In my early professional life, I was a budding poet and humanities academic, My scholarship focused on cross-sections of fine art, history, and computer science. In particular, my research looked into the origins of the personal computer and the internet and the dissatisfaction many of the early tech pioneers had with the post-Google world-wide web. I became almost obsessed with these lost dreams of connectivity and my research took my down some weird rabbit holes that connected these spurned networks with fringe spirituality --  Gurdjieff, Tim Leary & Ram Doss, Theosophy, etc. In 2011, a personal crisis forced me to abandon academic life, but I never really gave up on the concept. Freed from the confines of the university, I poured myself into those metaphysical systems, learning to hone my intuition through tarot, astrology, yoga, and meditation. As a poet, I approach astrology primarily as a poem, an expressive tool for self reflection, a symbolic mirror, so to speak, in which we can begin to understand the embedded patterns in our psyches and how those relate to the larger patterns in our environment, which includes the cosmos. By looking at astronomical patterns alongside patterns in our past and present, we can begin to see a meaning emerge, not unlike how meaning emerges from the imagistic chaos of a poem. The goal is to begin to see life as the terrain (within and without) to which a natal chart is a map. The more comfortable we are with that map, the more we can begin to feel empowered to make effective navigational decisions. I tend to read charts like I read poems. I begin with a descriptive, concrete account of what’s there, ala Hellenistic (read ancient Greek) astrology, and from there begin to look at how the arrangement of those details resonate with the personality of the person, as in most contemporary Western, personality-centered, astrology. That way, the chart helps us not to just hone our timing, so that we can be effective, but it also shows us where we have room for growth and expansion.