Paul O’Mara

I spent years watching my mother with a pencil tucked behind her ear, ephemeris in one hand, Farmer’s Almanac in the other, plotting the sky like it was a map home.

The moon was her guide. She gardened by it, lived by it. A quiet, meticulous astrologer — never loud about it, just deeply in tune. Her charts were precise in the way that mattered: not technically, but personally. She didn’t need the stars to be exact. She needed them to speak. And they did. In symbols. In glyphs. In the particular silence of a garden turned by lunar phases.

I keep her sky-maps now. Not out of duty, but devotion. They remind me of what astrology actually is — not a science to be proven, but a language to be spoken. A story told in mathematics and geometry, searching for meaning in the symbols. That searching is what I love. The quiet, hopeful act of tracing order in the cosmos.

Irish by heritage, Somerset by upbringing, I came to tarot through the mystical alleys of Glastonbury — which is about as inevitable an origin story as the cards themselves would suggest. I gave readings in Covent Garden. I read by phone from the beginning, back when that was still a strange thing to do. I have been doing it for over twenty-five years.

My Sun is in Aries. My Moon in Taurus. My Ascendant in Sagittarius. My Mars conjunct my Sun, which explains rather a lot. I started every day for years with a daily tarot card reading on Instagram, the practice of showing up for the cards and letting them speak, even when — especially when — I didn’t know what they were going to say.

Before I found the cards professionally, I rode the 1980s desktop publishing wave. Degree in fashion and textiles. Then illustration, graphics, television, web design. I have worked everywhere, drawn from everywhere, made things with whatever tools were in front of me. That curiosity has never left. It just found different instruments over the decades.

My main obsession remains tarot. It has consumed me in the way that only a true thing can. You will find me most moments of the day with a deck somewhere nearby. The astrology came through my mother and has deepened with time. The two practices are not separate for me — they are different dialects of the same language.

Yes, the Earth has shifted. The zodiac no longer aligns as it once did, and modern astrology is technically inexact depending on who you ask. I have never believed that was the point. Astrology is storytelling rooted in mathematics and geometry. It is the searching for meaning in the symbols that matters — the searching for meaning, purpose, identity. That part is as true now as it ever was.

I love the people who are drawn to the stars to make sense of the world’s chaos. Those who use astrology as a tool, not a truth. A symbolic guide for reflection. A language for the things we cannot quite name any other way. That is what my mother was doing with her pencil and her ephemeris, and it is what I am doing now with mine.