In the years since my road map took me on the scenic route through life, I have developed a passing interest in Astrology.

This is based in certain unscientific observations.

Like the illuminating discovery that my sister and I have not one astrological compatibility in our chart.

No one needed to tell me that our planets were at logger heads when I was born!

When I found that out it was a relief – I could finally file us under ‘Irreconcilable Difference’ and move on.

Likewise, it came as no surprise, watching my nephew and his mother interact, that his top three planets share the same positioning as mine. Poor fella.

(It’s part of the reason I contend that Karma is just another word for Genes.)

There are other patterns too.

My partner and I are situated in opposite positions on the zodiac, being Taurus and Scorpio.

She also shares my father’s birthday, which in itself is not all that remarkable (yeah, I know, *Daddy issues* – it’s not the same year, okay? 🙂 ).

Delve a little, though, and we find that every member of her family shares a birthday with someone close in mine, only in each case, it is gender reversed!

Is this freak coincidence, or is there something to it?

Some contend that Astrology is just another form of quackery. A kind of mystical, hocus pocus fortune telling. Maybe. Maybe not.

The planetary line up at the time of our birth is never the same twice. It is branded to us, like a fingerprint, or DNA.

A site of endless mystery for curious minds to unravel.

A blueprint, if you like, of possibility.

What fascinates me is the way that scientific discoveries sometimes mirror ‘mystical’ explanations for the way things are.

For instance, did you know scientists have found a gene that predisposes us to religious belief?

This leads me to wonder – is it possible that the sensory memories encoded in our genes are just a more sophisticated way of explaining reincarnation?

Or that the historical trajectory of planets is a more precise means of mapping the course taken by one giant breath of life?

On the one side we have belief in the wisdom of an all knowing being where the limits of our knowledge fail.

On the other, a precise methodology that turns flat surface theory into solid 3D fact.

Both reaching for a mystery neither dogma can explain. Pointing in the same direction, but unable to shake hands.

For my part, I find the magnetic push-me-pull-you of planetary entanglement far more compelling than a nudge from a big hand in the sky.

Beyond metaphor, it connects me with elemental force to the wider universe, a small part of a much grander mystery.

Mystery is good. It is reaching for the unknown that propels us forward, and what is life, if not an inexplicable need to create meaning from nothingness?

So, until science can disprove the notion that our personality is written in the stars, I will go on reading my forecasts, and contemplating possibility.

Do you read your stars? Any freaky patterns there you can’t explain, or is it all just hocus?