Sara Slingerland Sheiner is a poet, diviner, and independent scholar from Shawangunk, New York. Her manuscript, Of Lack, has been chosen for honorable mention in Seneca Review’s 2024 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, a runner-up for Tupelo’s 2021 Berkshire Prize, judged by Victoria Chang, a finalist in the 2020 Essay Press Book Contest, judged by Renee Gladman, and a semi-finalist in the 2020 + 2022 Wisconsin Poetry Series' prizes. She is currently working on a book-length poem, a 'contraepic,' titled The Field. She has a doctorate in the literary arts from the University of Denver, a master’s degree in creative writing from Virginia Tech, & was the poet-in-residence at Randolph College in 2017.

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If you’re here because you’re curious about my astrology and tarot practice. Hello—my name is Sara.

I was led to study tarot and astrology by way of my love for nature and poetry. Thus, I have named my divination practice The Divine Field.

You might be asking, why a field specifically?

Though a field may look like just a bunch of grass, as we stand at its periphery, there is—at least for me— something about a field that vibrates with so much more.

Similarly, when we look up at the night sky, perhaps still at the periphery of that more-than-field, far from city lights, it might seem like just a bunch of stars but again there is something more there. (And I don’t mean aliens.)

Just like these, a poem is alive with something beyond its words and imagery. With all of its techniques that try to describe the beauty and divinity of life, the natural world, and its intelligence.

Like that, astrology, and its techniques, attempts to describe the beauty, divinity, and intelligence of the cosmos.

And together these two—poetry and astrology—reflect each other and speak to each other and their pursuit is the same: to understand why we are here and how we are all connected and what we are supposed to do with this brief life.

With our sensations and our experiences and about all we feel and the greater meaning we can all sense that’s right there just waiting to be understood, felt, communicated. If only for a short time or only in brief moments.

I love and practice astrology for the same reasons that I love and practice poetry. Because I feel the strange aliveness of existence in all of its pain and beauty and love and awe and quiet and everything, the kaleidoscope of experience.

I began my study of astrology in earnest in 2020. First, I endeavored to teach myself by listening to The Astrology Podcast, Ghost of a Podcast, and the Magic of the Spheres podcast supplemented by attendance at the Denver Astrology Meetup and with courses and presentations from Alice Sparkly Kat, Blair Bogan, Laura Nalbandian, Diana Rose Harper, and others. In 2023 I joined Nightlight Astrology’s 27th cohort and have since completed the Year 1 course and certification, the Year 2 course (certification hopefully to come), and am currently enrolled in Horary.

You can explore my one-on-one offerings here.