planetary energies

how astrocartography came into my life

note: this post is directly pulled from my 10/21/21 email newsletter without edits. if you would like to receive my weekly note in your inbox along with additional sections and features not included here, you can join my email community.

i know. it's been a minute. a three-months-long minute. life. a lot of life, life-ing. you already know.

i missed you and am very glad to be back in action with our weekly-ish situationship <3

tl;dr // your girl is offering 1:1 astrocartography readings publicly for the first time! you can learn more about these sessions and book a reading here.

some years ago, amidst what would become a decade in brooklyn, i found myself itching for the experience of living in a new city. it’s not that i felt done with new york, but i wanted a new experience. the question of where my next place was didn’t feel easy to answer, though; everywhere i had visited up until that point felt nice to visit but didn’t quite resonate in terms being somewhere i wanted to live. add to that, that there wasn’t really any specific place i felt clearly called to explore;

ask me where i wanted to travel to next, and i could throw out twenty different cities that i felt equally open to and curious about. i didn’t have a “paris” or dream city in mind;

and while on one end openness and flexibility can be very liberating, in this situation, my total lack of direction felt super confusing and frustrating. i’d tell people, “i want to try another place to live, but i’m going to have to travel a bit more to figure out where that might be.” the issue there became that i just didn’t have the capacity or funds to bounce around and travel like that to explore new cities.

it was just so weird. any time i checked in with my spirit about where i felt called to home-wise, all i could come up with was new york. yet simultaneously, i felt deeply intuitively called to embark on a new adventure, even if it were to be by virtue of a second home in addition to nyc. as confounding as this tension and lack of clarity was, i couldn’t shake these feelings and they continued to stay with me for years. not knowing what to do, i just sat with the discomfort, hoping one day an answer or a sign in the right direction would come.

enter astrocartography. in summer 2017, i had the opportunity to photograph the astrotwins’ personal astrology retreat in tulum. during one of their lectures, they in passing mentioned a lesser known type of astrology called astrocartography— the astrology of place. i was like, “um, excuse me? you telling me that astrology can tell me what kinda vibes i might catch at different places all around the world? do you understand that you may have just solved my entire life with this offhand remark? do you even know?”

it was the clue that i’d been quietly waiting for.

so i went to the free astrocartography site they suggested and entered in my birth data (birth date, birth time, birth place). and it generated this wild ass visual with zillions of longitudinal lines across the world map. these lines represented the various energies available to me in different places.

so many vibes. all the vibes.

in its full glory, my astrocartography map looked like the image below. my brain basically overheated and melted when i first saw it.

it. is. a. lot.

a lot, a lot.

like, it’s almost disrespectful.

but also, omg, so much juicy info when you learn how to break down how this shit works!!

astrocarto.png

some of you might recognize the glyphs at the top of the screen capture as astrological planetary symbols. for the rest of y’all, you wanna know what the entire fuck is happening here, huh?

in astrology, each planet holds a unique set of qualities and presides over different themes in our lives. in astrocartography, each line on your personal map represents one of these planetary energies.

for example, the pink line on this map is for jupiter, which relates to joy, expansion, wisdom, and multiculturalism, amongst other things. the dark green line is for venus, which speaks to relationships, romance, the arts, and beauty. the black line with the “P” symbol is for pluto, which is all about death and rebirth, transformation, alchemy, and power. the light green line is for mercury, which represents how we think and communicate (speaking, writing) as well as our more mentally oriented psychic senses and intuitions. other planets covered on our map include saturn, mars, neptune, uranus, chiron, north node, moon, and sun.

the simplest and most straightforward way we can explore your astrocartography map is to pick a city that is calling to you or that you’re curious about (could even be your current city!) and then check out what planetary lines are running near that place. the story told by the energies of these lines will then tell you what you can potentially expect to experience there!

there are many more ways you can gain insights from astrocartography, which i’ve broadly outlined on my site, if you’re curious. you can also stay tuned to this space, as i’ll soon be further illustrating the various types of questions you can explore using this art form.

so what happened after i nearly passed out from overwhelm upon first seeing my map? obsession. pure unadulterated obsession. my virgo sun, virgo mercury, scorpio moon ass stuck the fuck with it until i understood what was what and was no longer overwhelmed.

and naturally, i now have a very systematic yet fluid way in how i approach readings. over the years, i have pored probably over a hundred hours on my own map as well as the maps of people in my immediate community. i also took a course and did a little reading, but to be honest— my readings are primarily intuitively led, which both i and my clients actually love.

soooo, yeah. a whole fun journey! a journey about journeys! i’m super excited to share this practice with you :)

i really love seeing how people light up at just how fascinating and eerily on point this work can be. it can be a really beautiful affirmation for intuitive hunches you may have about given places and can also help contextualize your life in a way that just makes things easier to digest. often, i find there’s a sweet comfort that astrocartography can bring.

i hope we'll get to share in that sweetness together sometime.