Hi y’all,
Happy midsummer!
How are y'all holding up? We’ve got a lot of changes happening in the week ahead, and I’m sure a lot of us are ready for a slightly new frequency after last week’s tense angles in the skies.
Last week was the last full week of Gemini season, and we enter this week with Mercury, Venus, and the Sun entering the sign of Cancer. We spent the end of last week in the I’Ching hexagram heaven over earth or “Stagnation”, known as the Gate of Caution in Human Design. We also spent the majority of last week with the outer planets (Pluto, Neptune and Saturn) making tense square angles to several of the inner planets (Venus, the sun, Mercury, Mars).
Last Monday, with angsty Mars making an exact square to disruptive Pluto, my plans to head to NYC were derailed, and so I spent much of last week gathering up the loose ends and tapping into my Queen energy to figure out a new plan for the week. This led to gathering together all my expenses, doing my taxes, gathering together receipts, etc. Not exactly what I anticipated when I was recording last week’s episode about the Gate of the Gatherer with the lovely Daje Aloh, but we can’t always predict how these energies show up!
Later in the week Mercury, the Sun and Venus moved through Gemini, all making squares to Saturn in Pisces, and the Gate of Gathering moved into the Gate of Caution, so I ended up spent a lot of that time in a bit of a standstill, moving slowly, sleeping, and letting my brain off the hook for having to figure it all out. I did some art, I went on walks, watched the rain drop down the windowpane, took photos of wildflowers, wrote some poetry, and through these practices, the right words seemed to flow through to make me feel better. That’s a lot what the Gate of Caution is telling us- don’t waste words on unimportant things, take a step back to assess, and speak from the heart when the timing is right.
Square angles in astrology represent doorways, threshold moments, where they can be confronting at first (like a door being slammed in your face), but they provide learning opportunities that allow us to open the door and step through, as our new and improved selves, into a brand new reality. This week we’ve moved beyond these square angles and the standstill energy of the Gate of Caution, hopefully by learning some things and crossing some thresholds. We are now entering a whole new season with a bang- the first of 2 Capricorn full moons, Cancer season, the summer solstice, and the Gate of Extremes.
We’ve made it a quarter of the way through the wheel of the year already, since starting this project, and I want to thank you all for being here for this experiment with me! I want to give a special shoutout to my partner Jackson Mathey of Spirit River Sound, a brilliant audio engineer who has helped me so much with the production of this project. If you’re getting value from this podcast, please consider leaving a review wherever you’re listening, subscribe at Astrosomatics.substack.com to get it in your inbox every week, or share with a friend!
As I watch flowers blooming all around me in this midsummer season, I’m envisioning how this project will blossom, and considering launching a live container next year, with written prompts, a guidebook, monthly live meetups, and a place to meet online as a community to discuss how the wheel of the year is showing up for each of us. Let me know if you’d be interested in something like this, and I’ll keep you in the loop!
Now on to the weekly forecast!
-Alison
This week’s highlights:
Summer Solstice ushers in Cancer Season
The Pagan Holy Day of Litha
Full Moon in Capricorn
Human Design/I’Ching:
June 18-24: the Sun is in Gate 15, the Gate of Extremes, after leaving the Gate of Caution
This week’s themes:
Florescent blossoming
Nurturance and gratitude for the abundance we have
Embracing the full spectrum of humanity’s rhythms, diversity and expression
Our Place in the Wheel of the Year
Medicine Wheel Direction: South (Fire, Youth)
Wuxing Cycle Element: Fire
Pagan Season: Litha
Zodiac Season: Cancer (June 20-July 20)
Moon Phase: Full Moon in Capricorn
I Ching Hexagram/Human Design Gates: 12 (Mon) into 15 (Tues-Sun)
12 = Heaven over Earth (Bi: “Obstruction”) or The Gate of CAUTION
15 = Earth over Mountain (Qiān: “Authenticity, Humility, or Integrity”) or The Gate of EXTREMES
Solstice, Cancer Season, & the first of two Capricorn Full Moons!
The longest day is here! Ahhh yes, yummy deep summer. It’s a little bittersweet, I suppose, because from now on the days are getting a little bit shorter, but that’s glass-half-empty thinking… and I’ll choose to revel in the heat of the moment. Each year in the Tropical Zodiac’s northern hemisphere the summer solstice begins Cancer season, the longest day and the shortest night of the year, midway between the spring and autumn equinoxes. And ever year in Cancer season the moon is full in the opposite sign of Capricorn. This year, the Solstice, Cancer Season, and the Cap full moon are all happening within a day of each other, on June 20th (Thurs) and 21st (Fri). AND, we have a bonus round: This year there’s a second full moon in the sign of Capricorn, happening on July 21!
The Crab & The Sea Goat
Cancer the Crab is an amorphous animal that can live on both land and in water, just like its counterpart across the sky, Capricorn the SeaGoat. Capricorn season begins with the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night, so both Cancer and Capricorn are signs of extremity: dark/light, short/long, winter/summer, hot/cold. The Crab and the Seagoat sit across the wheel from each other on the axis of care and nurturance, so the dichotomy is sometimes described as extending to mother/father or maternal/paternal, with Cancer being ruled by the ever-adaptable Mother Moon and Capricorn being ruled by the structured and strict Daddy Saturn.
Because of the extremities of their respective seasons, I see Cancer and Capricorn both as fierce and resilient signs, necessary attributes to thrive in the depths of summer or winter. The crab, in the heat of summer, has developed a shell-home around his tender body, a place to retreat from the cacophony, aliveness, and solar rays of midsummer. Cancer lives on the cusp, the shore between worlds. Crabs stay still for long periods of time, but are always available to pop into the water or climb up on rocks with agility and speed. The sea goat, on the other hand, is a mythical creature that lives in our prevalent dreams on the longest nights. Capricorn is able to swim down to the depths and climb to the craggy peaks of our imaginal realms, and always keeps on moving, striving… to stay warm in the coldest months.
This full moon on Thursday, the emphasis is on finding a balance between these two ways we care for ourselves and others- in the moment to moment and the long term, in our daydreams and night dreams.
Gate 15: The Gate of Extremes, aka ”Humility”
The Solstice is certainly a day of extremes, and it is fitting that in the I’Ching and Human Design it falls in the Gate of Extremes. Also known as the Gate of Love for Humanity, this gate embraces the full spectrum of humanity’s rhythms, diversity and expression. This gate encourages us to be open and flow through different rhythms while seeking variety in our lives.
When embracing extremes, whether it’s in the hot weather of summer solstice or the emotional and philosophical differences we find amongst our peers, it’s important to maintain humility and integrity to ourselves, to lead from below and behind, not with our egos. In a world of highs and lows, inner modesty and authenticity are key.
In the I’Ching, Hexagram 15 is Earth over Mountain, known alternately as humility, integrity, or authenticity. We begin a new phase of “Mountain” being the lower trigram for the next 8 hexagrams, “Mountain” taking over the role of internal forces after 8 weeks of being in internal Earth energy (and before that, Thunder energy, which began the year on Spring Equinox).
Earth over Mountain is mountain under earth, which gives a visual of humility. The mountain is there, covered in earth, yet it is still a mountain. It doesn’t need to look down from up on high, it doesn’t need to show anyone anything; it is still a mountain, even in it’s union with the earth that sits above it.
Being humble cuts through complication and pride of an over-developed ego. The core of the Chinese word for ‘integrity’ or ‘humility’ is uniting, in the sense not of merging into one, but of holding two things closely together. To make ‘integrity’, the character for ‘words’ is added to ‘uniting’.
In the Gene Keys, another interpretation of the 64 phases of life originally attributed to the I’Ching, the energies are broken up into 3 levels: the shadow, the gift, and the siddhi. The Gate of Extremes correlates with Gene Key 15, where the shadow is Dullness, the gift is Magnetism, and the siddhi is Florescence. In terms of the energy of extremes, the shadow relates to the feeling of dullness when we are not at one polarity or another, but rather in the middle of the axis. People with this gate active in their charts might feel bored when things don’t feel up or down, and get stuck in the feeling of drabness. But the more they have restraint and sit still in the so-called dullness, without needing to fluctuate between extremes, the more magnetic they become, harnessing the energy of both of the extremes into the center. That is why the gift is magnetism- a magnet is a strong force of unified polarities.
At the even more transcendent level, the siddhi of florescence takes this magnetism and blossoms it into a contagious, overflowing abundance of pure energy. When I feel into the earth’s energy during this summer solstice season, it is that big flower energy. There are giant blooms everywhere I go, people posting literal flowers all over social media, events and live music happening nonstop around town, the extreme heat of the day only being cut by a dramatic, thundery late afternoon summer rainstorm, that also feels, well, extreme. Things are blossoming. Things feel florescent.
I had never thought about the word florescence as related to flowers, but when I was reading the book on the Gene Key for this week, that really struck me as an incredible concept- it’s almost like trying to merge extremes into the middle doesn’t work, it makes them dull, and trying to hold them within a solid shape like a magnet doesn’t work either,- the verdant nature of this gate, of this season, cannot be contained in this way. The thing about florescence, the process of bursting into flower in midsummer, is twofold- you can’t force them. Florescence can’t be chased, hurried, or enforced. Florescence is spontaneous, unpredictable, and too wild for something like the mind to follow. And once florescence begins, it keeps expanding, popping off in many directions at once, always moving, growing, exploring, and influencing others to do the same. Florescence demands an attitude of trust and surrender and childish delight.
Florescence, says Richard Rudd in the Gene Keys, is the explosive chain reaction of enlightenment of all forms to the true nature of consciousness.
Mic drop. Fuck yes. I feel it in the world around me, and in my bones. An uncontainable delighting in the everything-ness, in both sides of the polarity, in the extremes.
The Gate of Extremes spans the transition between Gemini and Cancer season, and to me, the progression between the energies of these 3 stages of the Gene Key seems perfect for that. A mature Gemini finally knows that, despite their excellence in containing multitudes, they can’t contain it all within themselves. Cancer, a sign that represents nurturance, the phases of the moon, the womb, the breasts, and motherhood, knows that in order to care about something, we must one day let it go. Cancer the crab flows from the dry rocks to the watery seas with ease, and to me this evokes the siddhi, florescence ,of the 15th gate- the surrender, the release of control, the permission for beauty and truth to blossom in their own time, on their own accord.
Dang, it’s beautiful how these systems of thought come together, sometimes.
Litha: A Pagan Midsummer Celebration
So each week we talk about 1 or 2 i’Ching hexagrams or Human Design Gates, dive into an aspect of the Zodiac season, and highlight a little bit about the element of the season as described by the Medicine Wheel or the Taoist 5 element system. But only every 6 weeks do we get to talk about the Wheel of the Year from the Pagan perspective, and today is one of those lucky days!
The Pagan wheel of the year celebrates as holy days the solstices, equinoxes, and the cross quarter days between the equinoxes and the solstices. Litha, which occurs on the summer solstice and coinciding with Cancer season, is a holy day that symbolizes the peak of the sun's power as it showers the earth with abundant light. The word "Litha" itself is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for "midsummer."
Most ancient cultures celebrated the summer solstice in some way, and revered midsummer as a celebration of fire. The last holy day, Beltane, was also a fire holiday, which lines up with the season of fire in many versions of the Indigenous medicine wheel, as well as in the Waxing 5 element cycle in China. The Celts celebrated Litha with hilltop bonfires and dancing, when people jumped over the bonfires for good luck. In other parts of Europe, people would set large wheels on fire and roll them down a hill into a body of water. Bonfire jumping and other fire ceremonies symbolize cleansing things from the last half of the year that we are ready to release before the wheel of the year turns again, as well as stepping through the threshold from one part of the year to another. At Stonehenge, the light falls directly onto the center stone on the solstice.
In some traditions, like Neo-paganism and Wicca, Litha is when a mythological battle between light and dark takes place. In this battle, the Oak King and the Holly King battle for control, with the Oak King representing daylight and the Holly king representing night. Each solstice, they battle for power- the Oak King, wins on Yule, winter solstice, until Litha, while the days are getting longer. But on Litha, the Holly King wins, and the days begin to get steadily darker again until Yule. In modern-day Ireland, Litha was also a celebration of the Celctic goddess Danu (Anu) who represents earth and fruitfulness.
Celebrating Litha is a practice of immersing ourselves in the radiant energy of the sun and the abundance of nature,honoring the fertile energy of nature and celebrating the beauty and magic of our natural world. As the Wheel of the Year turns, Litha is as a reminder of the interconnectedness between humanity and the natural world. By coming together in celebration, gratitude, and reflection, we honor the sun's life-giving energy and reaffirm our commitment to living in harmony with the cycles of nature. Litha can feel energetically similar to the vibes of the full moon: lots of light and energy, but also intensity of emotion and sleep disruptions. Since we’re in the brightest time of the year, this holiday is less about introspection and spiritual reflection, and more a time of being outward, like fire, connecting with community and the natural world.
Do you celebrate the solstice in any way? I’d love to know in the comments how this peak sun time of year is showing up for you in your body, mind and soul. I plan to continue my wildflower walks, do a little camping trip, and find a place to feel the sun on my skin- hopefully with my toes in a creek too to welcome the water sign of Cancer. Overall, I’m just focusing on gratitude this week, for the flashes of beautiful, delicate color amongst the greys and browns, and also for the grays and browns themselves.
Next week we’ll be entering the first full week of Cancer season and Gate 52, the gate of Stillness. So revel, jump over some bonfires, blossom and bloom, and next week you can crawl into your Cancerian shell and take a break from the heat.
Until then,
All my love,
Alison
A Florescent Full-Moon Solstice: Weekly Forecast for June 17-23