yourself you’ve been told don’t (or shouldn’t) exist. That can come up against resistance at first.

Sometimes getting the ball rolling means making use of Mercury’s role as Trickster to find a side door or a game; Gemini is a highly creative sign (and its natives tend to ‘be’ their creations, and vice versa). Sometimes you just need the right timing and to be emotionally/spiritually ready for the inner dialogue to flow.

Eventually, conversation is the first concrete step toward integrating ideas (internally or in talking with another) — and communication or a facility with words is another signature of Gemini. With Jupiter in this sign now, that may translate into multiple conversations, held out in the open — the open space of your full consciousness (or the open space between you and another person).

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Moments before the Sun ingressed Gemini Monday, a two-mile-wide tornado cut through Oklahoma mowing down homes and schools, ending its approximately one-hour trip in a town called Moore. It happened within hours of the third of seven Uranus-Pluto squares, what I call the 2012-era aspect. Before I discuss this chart, I have a comment that I’ve wanted to make several times recently when I’ve been covering the seemingly endless litany of disasters that we are witnessing.

Chart for tornado hitting schools in Moore, moments before the storm unraveled. It probably touched down in Newcastle at about 2:53 pm, as far as we can tell, though other times have been given.

The world has been fitted with an extended nervous system that connects anyone with access to television or a cell phone to endless information — including instant contact with the pain and struggle of people many miles or continents away.

Often we see these things unfold live, or moments later on video recordings; that was the case today, as video cameras tracked the tornado’s approach to Moore, Oklahoma.

While we’ve all been gradually interconnected by radio and television since the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920, human consciousness has never experienced anything like the instant, global spread of imagery and information like we have now. What might have taken hours or days to reach people in remote areas (or even years, if ever), now we can watch live coverage of — for example, as happened today, a tornado makes its way across the landscape and eventually slams into a school. There is conflict between the ability of technology to deliver the image and its apparent inability to do something about what is happening.

Our senses were never intended to extend this far, or to perceive from this point of view — especially for those who are empaths or sensitives. They are more practical, intended to provide information about our local surroundings and the people with us in any given moment. Now we’re subject to incursion by anything that happens anywhere, and most of the time what we hear about is painful. We can watch the view from a helicopter as homes are splintered. We survey the damage instantly on live television rather than reading about it a day or two later, accompanied by a black and white photo, or seeing it on the next night’s news.

That is different than being presented with the immediacy of parents missing their children, something almost every human, especially one with kids, can feel viscerally. The benefit here is that perhaps the pain will get us to rise to the level of wanting to stop this from happening to others. The pain humanity and certain industries in particular is spreading would finally have a purpose if it actually focused anyone’s attention on why we collectively don’t want it.

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