How I read
Reading is the work.
Not reading in the narrow sense. I mean the thing we do with a friend's silence, with the weather, with a body that's asking for something it can't name, with the news, with a birth chart, with a book. Reading is a way of noticing.
It's how you watch a life unfold and start to catch the pattern moving underneath it.
Done well, it's attentive and participatory at once, less like grading a text and more like being in conversation with one.
And I read everything the same way, whether it's a romance novel, a birth chart with its weather of transits, or the story a person is telling me about a threshold they may not yet know they’re standing in.
The first thing I do is go looking in the dismissed places. Wherever the culture, or a person, has decided something is silly, small, or beneath serious attention, that is almost always where the gold got buried. The depth too. Sometimes the healing.
Most of my work is just walking back to the overlooked corner and seeing what was actually there the whole time.
It's why I trust pleasure as information. What pulled you toward this book, this placement, this story, the thing that made some part of you sit up and say yes, is already telling you something true.
Desire points. The body knows before the mind has language for it.
So I start there, with whatever drew you, rather than treating it as the embarrassing part to get past.
From there it goes deeper, and more personal.
What is this story doing for the person reading it?
What is this chart asking of the person carrying it?
A story you can't stop returning to is rarely random. It's usually a mirror angled at something you're working out, or longing for, or refusing.
And none of it happens in a vacuum. Whatever you're metabolizing alone, in private, with a book you'd maybe rather not admit you loved, half the culture is metabolizing right alongside you.
The personal and the collective turn out to be the same conversation at different volumes.
That's the lens.
Pleasure, then the personal, then the collective field it all belongs to. I won't lay the whole method out here like a recipe, partly because it's still forming and partly because a method handed over as a list stops being alive. But that's the shape of how I look.
What I don't do is read your chart as a fate to be predicted or a personality type to be confirmed.
I read it as a living landscape, full of forces you're already in relationship with, here, in this season.
The planets aren't running your life from somewhere out there.
They move through you, and a reading is a conversation with what they're doing in the room of your life right now.
That kind of reading doesn't tell you what will happen.
It shows you what is happening, and what it's asking of you, in the life you're actually living.
The instruments I read with
I came to my traditions the way I come to most things, by following curiosity until it led me to teachers who became companions. I read their books, sat with them when possible, digesting everything into something that comes out sounding like me.
Depth psychology, in the Jungian lineage, is the floor of the work, the load-bearing one. Pacifica is where I trained in it formally, though the reading started long before and hasn't stopped since.
Archetypal astrology is the practice I've kept the longest; I still study it, currently with Brian Clark as a mentor, because the work is never finished and I'd be suspicious of anyone who told you it was.
Underneath all of it runs mythology, Greek and Roman as my oldest ground, Celtic as my deepest love, with Norse newer in my hands. And I'm working slowly through the bardic level of the Druid Order, which is the part of my training most openly concerned with the thing I'd been doing on my own for years: how a story carries medicine.
Why I work this way
I believe in the sovereignty of the person in front of me. I'm not approaching you as a problem to be solved or a diagnosis to be confirmed.
I'm approaching you as a story still being written, one that's asking something of you that will stretch you and grow you and, in the old sense of the word, heal you, which means make you whole.
That's different from a cure. It has to do with the growing edge of who you are, and how to meet it.
A birth chart, in my hands, is not a forecast written in stone.
It's the geography of a life you are the author of. You're not a victim of the planets; you're invited into relationship with them, even to romance them, with the curiosity of a lover, rather than bracing against them.
And the threshold work isn't therapy in the clinical sense, though it's therapeutic in the older one, which meant being in service of what's being called. I don't tend a wound across years.
I sit with someone at a crossing, listen for what the next chapter is asking, and walk alongside while they find it. I know this country less from maps than from my own crossings of it.
If this is the way you've been wanting to be read, the work takes a few different shapes from here.
Follow the one that's already calling you.