Gemini Season: On Multiplicity and Learning to Speak Alien

My grandmother reaches for my hand before she opens her eyes. That's how it starts now. A hand in the dark, feeling for something.

I spent the first week of Gemini season helping caretake her. She's 97. The version of her that could tell stories for hours has mostly gone quiet. She tells me she needs to pee. That she's hot. That she wants to die. We can't yammer on the way we used to.

My grandmother from Ecuador grew up Catholic in the early 1900s, a childhood so wild it's hard to imagine from here. She turned all of it into stories and that's how we spent our time: her offering me narratives to help me understand the world. She and my mother gave me Spanish, my first language, every summer teaching me to read and write in it. Language was how she loved me.

I came with a bit of a fantasy that my presence might wake her up and we'd connect through the stories she used to tell. It's not happening, and there's grief in that. But I can also see something else: I'm learning to communicate with her differently. Slower. Quieter. More physical. As the last phase of her life warrants.

It's a lot of holding her hand. Staring into her eyes. Trying to catch her attention. Sometimes she opens her eyes, recognizes me and says: "Mi hijita." "Mi tesoro." Other times she's having a hard time, she's become the child.

I put on Project Hail Mary in the background while I lay in the bed with her. I loved it immediately. That's why I watched it four days in a row. I wasn't looking for a lesson. I just couldn't stop watching.

I hope this won't be too much of a spoiler (this is all in the trailer) but the movie centers around a scientist named Grace helping make a last-ditch attempt to save Earth. He sets out on this mission, meets an alien, and calls him Rocky. Two completely different beings, no shared context, learning to communicate from scratch.

Rocky mimics Grace the way a toddler does. He mirrors his sounds, his gestures. When he doesn't catch something, he modifies. Slows down. Draws pictures. Builds models. Tries again. He twinned him. Each imitation a hand extended across an unbridgeable gap. This is how two beings with no shared context build language from scratch, one reach at a time.

Gemini season started the day I arrived to help out with grandma. But I was not thinking about Gemini. Most of the time I was with her was in a dark room, routines gone, everything disrupted. I had this low-grade judgment of myself float in: you're not really connecting with your usual practices.

When I finally had a moment to step back and let my witnessing observer come online, which the movie 100% helped me do, as good art does, I thought, holy $hit. This movie, this experience with my grandmother. If this isn't the most Gemini f@cking thing I've ever encountered, I don't know what is.

Where Gemini Begins

The zodiac mirrors the arc of a human life. Aries is the birth of an idea. Taurus grounds that spark into a body, into weight, senses, form. Then Gemini energy disperses outward. Begins reaching. Learning its environment. It discovers, for the first time, that it is a self in relation to other selves.

In the Gemini phase of human development, we shift into toddlerhood. The child begins reaching past its own body. A face appears that is not its face, and curiosity and interest bloom. A hand reaches back when the child lifts its own. Sounds go out and return, slightly changed. The brain is building a map, converting raw sensation into something that can be named, remembered, shared.

This is what the Gemini twins symbol describes: reaching toward another, imitating, taking it in, building an internal world that corresponds to the external one. Take in, copy, send back. What comes out is never the thing itself. It's a version. A symbol. This is how Gemini bridges the gap to the outside world. This is how it learns and creates language.

This is what Rocky was doing. And this is what I was doing with my abuela. Lying down when she lay down. Holding her hand. Meeting her where her body was.

Gemini's Ecological Expression

Gemini is Mutable Air, the third sign, final sign of spring, roughly May 21 to June 21. Mutable signs are shape-shifters. They disperse one season and pull us into the next. Gemini does this by multiplying. Flooding the field with information.

Gemini season arrives with swarms, bees, black flies, everything moving at once. Wildflowers don't come in ones and twos. They come in swaths. Around my house this week I identified twenty different wildflowers in a single walk. Everything is multiples. A deluge, more than you can catalog.

I felt this multiplicity watching the movie. My urge to watch it four times. The way Rocky speaks, repeating words over and over. Multiplicity drives toward connection. The goal isn't to fill the air with noise. It's to reach.

In nature, Gemini is the wind. I wasn't outside much that week. But when I stepped out, the air was alive. A million birds doing their business in the shrubs. Bees in their frantic late-spring work. The wind doesn't just blow. It carries pollen from bloom to bloom. Sound from mouth to ear. Information from being to being. The invisible thing that connects separate things.

Where Gemini Meets Your Body

Gemini lives in the breath, lungs, hands, and arms. That's where Gemini lived between my grandmother and me.

One of Gemini's biggest lessons is exchange, and that happens fundamentally through our breath. Inhale: the world entering you. Exhale: you entering the world. When you bring attention to your breath, you're stepping into the Gemini current running through your body.

Then the hands and arms. A baby finds its hands before it knows what hands are. Stares at them, brings them to its mouth, reaches. The hands ask questions the mind doesn't have words for yet. They perceive texture, temperature, weight, they know things your thinking brain hasn't caught up to. The arms extend that reach into the space to make contact with the other.

Gemini also describes a sensory-motor loop. Something hits your senses. A preference rises. The story shows up, so does the emotion, and the body responds. Perception, preference, story, emotion, somatic response. A whole cosmos formed in a moment, so fast we usually miss the gaps between steps.

That judgment I mentioned, hey Cris, you're not doing your practices, you're not as connected this week, was one of my loops. Perception: dark room, disrupted routines, a grandmother who can't talk the way she used to. Preference: I don't like this, this feels like failure. Story: I'm not connecting, I'm not doing it right. Emotion: guilt, anxiety. Body: the critic's voice getting louder.

The witnessing observer the movie helped me bring back online is Gemini doing its other job: the part of the mind that can see the whole loop without getting swallowed by it. Holding the judgment and the grace in the same frame. The animal body and the higher self both true at once. Gemini doesn't pick a side. It's the bridge helping the two connect, process, and synthesize each other.

Three Practices for Gemini Season

Automatic Writing
Automatic writing is a beautiful way to play with Gemini energy, and to access the witnessing observer. Write without restraint for at least 30 minutes. No censoring, no stopping to read back. What you're doing in that time is Gemini's work: putting everything out, reaching through the hands onto the page. If you push past 30 minutes you'll notice a shift. The witness comes online and starts to sort through the deluge, find the thread, distill the essential message hiding inside all that output. Whether you sense that message coming from within you or from somewhere beyond you, it doesn't matter. You're channeling Gemini, Mercury, Hermes.

Meet the Wind
Go outside in late morning, Gemini's hour. Let the air touch you, your arms, your face, your hands. Notice the temperature of it, the direction, the way it changes between one breath and the next. Does it make you want to move? Say something back? Gemini lives in this air. It's the same air carrying pollen from plant to plant, ferrying invisible information between separate beings.

Breath and Mind
Look up coherent breathing, developed by Dr. Richard Brown and Dr. Patricia Gerbarg. What I love about it is that it makes the bridge between mind and body explicit, not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. Your mind actively directs the rhythm. Some practices within it ask you to visualize; others have you lift your hands and arms to help complete the breath. Movement, imagery, breath, all woven together. It exposes what's actually true: the mind doesn't sit above the body directing it from a distance. It lives inside it. Coherent breathing just makes that undeniable.

(New here? These essays come out once a month at the intersection of astrology, somatics, and the strange, embodied experience of being human. Welcome.)

I keep coming back to the scene where Rocky first mimics Grace and Grace realizes: this being is trying to talk to me. Across species and planets and the loneliness of being the only thing like yourself in the room. Rocky reaches anyway. He doesn't know if it will work.

In that dark room, the reach itself became our new language. Lying there. Holding her hand. Not using words the way we used to.

Gemini has many essences.

In July we dive into Cancer.

This intersection, somatic work, astrology, and ecology, is where I've done my own deepest work. It's also how I guide clients in session. If your body responded to anything in this email, a tightening, a softening, a quiet yes. that's the doorway. Reply and tell me what you noticed, or book a free discovery call below.

Book a Free 30-minute Discovery Call HERE

Everything is in conversation. You included.

Cristina Maria Fort Garcés
Creative Now Therapy & Beyond

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