In 2024, I placed my birth data onto an astrocartography map. Planetary lines crossed a geography I had already been moving through for years. At first, it was simply another map.
Then came Comancheria. Then Pike’s Map of New Spain. Places carrying personal significance began appearing inside much older geographic stories. The maps did not prove one another, but once they were placed beside each other, I could no longer look at geography in quite the same way.
Astrocartography brought an astrological chart into relationship with place. In a project already concerned with land, migration, buildings, and ancestry, that made the map especially interesting. It gave me a different arrangement of places I knew through work, travel, family, or grief.
The comparison did not make the maps interchangeable. A historical map belonged to its own time and purpose. An astrological map described a different kind of relationship. My memories of a place were another record again. Putting them beside each other was useful precisely because each asked a different question.
Eastland was no longer only the location of a restoration project. It was also an entry into the history of ground that had been inhabited, crossed, claimed, and remembered in other ways. Research involving Buffalo Hump and Benjamin Brinn widened that view. What had first seemed like my own route began sitting inside histories much larger than mine.
I became less interested in asking a line to explain why I had gone somewhere. I was more interested in what happened when a familiar place became unfamiliar again. The map could send me back to a landscape, an archive, or an assumption I had not thought to question.
Geography stopped behaving merely as background. It became another part of the inquiry, without becoming an answer to it.
Why did these particular places keep returning?