All dates and times are UT so may vary in your time zone.
5th May 2020 – 18th January 2022: North Node in Gemini
The North Node always points us in the direction of progress and fulfilment, revealing how to more deeply and fully occupy our humanity. It’s our guide into a bright future, but demands the sacrifice of familiarity for a more satisfying but challenging way.
The North Node has been in Cancer since November 2018. It’s shift from the sensitive and watery realms of the crab to the airy and relational realm of the twins gives us an important clue about how to best proceed for the foreseeable future.
Cancer is the guardian of family and ancestral origins. It moves us to find ‘our people’ and stand strong with them, honouring the past and protecting our shared future. But as the North Node shifts into Gemini it’s time to reflect on whose thoughts we’re actually thinking and whether now might be a good time to release some inherited perspectives: those opinions and world views absorbed from our past, our family and our religious, political, social and cultural environment. We may even need to disentangle ourselves from people we’ve travelled alongside in recent years.
Whilst the strength and power of community is currently coming into its own, the North Node in Gemini reminds us to be alert to the power of expectation and subtle coercion when it comes to ‘group think’. Just because ‘everyone’ believes something doesn’t necessarily make it true. And just because we’re told ‘this is how it is’ doesn’t mean it can’t also be another way.
Living with Uncertainty
Gemini doesn’t deal in absolute truth. It holds paradox and dichotomy with ease, living in a both/and world where opposites can be simultaneously true. We will be living in just such a world for the next eighteen months. It will be a challenge to sift truth from lies, fact from opinion and honesty from manipulation. There will be few certainties and contradiction will rule the day.
Media messages can more easily shape collective consciousness during this passage of the North Node so be careful who’s got your attention. The more people who switch off the news the better! Filter everything you hear – no matter the source – through a mind that lets go. And rest lightly on any conclusion drawn. There may well be a contrasting, but equally compelling, one right around the next corner!
When out of balance, Gemini can descend into anxiety, obsessive internal dialogue, and irrational fear. As the North Node travels through this cerebral sign, we can see these processes for what they are and choose to disrupt or curtail them.
This is not a time to be ruled by a narrative of fear – our own or someone else’s, no matter how well-meaning they may be. Claim your right to confidence in your own perspective and the power of flexibility and freedom of thought.
The world will not be reborn from collective fear of death and disease. It will be reborn by those who stand tall and affirm life, health and hope. It will be reborn on a wave of wisdom which can penetrate the fog of facts, disinformation, anxiety and control.
Information Exposed
Sources of information will be exposed during this transit. Manipulation of message and content will be revealed for all to see. Pay attention to where information comes from and who gains what from you believing it.
Stand sovereign over your own mind, free to understand and perceive as you see fit; to draw your own conclusions and shape your own truths. Free to live boldly rather than diminished by fear. Beware mass perspectives, received wisdom and ‘everyone knows…’ claims.
The North Node in Gemini empowers us to understand the true nature of information and its use and weaponisation in the modern world. When Neptune squares the North Node between November 2020 and February 2021, we may well see a clandestine but increasingly ruthless battle for public opinion. Information and data will be heavily manipulated. Attempts at suppression of information contrary to the official line may increase exponentially, alongside a corresponding surge in individuals’ willingness to choose a different source of guidance, more inner than outer.
Power Shift
While the North Node is in Gemini, power shifts from the privileged and elite to the masses. Reclaim authority from the experts. Expertise by definition is a limited view. No one is an expert of everything and only you are an expert on you.
Honour your own wisdom. Pay attention to your own inner dialogue and emotional state. Learn what triggers you into anxiety, anger or fear and what triggers hope, peace, resolve and a new sense of possibility. For there is great possibility in the months and years to come. Change which seemed almost impossible just a few months ago may now be only a breath away.
We are so deeply immersed in the evolution of this planet, in the next stage of our growth, that there is no going back. The old ways are gone. We must shift aspirations, values, priorities and perspectives to accommodate a burgeoning realisation that life must change and that we, as individuals and a global family, must fashion that change from the ground up, not have someone else’s model for change imposed upon us from the top down.
Claim Your Inner Authority
As the North Node enters Gemini, Saturn in Aquarius challenges us to face the fear of stepping out of the crowd. The voices of those who prefer the freedom to choose their fate rather than have it imposed upon them will grow louder now.
Those who refuse to be controlled by narrative of fear may be demonised by those who perceive this as reckless or irresponsible. But there are too many perspectives on our current circumstances for anyone to claim theirs as the whole truth and nothing but. The voice of inner-authority, of confident self-determination, of those willing to look risk in the face and still choose life, will become louder.
The North Node’s passage through Gemini will reveal the power of thought and of a sovereign mind. It will show us how precious flexibility is, and how destructive ongoing isolation can be. It reminds us to spare a thought for all who suffer mentally and physically in isolation and quarantine. It reminds us to reach out to them, to speak of them, to refuse to forget those whose home has become a punishing prison cell, whose emotional well-being – and even physical safety – has been sacrificed in a world controlled by fear of physical disease.
Venus Retrograde: Untangling Our Thoughts
One week after the North Node’s arrival in Gemini, Venus turns retrograde in the same sign (13th May – 25th June 2020), helping us make the inner shift to prepare for more changes in our outer world. Venus’s retrograde passage provides us an opportunity to process with greater ease the impact of the past few months on our psychological well-being.
For some, isolation has been rich and fertile with creativity and fresh perspectives. Less so for others. The best and the worst in humanity has been showcased as people come together to both support and shame, depending upon the prevailing narrative of the moment.
Venus retrograde will help us untangle our thoughts about it all and enjoy our inalienable right to our own opinion whether or not it aligns with the dominant one. There has been an alarming clamp down on freedom of speech and thought on the topic of Covid-19. Venus retrograde in Gemini will help us relax into the sovereignty of our own mind and the well-being that arises from clarity of thought. At the same time, it primes us for the North Node’s passage through Gemini during which we will all have our perspective shifted to some extent, even as we claim the right to discern as we see fit.
Flexibility Is Key
Between now and the beginning of 2022 we’ll learn the value of communication and wider community. It will become easier to lift ourselves out of an emotional swamp into a lighter energy of creative and innovative thought. If you feel the call to write, do it. Getting those words on a page may just reveal understanding that could come to light no other way.
Share your thoughts with others, but let it go if they don’t agree. Gemini allows all perspectives to exist – it’s accepting that way. Such flexibility of thought has the potential to birth a future otherwise out of reach.
Indeed, flexibility is the key to our current and future well-being. The more rigid we are around how life unfolds from here, the greater we’ll suffer when it takes its own course. Gemini is one of the most adaptable signs in the zodiac. It provides the ability to roll with life’s punches and still move ahead without too much convalescence required!
Whatever you believe will happen next, always retain some space for the unexpected and unimaginable. Both will be knocking hard on the door, so be sure to open it wide! A bright future depends on a creative response to what stands on the other side.
©2020. Reprinted with permission of the author.
About the Author
Sarah Varcas is an intuitive astrologer with a passion for applying planetary messages to the ups and downs of everyday life. In doing so she aims to support people in their personal and spiritual development, making available celestial wisdom which may otherwise be inaccessible for those without astrological expertise.
Sarah has studied astrology for over thirty years alongside an eclectic spiritual path spanning Buddhism, contemplative Christianity and many other diverse teachings and practices. She also offers an online (via email) Self-Study Astrology Course.
You can find out more about Sarah and her work at www.astro-awakenings.co.uk.
