The Short Version:
I’m a tarot & astrology nerd and legally ordained cleric. Yes, both. It’s a great party trick and also a meaningful vocation.
I use cards, charts, and the characters from any story we’ve ever loved to help people figure out what’s going on in their lives under the surface of their awareness. I take the romantasy novel or epic video game you finished at midnight exactly as seriously as the mythology with centuries of commentary, because the stories that won’t let you go are usually trying to tell you something.
I work with individuals at moments of choice as well as creative and identity thresholds, couples navigating the mythology of commitment, and groups looking to understand each other more fully. I am ordained as a Cleric in the tradition of Atheopaganism, and legally have all the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of clergy in the State of Vermont.
I’m also an artist, writer, gardener, renovator, educator, and devoted reader.
If you’re more interested in what I believe and how I work, check out these essays on:
–Atheopaganism and what practicing meaning without supernatural belief means in my life
–A bit of a poetic explanation of how I think about doing this work
–A deep dive into a slice of my background an how I ended up who and where I am
–An essay for the skeptics, about how the positive impact of these symbolic systems (tarot and astrology) can be “real” without supernatural assistance
A Long, Somewhat Unnecessary Narrative Version; or, How a Star Trek Episode Started My Journey Home to Myself
I came to this work through my own personal work, through well crafted stories, and not even a little bit on purpose.
In my twenties I had narrow skill set: I could see someone intensely, find language for what was stuck and unnamed in them, and make them feel genuinely understood and cared for in ways that shifted something substantial and necessary for them. What I was considerably less good at was regularly turning that same quality of attention on my own life, instead of occasionally, all at once in brief, unsteady gulps. I moved through relationships oriented almost entirely around what role I could play in other people’s needs and dreams. I was relationally caught in a recursive loop I couldn’t figure out how to exit, which is, as any sci-fi fan can tell you, the most frustrating kind of loop, but also an extremely satisfying puzzle to solve.
There was a Star Trek (TNG) episode that brought me into deeply uncomfortable self-recognition, to put it lightly, the first time I watched it in my early twenties. The plot: An empath being transported by The Enterprise awakens early, and exposes her vulnerable nature; that her entire way of being is shaped by becoming whatever the man beside her will find most pleasing, moment to moment, whoever he is.
She makes the difficult decision to permanently imprint a man’s preferences onto herself not because he wants her to, or because she must, but because she loves who she becomes in his presence, even though she will still have a lifetime of pretending to exhibit the preferred traits of the uncaring ambassador she is promised to. The man she chose to bond with (TNG fans, obviously we’re talking about Picard here) wanted only for her to be a full individual, rather than just useful and soothing to him. I recognized something in that distinction that I hadn’t previously had a solid concept of, and I proceeded to have a bit of an existential crisis.
Almost fourteen years ago, I took up with that kind of bond-worthy person, a number of years after my tearful first watching of The Perfect Mate, and was thankfully able to recognize the opportunity as the long awaited exit to my loop, despite how disorienting it was. Unlike our empath, I have been lucky enough to stay with the person who both forced and freed me to find out how to treat myself like an individual. What followed was a steadier, quieter chapter of learning what it feels like to be comfortable inside my own life. I had to become myself, which you might think comes naturally, but in both my experience and observation, it very rarely does.
That next chapter didn’t come with a lot of external visibility. It was necessary interior work, conducted mostly in private. We had a son. He’s ten now, and something about watching a person arrive in the world completely and unapologetically themselves, and understanding viscerally that my job was not to help him shape and contain that, but to help him build a life spacious enough to hold all of it, made something click into focus that had been incrementally moving into place in the background: To be complete, happy humans, we need to be as fully ourselves as possible. The question of finding a path I could genuinely access to do that became my next challenge.
So I went looking for the best tools I could find for that particular job.
For an overall container, I found Atheopaganism. For tools, I landed on tarot and astrology. I have never used them as “fortune telling” systems; I honestly have to hide my stress when people talk with me about them in that context. It’s just not the way I know these symbolic languages, and I worry discovering my secular mystic rather than literal belief will feel dismissive to them.
I do find them to be some of the most accessible and nuanced maps of human psychological pattern that have survived long enough to prove their enduring usefulness.1 I am self-taught2, have deeply studied, and applied these practices first and most rigorously to my own life before anyone else’s.
What I have found through that practice is that with me, these systems spring most into relevance and good use when they meet the stories we’re already fluent in. The characters from novels and films and games whose arcs felt more personal than we usually talk about. The manga finished at midnight. The goddess of myth you wouldn’t say you worship, but you wear a pretty pendant of each day. The fantasy novel that finds you at exactly the right moment, and won’t let go of you after.
I take all of these seriously as archetypal material, which is a position I hold in the lineage of one of my personal patron saints, Ursula K. Le Guin. She spent her life demonstrating and arguing that the stories a culture dismisses are often the ones doing its most honest psychological work. Popular media isn’t a lesser source. It’s frequently the most direct route to what’s actually true about a person. What people said about sci-fi and high fantasy in her day3, which today is most often considered serious literature, they say today about video games, comic books, and novels written with women as their primary audience, to name only a few.
There’s a concept from LeGuin’s Earthsea books that I return to regularly: that to know the true name of a thing is to perceive what it actually is, beneath whatever it appears to be. The wizard must learn to be still and attentive enough that the thing’s own nature becomes audible. This is also, more or less, how this work operates. I don’t arrive with a complete catalogue of who you are: I arrive with enough language for the patterns and symbols I’ve learned to recognize that when I speak toward what I’m seeing, something in you remembers its name in the symbolic languages you know. That recognition, not my naming of you, but yours, triggered by the right word at the right moment, is what we’re working toward.
I’m ordained as a cleric within the tradition of Atheopaganism, a nontheistic framework that understands ritual as essential meaning-making rather than divine transaction. I draw on archetypal psychology, symbolic systems, and the oldest technology humans have ever developed for taking things seriously, story, to help people see the narrative they’ve been living clearly enough to purposefully choose what comes next.
I offer a mirror, and the company of someone who has learned – and is still learning – to look into it honestly.
- I’m hoping to learn more about the use of the I Ching in coming years. I bought a translation at the end of 2025 of a much older version of the Book of Changes than what we are used to in popular culture, and it was more aimed at secular, philosophical use. I’m excited to dig into it as I have the chance to. ↩︎
- I have engaged with and learned immensely through a variety of wonderful coursework and texts; from Sarah Vrba and her Journey of the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana Journey classes, and all the work she’s done to bring more individual curiosity and less prescriptiveness to the world of tarot and astrology; more than I could ever catalog about astrology from Chani Nicholas, in particular working with and through her book on astrological chart work for radical self-acceptance You Were Born For This; Joe Monteleone‘s self paced courses on the tarot and the symbols contained within the traditional imagery have solidified my confidence and fluency with this symbolic language. There are countless other individual books on these topics I have devoured, digested, and filled with tiny post-its. So while I may be “self-taught” I have had some incredible teachers, they just haven’t met me, so I don’t feel I can directly claim to have learned under them. ↩︎
- People dared call Lord of the Rings simplistic! LeGuin defended it by saying (paraphrasing mine) that so was Oedipus Rex, but that didn’t have anything to do with how good of a story it was. ↩︎