WHAT IF WE DIDN’T PRESUME TO KNOW WHO SOMEONE IS BASED ON THEIR SUN SIGN?

What if we didn’t presume to know who someone is based on their Sun sign—or based on any part of their birth chart?

What if astrology has always been a practice of coming to know ourselves and one another with greater specificity, nuance, and situatedness, rather than a cosmic personality quiz or yet another system of reductive categories into which we can sort ourselves and one another?

This is not to say that astrology—the planets, the signs, the houses, and so on—can mean anything we say they mean—although it is true that there is no final authority who decides what is or is not a valid interpretation of this system.
Rather, astrology is a practice of making meaning of our lives through the alignments and correlations we discover with attributions that people have made with the sky for thousands of years, finding how these ancient traditions bring greater awareness to who we are and who we can become.

You will very rarely see or hear me sharing generalizable statements about what specific signs or placements will mean for everyone, and especially not how they tell us who someone will be.
I am not interested in more ways of making universalizing claims about who people are, who they will be, or who they should be. I think we already have enough of that in the world.

I am invested in what we can discover about our lives when we consider them through the lens of this ancient tradition.

Some people seem to take a lot of satisfaction in identifying with things they have heard or read about their Sun sign, and if that makes their lives more livable, then I am glad.
Perhaps it offers a sense of belonging to a group to say that everyone who was born when the Sun was in a specific sign of the zodiac is “this way,” and “so am I.”

But my concern is that at best, these kinds of generalizations flatten nuance and potentially get in the way of knowing ourselves with greater specificity—and at worst, it foments a kind of sectarianism that fosters greater separation.

What if astrology is capable of describing not only ways in which we are similar to one another—our commonalities—but also, and perhaps more importantly, describing our differences, our uniquenesses, and the ways that we are not the same?

When we examine our lives through the lens of astrology, we come to discover how the same qualities, attributes, and significations articulate in diverse and vastly different ways.
And coming to recognize and value our differences is a vital and necessary part of coexistence.
If we can only value others because of the ways we perceive ourselves as being the same, we will inevitably reach a point when those values falter or fail. It is not enough to build a world on the celebration of sameness. Truly ethical coexistence requires acknowledging and celebrating of difference.

Audre Lorde taught us, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
She also wrote, “Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”

So much of my work with clients is describing my understanding of what the placements of the planets, signs, and houses in their chart have meant to people across different cultures for thousands of years, then asking, “What does that bring up for you? How does that show up in your life?”

It is one of the great joys of my life to be in conversation with people about their charts and lives, not as a practice of telling them who they are or who they should be, but instead discovering what comes into focus and what becomes more meaningful for them as we follow the principles of this ancient tradition into a fully situated, unique, and nuanced account of the lives they are living.

​Rather than the imposition of reductive categories and generalizable personality traits, astrology can be a co-creative process of acknowledging, describing, sharing, and embracing more and more of who we are—our differences and our commonalities.
And from that place, we become more capable of showing up in the fullness of our uniqueness and building the communities that we need for our collective liberation, recognizing the celebration of our differences as our strength.