What It's Like to Have Tea With an Astrologer

When I was a teenager, I lived across the street from a kind old woman. Once a month or so, I baked a batch of chocolate banana muffins and knocked on her door. We sat at her kitchen table and ate most of the muffins ourselves. She told me stories about going to school in a one-room school house in New Haven where the immigrant children spoke eight different languages, and the teacher only spoke English. But mostly the conversation was about me, the discomfort that was bubbling up in my heart around the faith I was raised in, my difficulty understanding and navigating teenage politics, my utter inability to imagine myself in any kind of career.

I remember opening the creaky screen door on the side of her house feeling like life was heavy, complicated, but I left feeling lighter. My neighbor was almost a hundred years old. The world she lived in was simpler, slower, wiser. She planted an enormous garden every year, and her family mostly ate the vegetables they grew themselves, not out of a sense of lack—though, I’m sure the Great Depression had an influence—but in the spirit of hobbits.

Her life was simple but not idyllic. She had frustrations with her husband and her priest, and she let me know that she wished women had the freedom I was growing into when she was my age. But I felt like I brought some of her wisdom and perspective back with me when I crossed the street back home. For a little while, my life seemed just a little bit easier, not because I suddenly had the answers, but because life no longer felt like a puzzle to solve.

I am now halfway between the teenager bringing muffins and the old woman. My neighbor is gone. Her world is gone, but I remember it. People see that, I think, which is why they knock on my door.

I am a kitchen-table astrologer.

Most days, you can find me in my cozy nook, a wall of books behind me, a hedgerow covered with wild flowering vines out the window, talking with a client-friend over a cup of tea.

My people come from all over the world, so we talk on Zoom, but the camera and the computer quickly disappear as we get into the flow of conversation. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’ve known a person for years, and most of my clients have found their way to my door once or twice a month since before my daughter was born.

Naming her was easy, but I find it difficult to describe myself.

Kitchen-table astrology isn’t therapy or coaching, and it isn’t a conversation with your best friend. It’s a third thing.

Something between storytelling and magic that I call narrative astrology.

I am the person you talk to when you aren’t working on your mental health. You aren’t trying to meet a goal (at least, not in a direct, systematic way.) And you aren’t just trading complaints over coffee.

When you live a magical life in a mundane world, and you don’t want your synchronicities brushed aside, I’m a person you don’t have to mince words with.

When you are the person who is giving and giving and never has space to receive, I balance the scales with an hour of attentive care and careful listening, entirely focused on you.

When you know that you’re missing something, and you can’t see what it is, I step into the story with you and offer a gentle, “What if…?” that subtly shifts your perspective.

I’m a wise woman, a cunning woman, my ancestors used to say. Wise women like my childhood neighbor draw their wisdom from roots that sink deep into the earth. But I’m not just a granny in-training. I bring my share of that steady groundedness—I am a Taurus, after all—but I look up, too. Navigating by the stars and the tides of time.

I am a kitchen-table astrologer because it allows me to offer more than tea and validation.

Often, my client-friends come to me burdened by life, feeling like they should know better, should be stronger.

I say it a thousand different ways, but everyone who sits down at my kitchen table hears the same thing: I see you. What you’re feeling is real. It has a name. And it will pass.

I know how much those words are worth, because there was a time I was lost and astrology helped me.

This is a magic far older than muffins and tea. The old magicians knew that to name a demon was to bind it.

But that’s not kitchen-table conversation.

At my table we gather, blow the steam off a hot mug and drink. And somehow, like my young self walking through the creaky door of my old neighbor’s house, my people leave the table smiling, feeling lighter.

Everyone should have a kitchen-table astrologer. If you'd like yours to be me, here's where to start.