Astrology
And other coincidences
Chart
When I was in 11th grade, my mom and dad got horoscopes charted for all four of us. We had just moved to a new house, and the astrologer was our next-door neighbor at the house we had just moved from. After he made the charts for my mom, dad, my brother, and me, we made several trips back to our old neighborhood to hear him read his predictions of each of our lives. I could only listen to his reading of my chart while my mom sat beside me. We sat on the floor while the astrologer, our ex-neighbor, sat across from us with a small table between us. On the table rested my chart, a thin booklet with diagrams of planetary positions and long passages written in fluent Hindi.
He mentioned milestones and phases, some ok, nothing jubilant, and some quite gloomy, altogether spanning 40ish years, thinning out in details as the spans progressed. He also noted some traits about my personality and how I will move about my spaces. He was dismissive while he spoke of how I would aspire to be. I felt rebuked, which was not new (I blame the school for that). Not much felt flattering. Sprinkled throughout the little book were suggestions for gemstones that would help ‘cure’ personality traits that would be hindrances to my being or help me evade hurdles at various points in my life. For my temperament at the time, the astrologer prescribed a pearl ring of a certain weight and size, flat at the bottom for maximum exposure to skin, cast in silver for cooling, for calm. My parents ordered the ring, and I wore it for a few years. Now, it sits in a fabric box with other old silver jewelry.
Maybe I took it all with a grain of salt but some of his predictions stayed with me over the years. I left the chart at my parents when I moved away, but I thought about it sometimes.
In my 20s and 30s, I remained very interested in astrology and religiously waited to read Susan Miller’s (always late) monthly predictions for my sun sign. Sometimes, she was uncannily spot-on for me, and sometimes, she failed me. In one monthly update that she posted 7 days late, she wrote that I should not be signing any new contracts for significant shifts in the first few days of the month. I had just signed an offer for a new job that I was unsure about.
Some years ago, during a bafflingly difficult time, I started reading Chani and went deeper into my rising and moon signs. It seemed like everybody got more into astrology at that time. The belief system became more easily relatable, mystical still but accessible, something to build upon and grow with, stories to write about ourselves based on where the planets happened to be. I lived in a place surrounded by beauty – poppies, magnolias, frequent trips to the redwoods, meadows draped in wildflowers of blinding vibrancy, secret beaches, and so much sunshine, yet I was always anxious. I looked for answers everywhere and thought about my chart from childhood.
In winter 2020, while visiting home, as soon as I got a little past the jetlag, I asked my parents for the little book. I had been remembering bits from it. My dad figured I wouldn’t fully comprehend the astrologer’s formal Hindi, so he read it aloud and translated some bits while I recorded his voice on my phone. As he spoke, I recollected from memory the sentences about how I would tend to be. I had forgotten that the astrologer wrote of my love of clothing and dressing nicely. And that I would spend a chunk of money on it. I filed that away in my ever-growing pile of shame.
Gloom
Toward the end of the chart, he predicted a period of distress that would last a very long time. To help deal with it, I could wear a ring of a particular gemstone set a certain way. I fixated on that looming period of gloom and wondered if it had already begun. In the following months, I asked my mom to call or visit the astrologer and ask to make a follow-up chart. I also considered getting the ring made.
Shifts
Then, one day, my belief in astrology vanished as if overnight. I realized then that I hadn’t sought forecasts in a while. I don’t know what happened. Because I am still inclined to believe in many unexplainable phenomena. I am still always looking for and finding signs pointing me towards paths. I try to keep a running list of coincidences even though I notice so many that it’s tiresome to tally each one. Like last week, for instance, I was savoring my way through How Should a Person Be - a promising premise of wayfinding. One evening, I felt like taking a break from the book and decided to pick up one of many unread issues of The New Yorker stacked on our shelves. I skipped straight to the fiction. It happened to be by Sheila Heti! The other morning, I was walking down the street and thinking about some of the dry cleaning I needed to drop off, and just that very moment, I noticed a bright green dry cleaning receipt on the pavement. I had never seen or noticed a dry cleaning receipt in recent memory. My sun sign is Leo, my rising is Libra, and my moon is Taurus. Mia’s sun sign is Libra, and Lila’s is Taurus. An endless list of patterns laid out for me, waiting to be found by me, to do something with.
Celestial
During the winter break, while visiting Northern California, we spent a few days in the valley. We stayed at a place with small pools fed by hot springs. In the evenings, we would spend hours in the pools while looking through the fog steaming around the fairy lights strung around the property. After dinner, we made s’mores by the fires in the pits next to the pools. Late one night, past Lila’s bedtime, Nikhil stayed in the room while Mia and I went out. I needed to breathe the cold night air. We looked at the stars, and I spotted a bright yellow light in the eastern sky. I thought it might be Saturn, and that excited Mia. She declared that it was her favorite planet. But when I looked at the sky through an app, it seemed to show Uranus or Jupiter. Or Mars? It wasn’t easy to figure out. But that didn’t matter. Whether or not of astrological significance, the planets, stars, and moons held me with immense power. Imperceptible shifts happened in those few minutes when I looked up and scanned the night sky. I stood in the middle of a bocce court, with hills on one side of me and a small stream across the road on the other side. The next night, our last in the valley, I went out again. I needed to be there and look up and accept all the planetary interventions that would manifest in the coming months. The next day, I got a news notification on my phone about the vanishing of Saturn’s rings.
A few weeks later, back in Brooklyn, Mia looked out one night and noticed more celestial objects than usual. Earlier that evening, on our way home, we had spotted a waxing gibbous moon, 98% on the way to full.
(Small paintings I made many, many moons ago)
Songs in my winter playlist on repeat this week:
Arrivederci
Wede Harer Guzo - I was at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop a couple of weeks before Christmas when the air had just started to feel like the holidays and like winter. Unlike late weekday mornings, the coffee shop was quiet on that early Saturday. This song came on and felt like the symphony of 15 beautiful, conflicting emotions, somehow co-existing.
Do You Ever Remember? I don’t quite know how this got stuck in my head, but I have been singing this audibly while walking to and from the train.
Books I loved recently:
The Wilderness by Ayşegül Savaş
Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri