In the introduction to the original version of her book There is a Season, Joan Chittister talked about the use of astrological symbols in early Christian art and literature as a way to mark time as holy. She writes: “The fact is that all time is good. It is learning why this is true that is so difficult. A look at the signs of the zodiac, the symbols of the cycles of time through which we pass year after year, brings new layers of insight to the answer.” The following was her reflection on Gemini, May 21-June 20.

Gemini, the twins, “opposites fused into one,” as the astrological symbolists call them, fairly shout to us for recognition and demand our attention and force us to face the way we have twisted our lives and contorted our energies. The twins live in us all, forever crying to be attended to separately, forever condemned to the anonymity of community. At those moments in time when individuality and community vie for attention, the self comes up against the realities of life. Here uniqueness lives, yes. Here uniqueness dies as well.

The Gemini moments in life are lessons of immeasurable meaning. They are the arm wrestling-match of maturity. They are the stepping-stones of our ascendance to connectedness, bought one unfulfilled temper tantrum at a time, purchased one act of community at a time. The Gemini periods of life require the coming to balance in us of the need to attend to personal priorities and the equally demanding reality of personal relationships. The purpose of relationships, Gemini demonstrates, is to save us from becoming a world unto ourselves, narrow, self-selecting, and untouched by anything outside our silly little selves.

Centered in ourselves but attached to the world around us, Gemini knows we will not be able to escape the lessons that only life can teach us. We learn, thanks to the Gemini phases of life, to see ourselves as others see us—to accept that or reject that as we please, but to do so consciously at all times so that what we make of ourselves we make clear-eyed and certain.

Gemini draws us out of ourselves into shaping and reshaping contacts with others so that we can become bigger than we might otherwise ever have been able to be if left only to our own devices.

—from There Is a Season by Joan Chittister with art by John August Swanson (Orbis, 1st edition)