starweaver1.jpgWelcome! I’m Starweaver (Tom Waters) – astrologer, tarot reader, and Wiccan priest in Tesuque, New Mexico. I am coauthor (with Mary K. Greer) of the Llewellyn book Understanding the Tarot Court. Learn more by visiting my web site, Starweaver’s Gems from Earth and Sky

Starweaver is my magical name; in my mundane life, I am Tom Waters, a health physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I was born in 1961 in Fremont, California, under a Scorpio Sun and an Aquarius Moon. I am husband to animal communicator Karen Taylor Waters and father to a delightful twelve-year old girl named Anne-Marie. We live with our cat Abbey between mingling streams in beautiful Tesuque, New Mexico.

Now that you have the facts, a little personal history is in order:

You probably remember me from school: I was the nerdy kid with glasses who knew the answers to all the teachers’ questions and got beat up on the way home. I was the child of an unhappy marriage that ended with a welcome exhale when I was 10. Mom and I moved from California to New Mexico, where I endured high school by reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy. In college, I majored in physics and computer science, and managed to get a scholarship to study at Oxford University for a couple years. I earned a PhD in astronomy from New Mexico State when I returned. As a grad student, I worked on the Voyager mission, and was one of the first people to study the air currents in the atmosphere of Uranus.

The same year I finished my degree, I got married and moved to Nebraska for a teaching job. After a couple years, we ended up in Los Alamos and I became a technical writer there. Anne-Marie was born in 1995, and a few years later the Laboratory decided they could use my physics background more than my writing skill, and I became a health physicist, doing internal dosimetry for the radiation protection program.

Throughout most of my life and career, I had been an atheist, a skeptic, and a great devotee of science and reason. I was also withdrawn and asocial, and given to releasing emotion in bursts of frustration. After my daughter was born, though, I gradually awakened to a more expansive way of thinking, feeling, and living. We joined the Unitarian Universalist church, and from there I found my way into reading tarot cards and eventually to embracing Pagan witchcraft as my spiritual path. The transition was a large one for me in many ways. My marriage ended, I moved into a completely new circle of friends, and fell out of step with the goals and purposes of my youth. The changes, though, were both necessary and positive. I moved into a new life that expressed my authentic self. I married my true love in 2007, and life has become whole and satisfying for me in a way it had never been before.

I’ve decided to make this a personal bio in order to convey a sense of my devotion to the topics I write on here. Tarot, Paganism, and astrology were, for me, great catalysts of self-discovery and self-creation, through which I was able to move out of a shell that was too small for me. I truly believe that we all have the potential to grow and blossom as human beings. The paths by which that can be done are many. I’m here to share mine with you.