Equinox & New Beginnings
On identity, timing and the quiet moment something begins to take shape.
Happy Equinox. Happy Naw-ruz. Nowruz Mobārak. Happy Ostara.
Today is the day when light and dark are equal, held in a perfect, temporary balance before daylight takes over. For many cultures around the world, as well as astrologers and those who follow the seasons as their guide, this is actually the real New Year. Or at least it feels more like it. I married into a family who celebrates Naw-ruz, which was my first memory of a true spring time celebration. A beginning that makes sense in the body, not just on paper. But, my fascination with the change of the seasons started much sooner.
I’ve loved astrology for a long time. Longer than I’ve been able to explain why.
It started the way it does for a lot of people: teenage years spent tucked into the back pages of a Glamour or Cosmo, a little blurb about your sign and what the month ahead might hold. Small stuff. Easy to dismiss, easy to keep reading. I was young and I kept reading.
I was born Leo. And if you know anything about Leo, you know the reputation: ruled by the sun, loves the spotlight, magnetic, occasionally egotistical and insufferable. Center of the room energy. The kind of person who walks in and the temperature changes.
That did not sound like me.
I was shy. I kept to myself more than people knew. I didn’t assert myself - not loudly, not easily. Every time I read the Leo description I thought, this is wrong. But it didn’t stop me from reading. There was something in me that wanted to keep looking, even when the archetype didn’t quite fit.
Then one year, my sister-in-law gave me a book for my birthday: The Secret Language of Birthdays. Every single day of the year has its own entry - not just a sign, but a specific portrait of the person born on that day. I remember picking it up thinking “Okay, let’s see how egotistical and self-centered I’m apparently supposed to be this time.”
What I found was something else entirely.
The entry described someone who lives two lives. One that’s open, warm, and easy to be around … the version everyone sees. And one that’s more private, more guarded, more carefully held. The book said that people born on my day are often experts at playing more than one role. That on the surface, everything looks conventional, expected, the model wife/parent/student/etc and underneath, there is an entire inner world no one is quite invited into.
Well. Now we were talking.
The real opening came years later in fall of 2021, coming out of one of the hardest years any of us had lived through. I was deep in my own process of trying to figure out who I was and what I was actually supposed to be doing with my life. The pandemic had a way of stripping things down to the studs, and showing us who we were when the world stopped moving so damn fast. I was standing in the rubble of some old version of myself, not entirely sure what to build next. I don’t remember exactly how astrology found me again that year (honestly, I think it was my sister-in-law again, which tells you something about the people who know us best). but that’s when I discovered what a real birth chart reading could do. Not a sun sign. Not a horoscope. An actual reading - planets, signs, houses, aspects … the real deal.
The nuance of it scared me in the best way.
I found an astrologer on Instagram and booked a reading. What I remember most about that reading was what it felt like to have a complete stranger look at my chart and start naming things, themes I had already watched play out in my life, specific patterns I had noticed but never had language for. I’m a clinician. I’m a natural skeptic. I don’t walk into rooms ready to believe without proof. But this was enough to crack something open, enough to make me think: what if there’s actually something here?
Fast forward to 2025. I enrolled in an astrology certification program. A good one, taught by a master astrologer who was trained by another master astrologer of 50+ years. Somewhere between the first lesson and now, astrology stopped being a course and it turned into a lens through which I see myself and others.
Now, I am not someone who just reads astrology. I’m someone who sees through it.
No to define someone or limit their potential with a glib label. It’s the start of a conversation to question, to explore, to gently surface what might already be present for someone. Not projecting a personality onto them. Giving words to tendencies and experiences they’ve never quite been able to name, patterns that are hard to change but more progress can be made when you have a map and a compass.
What astrology gave me, more than anything else, was the experience of feeling truly seen. It surfaced things I had barely admitted to myself, let alone shared with anyone. That’s not a small thing. And it’s why I’ve committed to understanding it.
So, happy equinox. Happy first day of Aries season, the season of fire and initiation and energy that actually wants to start something new. Let go and allow yourself to honor the urge to clean out a closet, start a garden, or finally tackle that project you’ve been circling for months.
There’s a different kind of ease available when you honor the wisdom of the seasons, when you stop swimming against the current and move in the direction you were meant to go.