Origin Story to Present Day:
A Fool’s Journey Toward Astrology, Art & Belonging

by Jeff Hinshaw

There are many moments in my early life that make my path toward astrology seem almost destined in retrospect. I certainly didn’t know I was going to become an astrologer, but I have always been fascinated by people, patterns, and the strange little systems we use to understand ourselves and one another.

When I was in pre-school, one of our class projects was to draw a picture of our favorite thing about school. I remember the student sitting to my left drawing a picture of recess, while the student to my right drew a picture of lunchtime. I looked to my neighbors’ ideas, not because I wanted to copy them, but because I genuinely wanted to know what they thought.

I remember taking a moment to really consider the question. Four-year-old little Jeffrey closed his eyes and took a deep breath, Friendship,” I thought to myself.  I drew a picture of myself holding hands with the two students sitting beside me. Aquarian from the start.

That drawing of FRIENDSHIP was later chosen for the cover of our end-of-year bulletin and programming. My mom framed it and hung it in our house with pride, where it remained as a little artifact of who I was before I had any idea of how important community would really become.

By third grade, that instinct toward connection continued to blossom. My classmates voted me a “Friendly Helper,” a student who welcomed new kids to school, gave tours, and made sure they had someone to sit with at lunch. I also went through a training program to become a peer mediator. Even back then, I was drawn toward the space between people and how we might better relate.

And then it got more cosmic. In fifth grade, we had a substitute teacher who was unsure what to do with us for the last thirty minutes of class, so she announced that we were going to have a “hidden talent show.” Each student had to get up and share something they were secretly good at. 

At the time, I was obsessed with The Secret Language of Birthdays: Your Complete Personology Guide for Each Day of the Year. If you grew up in the nineties you might recognize it.  It’s a reference book that assigns personality descriptions to each day of the year. I had plenty of extra time on my hands in class, so I would write in the margins, highlight phrases and memorize everyone’s birthday.

When it was my turn for the “hidden talent show”, I announced that I could name not only the birthdays of everyone in my class, but I could name the birthdays of everyone in our entire grade in chronological order. I rattled them off without missing a beat. People’s jaws dropped, and I became known as the “Birthday Man”, a pretty fitting nickname for an Aquarius born on Valentine’s Day who would one day become an astrologer.

By the time I was 13, I was obsessed with a new computer game The Sims, which launched under an Aquarius New Moon in February 2000. Transiting Uranus was conjunct my Aquarius Sun. While many people played The Sims to design houses and decorate elaborate interiors, I was much more interested in the people who lived inside them. When you created a character, a little zodiac wheel would spin and reveal their Sun sign. I loved reading up on the different personality types and observing how each sign interacted with the world.

That fascination with people followed me into high school. Even as an openly gay teenager, I ended up being class president all four years, largely because I cared deeply about making my school a more inclusive place and creating opportunities for people to feel represented and involved. I also had a tendency to bring my various personality systems into the process. From personality quizzes, to astrology and the Myers-Briggs, these systems were primary tools for thinking through leadership, group dynamics, and decision-making. I suppose I have always been pretty cosmic in my approach. So naturally, I gravitated towards writing as an outlet for processing.

In high school and college, I maintained blogs with names that now feel like early prototypes of Cosmic Cousins. One was called “Just Jeffin’: Thoughts, Theories & Other Things.” The other, on MySpace, was “Jeff Snacks: Your Daily Dose of Magic.” They were places to experiment with voice, ideas, technology, music, spirituality, and whatever else had captured my attention that week. Long before I thought of myself as a professional writer or astrologer, I was already building little worlds on the internet and inviting other people into them.

That curiosity followed me into college, where I studied both Psychology and Creative Writing, earning a B.A. and B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. My first published piece, “Don’t Let the Bitters Bring You Down,” was an excerpt from a short memoir I wrote about growing up gay in the South. The excerpt retells a story about handing out sunflowers with my childhood best friend, Suzie, to strangers in downtown Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up.

In many ways, those degrees gave names to two sides of my personality that had been developing for years: my fascination with what makes people tick, and my need to find the right words to express the way I experienced and understood the world.

In college, I wrote for Bootleg, a local magazine, where I reviewed music albums and wrote thought pieces on everything from angel numbers to hidden gems. Writing about music and synchronicity taught me how much I enjoy listening closely, finding the story underneath the surface, and translating an experience into language. Looking back, I can see that this was another early expression of the work I would continue into adulthood.

During my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Swansea, Wales, and interned at the Dylan Thomas Centre. With transiting Neptune now conjunct my Aquarius Sun, poetry and songwriting entered my life as ways of expressing my emerging mystical nature. Years later, when creating the Lonely Planet Travel Tarot, I chose the Gower Peninsula in Wales as the location for The Fool, a place where I knew very little about the world or tarot.

The Fool represents the beginning of a journey: stepping into the unknown with curiosity, openness, and very little idea of what comes next. For me, the Gower Peninsula carries that same feeling. It reminds me of being young and far from home, wandering into a new landscape without a map for who I was becoming. The spirit of the Fool’s Journey seems to be a thread that weaves together the tapestry of my life’s purpose.

After graduating from college, I completed a yoga teacher training at the Wilmington Yoga Center, then took another Fool’s leap and moved to New York City in 2011. When first arriving, I lived in a one bedroom apartment with two other twenty-something’s as a way to get my foot in the door and afford to live in the big city. So without a lot of privacy at home, New York City became my living room.

I performed spoken word at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side, worked as an assistant manager at a vegan café in the East Village, started a dog-walking company called City Wolf: Balance for the Urban Pup, and taught yoga at Greenhouse Holistic. I also had the chance to live at the Integral Yoga Institute Ashram in the West Village, take a tarot workshop with Rachel Pollack at Namaste Bookshop, and studied the Psychology of the Chakra System with Anodea Judith at Kripalu. This eventually led to teaching a course I designed, Chakra Shots, a seven-week journey through the chakra system paired with a daily juice shot inspired by the food associations with each chakra center.