+ reading a natal chart
I don’t think of a natal (birth) chart as a script for your life. I think of it more as a kind of map- or maybe a language- that gives you another way of looking at the life you’re already living.
A chart is made up of placements, houses, aspects, cycles, transits, and progressions, but what makes it interesting is what happens when those pieces line up with real life. Sometimes the parallels are obvious. Sometimes they’re crazy specific. Sometimes there’s a theme that repeats, a shift in emphasis, a particular house suddenly becoming important, or several seemingly unrelated things happening at once that begin to make more sense when viewed together, and all a bit sus, whispering behind their metaphorical little hands.
I don’t generally look at my chart first to find out what’s going on. I wait until something is already happening, and then I look at my chart. It’s a little like eating sushi. You can look at a roll and know there are all kinds of things wrapped up inside it, but you’re not going to sit at the table and take it apart piece by piece before you eat it- especially if someone else ordered for you. You eat it first. You notice the different flavors and textures as you go. Then afterward, you can look at the menu and see what was actually in the roll. That’s much closer to how I use astrology. Life happens first, and then the chart gives me another way to understand what I’ve just experienced.
That’s what I find useful about reading a chart. It gives the mind something to work with. It can take a jumble of thoughts, circumstances, changes, relationships, questions, and observations and organize them into a larger narrative. Not necessarily an answer to anything, but a way of uh-huh-ing the pattern. A chart may bring on much nodding of the head.
I tend to look for the connections, the repetitions, the contradictions, and the little idiosyncrasies that make a chart a polite, unintrusive interpreter. A placement by itself can mean one thing; that same placement in a particular house, interacting with other placements and activated by a transit, can tell a very different story. The interesting part is often in those relationships between the pieces.
In that sense, I think of astrology as symbolic, in the spirit taking a look at the weather. A weather forecast can tell you that a storm system is moving in, that the temperature is changing, or that there’s a good chance of rain. It can give you a sense of the conditions and what kind of atmosphere you might be moving through, but it can’t tell you exactly where every cloud will form, which raindrops will land on the pavement in front of you, or precisely what will happen at any given moment. A chart works in much the same way. It describes the larger conditions- the themes, pressures, openings, shifts, and changing atmosphere—while the actual experience is shaped by the life happening underneath it. It’s been one of those years. So everything going on in one or another of my houses is super interesting.
Part of what makes a chart so intriguing is how specific it actually is. It’s based on exactly where you were born and the exact time you were born, so unless you have a twin—or somebody happened to be born in the same place at virtually the same time—you’re not going to have the exact same chart as somebody else. Which is probably part of why, every once in a while, you look at something happening in your life and then look at the chart and think, well, that’s weirdly specific. That’s because it is weirdly specific.
For me, that vocabulary can be surprisingly useful. It helps articulate things I may already be noticing but haven’t quite been able to put into words. It helps line up the pieces. And sometimes, when enough of those pieces fall into place, the chart becomes another way of seeing the story that was already there.
The readings I’ve linked above are explorations of those patterns via specific birth charts and the individual placements, houses, transits, progressions, and the curious parallels that emerge when the symbolic language of a chart meets an actual life. Many of the readings are connected to my natal chart or the chart of others. I add in these alternative charts as a set of control group, when knowing of the lives of some family members and many friends (sharing natal chart readings is like lending a pair of rackets or your summer home in my circle) give insight and understanding when applied.
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one of those years…