This May Be a Divination Year 🌕

A reading! And a reading! And looking back to feel forward

I’ll be sitting down for my first ever astrology reading later today.

And, next week, on the evening of the 19th, I’ll be doing a reading (online, free!) of some of my creative work: the Pendleton Center for the Arts invited me to read for their First Draft Writers’ Series. It would be amazing to see some of you there.

I’m excited about both of these readings. They’re related, because the sonnet cycle I’ve been working on is about is a divination, a series of divinations. I am going to define divination here, loosely, as a “ritualized attempt to discern the patterns that affect us.” Sometimes the purpose is to predict the future. Sometimes it’s to delve other unknowns. I focus on “patterns” in my definition because we are embedded in and affected by many real patterns—and some of them are complex enough that our conscious minds need help to see them. That help can be solicited via logic—e.g. the scientific method—or via intuition, which is where magic comes in handy.

I’m kind of nervous to post on the internet about my amateur practice of divination, and to admit that I’m going to see an astrologer (an expert diviner).

But it’s the full moon. Letting go time. Maybe it’s time to let go of the next layer of hesitancy around sharing my woo. In fact, I’m starting to think this year might be a year of divining in public—with the guests on the podcast, as we’ve already begun to do, and here directly with you all, too.

There are so so many methods, after all! One of the things that gave me the guts to write this particular post was simply this very long alphabatized list on Wikipedia of divination practices. This list skews to “western” methods, I think.

There’s divination by insects (entomancy), by rune casting, by pouring hot lead into water, by watching birds. Bird watching is a very noble and ancient art, but did you know it was also a divination practice? “Auspices” literally translates to “looking at birds.” There’s scarpomancy (divination by old shoes—so that’s what shoe trees are for!!) and trochomancy (divination by wheel ruts). There’s divination by the moon (selenomancy), of course.

Those of you who think you are not diviners should go look at the list and see if there’s a form of divination you actually already practice, heh. Let me know about it in the comments.

I’ve been trying for the last few years to bring into my conscious awareness more of the real patterns I’m definitely already inside of, already affected by—and this effort is beginning to bear fruit in mysterious, fulfilling, and sometimes unsettling ways.

My family has been hosting full and new moon potlucks for the last fifteen months or so, with a very simple invitation at the center: on the new moon, each guest names something they want to see grow as the moon waxes, something they want to nourish; and on the full moon, we name something we’re ready to let go of, something we’d like to compost or whose influence we want to see diminish as the moon wanes.

So simple! And it’s been a powerful practice to tune into that wave of waxings and wanings, as well as the dailiness of earth’s waters pulling one way and then the other as the moon orbits earth elliptically. (Did you know that groundwater has tides, too?)

It feels palpably supportive, to me, to notice the moon—to acknowledge that real biweekly rhythm, to feel the real differences between the times of lighter nights and the times of darker nights—and to make at least some of my decisions in alignment with this particular pulse.

Noticing patterns is not the same as being “affected” by them, though…or is it?

Well, if I’m changing what I’m doing, I’m being affected, eh?

As my brother, a wise skeptic, put it when I admitted that I had suddenly become interested in astrology: “Probably any pattern we are capable of observing is capable of affecting our behavior.” Nice and succinct, John, thanks.

Of course, he went on to add that patterns with much longer time periods—like the orbits of the planets that are farther away, for instance—are probably less objectively “readable,” simply because it’s hard to gather and compare information on those kinds of time scales.

That makes sense to me. I’m generally pretty open to esoteric ways of knowing and sensing—if you’ve been listening to Kinward Podcast you know that about me—but for some reason I’ve always been particularly skeptical of the ancient art(s) of astrology. The stars are just so big and so far away.

It’s kind of hard to explain why my feelings have changed, but it has to do with the way these last three years of matrescence—coming into motherhood—have felt and unfolded for me. Big thresholds and big unravellings rightly invite new sense-making strategies.

Rather than trying to summarize it all over again, I’ll share an excerpt from the intake form I sent to the astrologer I’m going to see today, Hillary Schofield:

With the birth of my daughter (my second child) in January 2025, there were so, so many symmetries and synchronicities that I had a felt sense of being able to see (at least glimpse) larger patterns across time and on longer time horizons. A sense of divination being possible because we are enfolded in fractal patterns at many scales of time and material and "as above, so below." And particularly a sense of spirals and being in a time spiral and being myself a spiral and of course we are living in a spiral galaxy—so there's a star thing that has me looking up and out and scratching my head more. Astrologers are star pattern readers, right? I'd like to talk to someone who's devoted to thinking and sensing about our entanglements up to and including that scale of movements in space and time, and then back down to earth and now. Hope that makes some sense. Call me curious + newly encountering entanglement at a larger scale than I have felt it previously.

As you can see, I’m feeling into it more than I’m thinking about it. Woo! Feelings are information, too.

I think I’ll just say that, for me, practices that get me out of my head, get me noticing and intuiting and responding to a wider field of phenomena—sensory and otherwise—feel important and useful right now. There are patterns I think I (and we) would do well to remember, to affirm that we are inside of and co-emergent with—like our multi-species kinship networks. This is the focus of this body of work, Kinward Moves.

And there are other, more contorted and binary patterns that I think many of us are trying, collectively, to see more clearly so that we can get some critical distance on them so that we can REPATTERN. Certainly I feel in my own body the longing and the difficulty of unplugging from the habits of late stage cannibalistic empire, the patterns I’ve come to call “the hex.” But that’s another essay.

And I’ve come to trust more deeply that many different people across the world and throughout history have cultivated many different techniques for seeing and naming patterns—and some of those patterns, those real patterns and movements that we are actually always already inside of and expressing—are, yes, unfolding on those longer timescales and at huge spacial scales.

So maybe we can learn some useful stuff from folks who look at those big pictures. Astronomy (and much of geometry) evolved from astrology, after all.

I’m going to share a poem from my divination series here today—and if you like it, or find it interesting, I encourage you to come to the reading I’ll be doing next week. But first I want to share a picture and tell you a little bit about the series.

A poem dowsing. Photo (and poems) by CdV

I’m calling this project a “diviner’s crown” of sonnets. Here’s the “note on the form” from the beginning of the manuscript:

A traditional “crown of sonnets” is seven sonnets in which the last line of each sonnet is the first line of the next, and the last line of the last sonnet returns to the beginning.

A so-called “heroic crown of sonnets” is fourteen sonnets that circle this way, along with a fifteenth that collects the last lines of each of the poems into one neat master bundle.

My three-year portal into motherhood, matrescence, which these poems record and reflect, feels heroic indeed, like a full circle, indeed—but not so neat and not so neatly closed. Like a circle, yes; but like a spiral, where the journey takes you closer to the center in one moment and requires your getting bigger the next; like a snake, an alive creature; and layered with non-ordinary realities.

So, with all of this in mind, my “diviner’s crown” is a femme feral seeking seer’s form, comprising fourteen sonnets each scrying a water way, each weaving into the next, all pouring and steaming and swirling back into the great water cycle that is life engendering life: mothering. And then there’s a crown, the proof of change. Along the way there are rains and side channels and eddies; we could even say that there is another form inside the form, the form of a river.

Finally, at “the end” there is a last poem, an overlapping double-sonnet, the Ouroboros, skimmed and Seen in the currents and pools and bits of driftwood and assemblages of beings that have gathered, as life does, around (and in and as) the water ways.

That photo up there is from the divination ritual I did in order to write the Ouroboros. You might call it a dowsing (an attempt to locate groundwater using a forked stick).

This ritual involved: going to a river pool in the mountains, a pool with whom I have had a close relationship throughout this matrescence journey; stepping into the water and watching it; making an offering; grouping the sonnets seasonally and arranging them directionally and by my sense of where their content sits in my own body; harvesting (with permission from the willow) a live forked willow twig to use as a wand; and many climbs down to the pool and back up to the poems to flick them with water. I did three circuits for these last three years, and I spoke or sang aloud to bind each dip of the twig to a particular moment in the journey. The constellations of water droplets—where they landed and how they caught the light—showed me which words and phrases were to be enfolded into the final poem.

There was more to it, but that’s the gist.

(Oh, and by the way, as I was closing the circle, the willow reminded me that I had promised to throw their twig in the river so it could flow downstream, find a muddy spot, root and sprout. Willows do that. If you’ve ever worked with rooting hormone, it’s basically willow juice. Lively stuff.)

I did this rather labor-intensive ritual because I wanted to build the closing poem of the series not only out of the words I had already written, but also in embodied live dialogue among some of the living relationships that nourished me throughout the years that the poems cover: relationships with rivers (and with that particular pool); the relationship I have with my body and its abundance and its scars; my gratitude practice and embodied prayer practice and the practice of honorable harvest, etc etc.

If you’re scratching your head like what the hell is she on about, well—I’ve been trying some things. And I’ve Seen some things.

I’ve been expanding my palette of techniques for living toward more integrity, deeper alignment, among and as a part of relationships, kinship networks, that are very alive (and changing fast) right now. I’m not trying to see the future, exactly, but I have been having dreams about it—and I have begun to feel the obvious truth that one of the things you get with age, if you’re paying attention, is a sense for how things have tended to go under certain conditions—which can be predictive, sometimes.

I suspect that that’s what divination is, finally, if we’re doing it well: a stylized, granular attending that invites intuition. That maybe even holds space for what we might call wisdom. We know more than we know.

So! I’ll leave you with this poem (not the Ouroboros, but a poem from late in the cycle that is “about” much of what I’ve been writing about in this post). And I’ll hope to see some of you at my reading next Thursday, June 19, at 7PM PST. Did I mention it’s online, and free?

Wish me luck for my astrology reading, too. And tell me about the divinations you’ve been doing, whether you realized it or not.

More soon. Be well, friends.