I keep thinking about the point of Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowery. It's not as famous as The Giver, which was about perception. Gathering Blue was about memory in a world that lacked memory. Ironically, I can’t really remember the plot but remember how the world the main character lived in had forgotten how to make the color blue and how her duty of weaving was a remembering of forgotten history. She wove images into a long robe that depicted an unexplainable history with new words and only images.
It feels like I wake up every morning and see a news story about something incredible on a mind-blank social media scroll. It's either that the ecological collapse of the world is coming in eleven years, or some huge momentous political decision has forced sterilization on indigenous women, or a gorilla has learned sign language. Then, the next day something new has happened.
None of these things mean anything because we don’t remember them. When things happen all at once, they don’t happen at all.
I stopped remembering things because I can always look on my phone to see what I was doing on such-and-such date, because it’s a waste of brainpower to remember information when Google is just a breath away, and because no one has been privy to such a sheer and vast amount of information before so I lack the means to put it all together into a narrative.
This month of June, Mercury is traveling out of bounds just as we have a Gemini new moon the first week of June. Then, we get this nice Sun-Jupiter opposition in Gemini and Sagittarius that squares Neptune the second week. The third week, Mercury and Mars conjunct around the Sagittarius full moon. All of this happens while Mercury is in Cancer and, in the fourth week of June, Mercury leaves for Leo.
With all this Mercury and Sagittarius stuff, first comes illusion, then comes ideology, and the heart it hits is just hidden behind it all. We’re not talking to real life versions of people when we talk about public figures on social media, chasing disappointment and clout. We’re not talking about an internet that is hyperconnected anymore but an internet made up of four websites, each one filled with screenshots of the other three. We’re talking symbols that stand for themselves but don’t necessarily mean themselves. In an age of aesthetics, politics is only optics.
(South node in Capricorn: We have all this money that is just made up. We have an unsatiated elite class that is not answering their phones but only posting on twitter. North Node in Cancer: Okay, so what do we want to do about it?)
Sun-Jupiter opposition in Gemini and Sagittarius is about information. The square with Neptune asks us to make stories about all this fucking information. Mercury in Cancer reminds us that the stories we do make are all as heavy as history.
Threads on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are only that—threads. Threads can be woven but sometimes there are missing colors we've forgotten how to see. History makers remember things that count for them, because not everyone can remember everything.
Aries
You’re not an all knowing Google but a finite human being. What you choose to hear defines what you know. Everything and you see and hear affects you psychologically. What is the mythological nature of your daily life, no matter how boring it is? How would you read your daily movements and decision symbolically, not morally or literally? If you were, like Batman, not a man but a symbol, what would you stand for?
The symbol of you has much more to do with what you hear, and I mean really listen to, more than what you do because listening is an act of empathy and active association. It has more to do with what you participate in by being present than what you start and don’t finish.
Taurus
June will either make you even more stubborn than you are now or shake your foundations. Why not choose the latter? The information economy makes you want to hole up and not talk to anyone unless they’re paying you whatever your hourly rate is. You’re most comfortable with your usual position of being a stick in the mud that people call the problem child because they won’t give it up, no matter what it is. You don’t want to get along with your friends. They’re not your problem. You’re theirs.
June bring stories that other people tell about you because they know you on a surface level—stories that stick not because they’re true but because they’re memorable. Your job is to deal with what other people think you are. Your job is to do that without an useless sense of individualism, but compassion for falsehood because culture is just falsehood made real by generational pretending.
Gemini
You being the sign that everyone hates right now may make you super comfortable playing the bad kid who can get away with murder in one sly move and a slick smile. This month, it's time to reckon with daddy, or your own inner authoritarian. You have innate wisdom that your researcher's mind is supposed to compliment, not obfuscate. There are things that you can do to make you feel like you know what your doing, even if you definitely don't want to seem that way on the outside.
These things include: giving yourself permission to screw up publicly, understanding that the stakes never change if you don’t let go of something, remembering that everyone is as terrified of the future as you are, and sleeping at least eight hours a night. Mother yourself, because your actual mother needs you to set a good example for him or her.
Cancer
There’s part of you that won’t settle for anything unless it is truly precious. June wants to tell you that it’s the things you devote your lifetimes to that become precious. If you spend all of your time in a situation that makes you feel unworthy, you will begin to hang onto that same situation because it is the most precious thing in your life, even if it is something you hate more than you love. And you have a bad habit of loving hateful things first, because you believe you can redeem them.
It’s better to make a choice about whether you want to commit to something first, before you spend a lifetime withering for it. June may ask you to give up something or adopt something. The question it wants you to ask, without answering it, is: what you want to devote your life to, when you know the senselessness of the universe demands that you make your own meaning?
Leo
Are other people really, really fucking annoying to you right now? Your only job may be to own up to when you're feeling that way. Other people may feel incredibly disobedient this month. If you feel like you have to embody the mother you always wished you had to get in touch with your patience around your friends, you may start to feel frustrated because you, Leo, actually want desperately to be the child in everyone's eyes.
It's time to disobey, because that's what children do. It's time to be the bad, smart mouthed, up to no good kid that you’ve always wanted to be and just needed too much love to truly risk it all for. Fuck other people's love. They’ll give it only on their own terms. You have your own willful temperance to entertain.
Virgo
You may feel like you’re tired of it all. The thing is, you are but other people aren't. You have been calculating the damage every single piece of public policy will have on the place you live for years now and you're tired. You’re tired of being a thinking being. You’re tired of being the only thinking being and no one taking you seriously because your views are not as politicized as others.
The thing is, not everyone is as cynical as you because they have not stayed as up to date with current events as you. And there's a beauty to optimism. You need that optimism because you’ve become so cynical yourself. Your job is not to unearth those who want to bury their heads in the ground and force them to see your light but to stick your head in there with them and feel the currents of the ground shake without knowing exactly what is moving them but doing it together.
Libra
This June is a month of being careful to select what you work on. Work is the finest sample of care because it is the gift of your time to another body, whether that body is an individual one or a social one. You breath life into things. June means that your work has begun to bore you. It is your responsibility to make sure that it does not keep boring you. It is your responsibility to do interesting things. If your daily life bores you, then you’re not doing your job right even if everything else falls into place.
There’s actually more world out there than you’ve been told. Can you find the missing parts? Can you find the parts of the world that are not on the map? The ones your teachers haven’t and don’t explore? Not everyone will come on your journey with you, but that’s what makes it special.
Scorpio
Your deep fear of love is that you relinquish control over what particular qualities a person loves you for. Not everyone loves you for the you that you believe to be the real you. Emotional intimacy is a game of fleeting projections of what you desire most onto another life and vice versa, until you talk and forget about it all. Then you pick it right back up. It’s the oldest game in the book. We all know how to play it.
You can't fall in love with someone without letting them define you but you also can’t fall in love with someone without defining love for yourself and by yourself. If social media has taught you what love (and power) is, spend some time offline to figure it out in your own head. You have the time. There’s really no rush.
Sagittarius
What makes a memory worthy of being remembered for you? With all the different things that you ponder about and consider every single day, what makes a thing important enough to keep? Is it the ones that open up a window and a question or the one that offer an answer and shut a door?
You already know this: you can make up where you’re from and who you are and, sometimes, you have to in order to be yourself fully. Sometimes, like Aladdin, we need a false persona to make our real persona available. It's your fate to decide on your own history but history isn’t just a safe story. History is the thing that startles the present into becoming the future.
Capricorn
The beauty of all of this is that you own the story that you tell. It’s all yours—every implication and half-remembered sense of deja vu that you create your narration of the origin story of your nature from is yours. Only you have the right to decide how you are going to remember your mother, your friend, your teacher in your own words. The only thing you have to do is make it believable.
That’s harder to do than it seems. No one believes anything unless it is something that they already understand to be true. And most of the news stories we read are new headlines, so distorted that all they’re meant to do is make us laugh or click, preferably both. You have no chance of being believed if you tell stories without embellishments. Will you believe yourself anyway?
Aquarius
The question for you to address in June is, have you really been investing your time and resources into what is absolutely necessary for you to continue to feel alive? Have you been feeding the impulse to learn like it is a plant that can suddenly sprout leaves without warning you about when? Have you fully felt the appetite of your hunger for a new perspective because you understand that the way you are seeing the problem is part of the problem?
If you really love something, risk something for it. The worst thing that can happen is that your life will change. Your continued manual labor doesn't mean as much as one decisive moment sometimes, especially when you put the full weight of everything you have behind that one decision.
Pisces
Your addiction to social media is really an addiction to a world that exchanges control for an illusion of safety. Anything that feels like freedom in a world that allows such freedoms is not freedom but only tolerance. If your activism disappears when you delete social media, then it’s no wonder that you feel fragmented and dissociative IRL. The thing about online activism is, it is terrific for letting you know what you are at fault for but terrible at telling you what you have control over.
Get your head of the wires and realize that your only goal and hope in life is to devote your life to the study of the things that you deeply care about. Realize that you are listless because contemplation is the sport you excel at but put off when ideas become a marketplace. Studying takes as many forms as witnessing. Wake up and be a witness to your own life.
