Baby astrologer is such a cute word. The word, stolen from baby queer, reveals just how entangled the astrology community is with the queer community. When you’re a baby astrologer, you don’t necessarily care about the precise rulerships of each house or annual profections or planetary hours. When you’re a baby astrologer, you’re falling in love with astrology’s ability to tell a story of meaning.

What people get wrong about baby astrologers is that they assume astrologer babies can’t make sense of astrology. This is not true. Baby astrologers are the ones who make the most sense of astrology—the ones who do not treat astrology as a method of calculation but as a method of listening.

You’re excited about astrology when you first get into it! You are exhilarated when you notice that a good friend went through that breakthrough during a Saturn transit and you’re asking everyone you love for their Moon signs! You’re falling in love with the synchronicity of the world.

Baby astrologers ask all the good questions—sometimes, they’re questions that jaded astrologers don’t have the answer to. “Why does astrology work the way it does?” “What does it mean when I have empty houses? What about stelliums” “What is the difference between my Sun, Moon, and rising?”

Don’t believe anyone when they say that they can answer these questions. We don’t know why astrology works the way it does. We don’t know what it means to empty houses anymore than we know what it means to have full houses. We don’t know the differences between your Sun, Moon, and rising. The practice of astrology is not a practice of knowing these answers but a practice of wonderment.

What I love most about baby astrologers is their sheer love for the signs themselves—not techniques, not translations, but the signs. That love for the signs—you don’t lose that. You keep that for your entire astrological journey. The signs are rich with potential meaning because they show the many faces of the planets.

What I love most about baby astrologers is that they treat astrology as a love language. In treating astrology as a love language, they are not satisfied with it. They demand that the language become exhausted so that they never lose the hope of satisfaction. Baby astrologers treat astrology as a practice that holds real erotic power.

Baby astrologers do not claim to know you because they know astrology. They’re quick to say “I don’t know much about astrology” even though they do—they’ve experienced just as much life as the rest of us and, in knowing life, understand cosmology with it. Baby astrologers believe that the world of astrology has yet to reveal itself. They believe in the vastness of language and practice.

Baby astrologers are growing. That’s where the magic happens—through change and growth. Astrologer babies are just astrologers who are in the process of being unformed and formed by their practice of a language. When you allow yourself to be unformed and then formed again, that is when you are capable of transforming a shared experience.

Baby astrologers are integral to the astrological community because they are the ones changing astrology. And, because we are all responsible for changing astrology, we never stop being astrologer babies. We never lose our curiosity, love, and confusion. Rather, confusion is how we learn. We encounter it every time we meet someone whose charts we have not seen before and every time we experience a sky that we have never seen before.