Barbara Nordstrom introduced herself to me at Shambhala Books, where I was keeping a desk as the house astrologer in 1969, and she was trouble from the start. Red— a rawboned hard-drinking poet from the Sierras that I was hanging out with at the time— definitely did not like what he saw there: she used too much makeup, and had too many children. I, on the other hand, was fascinated. She had a knack for sizing people up quickly, intuitively, and did not take long to learn to read and speak astrology as the poetic language I believed it was.
We worked well together. I brought her into my astrology class at the university, and put together a weekly radio show with her on KMPX-FM, the local underground station, where we discussed the birthcharts of featured performers and illustrated our comments with their music. Audience members heard us exchanging increasing familiarities and endearments on the air over the months, and were not surprised when we got married on the last show— our engineer presiding.
We went on to establish a hippy commune we named Astrologos, in a decrepit, mouldering mansion that sprawled across the crest of a hill looking something like a derelic shipwreck high above the suburbs. We studied horoscopes and wrote and made public appearances, and held potlucks and concerts and seminars, and stumbled along famously, our household expanding and shrinking by the season to include dozens of guests and visitors.
But I was getting restless, and the Jungians who hired our work began to talk increasingly about my returning to school, this time to get a degree in something useful— clinical psychology. I saw that this was the inevitable direction I was meant to take, legitimizing my work as a counselor but, painfully, separating my work from Barbara, who was eager to pursue her own career as a professional astrologer. Our separation and divorce was very difficult, but it deepened our mutual respect and friendship, which continued over the years that followed. Her abrupt death this past year was a great tragedy for many people; I was grateful to have the opportunity to speak at her memorial.