MY PAL RICKY

Venus isn't only about romance . . .

When people think of Venus – the goddess of love – the mind naturally turns to romance. But where would we be without our friends? Love doesn’t always require sharing a bed or a roof. Sometimes all it requires is a glass or two of wine or a couple of cups of coffee and some time together.

Whether it’s romance or simple friendship, all of that is Venus territory and it’s the greatest treasure anyone can have on this earth.

My own Sagittarian Venus opposes Uranus. In classic Uranian fashion, that configuration means that in general I should “expect the unexpected” in my relationships. In other words, if we survey the whole spectrum of my important bonds with other people, we’ll encounter more than a few surprises in the form of connections no one would have expected me to have. Meanwhile, the Sagittarian part of my Venus adds cross-cultural ingredients to the recipe – I often find myself drawn to people from different countries, races, classes, and ethnicities.

Without boring everyone with a lengthy confessional autobiography, let me just say that I “resemble those remarks.” (Actually I’m smiling here – the “confessional” part probably wouldn’t bore you at all, but I am a Capricorn and I need to keep up appearances.)

Cut to a dingy airport in Tropea, Italy – a small coastal city in the Calabria region. It was April 2016. I’d just finished teaching a five-day intensive. I’m waiting for my flight up to Rome and back home. There’s no seating left in the terminal, so I’m sitting on the floor. Next to me in the same situation is a class member who also happens to be a gigantic, profoundly muscular Black man. We’re chatting as we await our flights. He’s Ricky Williams, a former National Football League superhero, not to mention one of the finest astrology students I’ve ever had.

We’re in the early stages of a budding friendship, so I feel safe asking him a question that’s been eating at me. I told him that I realized that I might have been blinded by one of the many prejudices that plague modern society, one that was in this case only partly racial. I was surprised that someone with his professional football background was so deeply drawn to astrology. Cutting to the chase, I asked him what percentage of his former teammates might also be interested in “celestial influences.”

Without missing a beat, Ricky said “zero.”

In more ways than one, Ricky Williams is one of a kind. He may be one of the greatest athletes of his generation, but you name the cliche and he violates it.

Not long before that scene in Calabria, I’d met Ricky for the first time. He had signed up for the big annual NORWAC conference in Seattle, partly because he knew I’d be speaking there. I believe this was May 2015. Ricky loomed up out of the throngs in the lobby. I’d never been much of a sports fan, but I had no doubt who I was looking at. Immediately – and without thinking – I said my first words to him: please don’t hurt me.

I’m still not sure where those words came from, but as strange as they might sound, they actually fit the needs of the moment perfectly. Saying “please don’t hurt me” cut through the surface appearance of things – this was, after all, a very large Black man who could have picked me up and tossed me over a set of goal posts! My family was not racist, but I have no illusions about the effects of being born White in 1949 in a racist society. Anyone of any color who claims to be immune to all of that probably hasn’t looked at themselves very honestly or deeply.

All of those dark projections may reflect what many people saw when they looked at Ricky, but I knew instinctively that they were many miles from who he actually was – or is. Even more importantly, I think Ricky could see that I could see it. Saying “please don’t hurt me” was a way of laughing at this world and all its poisonous illusions. It was also the first baby step that we took on a long road of multidimensional friendship – one that also soon led us to a shared sense of mission in this world.

Remember my Sagittarian Venus opposing Uranus? Who would have guessed that a soft-in-the-middle astrologer of the Caucasian persuasion would become astrology buddies with an Afro-American man who had earned a Heisman Trophy – one who set forty-six records while playing football at the University of Texas, then went on to set twenty-one more while playing professionally for the New Orleans Saints, the Miami Dolphins, and the Baltimore Ravens?

Even more mysteriously, who would guess that such a man would follow me all over the world mastering evolutionary astrology faster than anyone I had ever met?

ENTER LINNEA

Ricky fell in love with a commercial real estate lawyer from Los Angeles named Linnea Miron.

At his behest she attended one session of a synastry class I offered in Calistoga, California – somewhat reluctantly I believe. She quickly caught the astrology bug.

Not long after that class, I taught another version of it in Alpine, California. There were probably sixty or seventy people in attendance. Toward the end of the class, I “randomly” drew names of class members from a hat for a demo of the principles I’d been teaching. Out came Ricky and Linnea – see why I put quotation marks around “randomly?”

I think everyone who attended that class will remember the final scene that day. It was May 21, 2017. I invited Ricky and Linnea up onto the stage to share their reactions to what I’d said about the astrological dimensions of their relationship. Ricky sat in my big chair, with Linnea on his (big) lap, and they both raved about the work.

The next thing I knew they had proposed that we build a cell phone app together based on the principles of evolutionary astrology as I had developed them. That meeting happened on January 28, 2018 and it was the birth of our LILA project. If you’re interested, search the Apple Store or the Google Play Store for “Lila Astrology.” There’s a free version of the app and a deeper paid version. A fan once said that “it’s like having Steven Forrest in your pocket.” That feels a little weird to me, but I guess it’s about right.

Here’s an example of the content:

I’ve done all the writing in LILA. In total, I suspect it’s already about three books-worth of text, and it’s still growing. I think it’s the best astrology app out there, at least for grown-ups. I absolutely could not have done it without Ricky and Linnea. I have the necessary astrological knowledge and I can write, but when it comes to tech, I’m Mister Stegosaurus. Ricky and Linnea filled that gap. They also pulled together a crackerjack development team, covered the finances – and in so doing, they basically made a place for me in the 21st century.

I remember sitting in Emeril’s Delmonico restaurant in the summer of 2017 with Ricky, Linnea, and my partner Michelle. This was on Saint Charles Avenue in New Orleans, so inevitably Ricky was recognized – his time playing for the Saints had turned him into a local icon. For a while, he could have run for mayor in that town. It was there in that elegant restaurant that Ricky and Linnea shared a secret with us. Michelle and I were among the first to know that they had gotten married. The wedding happened on June 23, 2017 – just one month after that life-changing synastry class in Alpine. Fortunately, I was mindful enough to whip out my cell phone and immortalize the moment.

On June 1, 2021, they had a baby. His name is Sol Forrest Miron and I figure someday he’ll be a pal of mine too.

Here’s a shot of Sol looking at the statue of his dad at the University of Texas, Austin. I can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking.

RICKY’S CHART

As you probably already imagine, astrologically Ricky Williams is a complicated man. He was born in San Diego on May 21, 1977 at 1:57PM. Here’s his chart.

A deep dive into Ricky’s birthchart is beyond the scope of this short essay. Suffice to say that he embodies the essence of evolutionary astrology. By that, I don’t just mean that his chart fits him. Everybody’s chart fits them! What I mean is that Ricky is living his actual evolutionary path as it is reflected in his chart. People are free to respond to their charts in a variety of fashions, some wiser than others. Ricky is getting it right.

Football players are warriors, of course, and naturally that invokes the symbolism of Mars and Aries, which Ricky has in abundance, but it is his lunar south node that really tells the deeper story. Mars conjunct an Aries south node in the “house of death” – one could hardly ask for a fiercer karmic fingerprint. Yet Venus is there, so love is part of the story too. Then there’s that Cancer Moon squaring both Mars and Venus. The thing he could not get around – the unresolved, inescapable vexation in that prior life – was love again, but this time, reflecting the Cancer Moon, it’s the love of family.

Imagine the emotional poverty of having no one in your life for whom you would willingly die. That’s the polar opposite of Ricky’s karmic story here. Think of the dramatic words, “I would die for you.” In a passionate moment, we might say them and mean them sincerely, but the astrological evidence suggests that, unlike for most of us, Ricky experienced a prior life in which those brave words were “talk” that he actually had to “walk.”

And he did. And I suspect he died in the process. Life is sometimes grievously unfair.

Here’s the underlying point: that fierce loyalty and that frustrated rage were both reborn in him. Yet his evolutionary goal in this life as symbolized by his Libran north node, lies in finding two things: inner peace and love that lasts. In this life, his soul-intention is to grow old with someone he loves. He’s the Warrior who is ready to release his attachment to the endless battle. Ricky’s birth marked the beginning of his monumental spiritual task: letting it all go. The last thing he needed in this life was the lies about “blood and glory” that angry old men tell young impressionable boys – or, I suspect, that football coaches tell their running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers.

Still, like all of us, when karma ripens, we see the same situations reappearing in our present lives. That’s how it works. Ricky had said to the universe, “set it up again, I want another look at it. I think I can do it differently this time” – hence those football coaches and those brutal life-and-death battles on the gridiron.

Google “Ricky Williams” and you can easily find videos of him flying through the air carrying a football in what is obviously a battle. When it comes to warriors, professional athletes are the cream of the crop – and Ricky was the cream on top of them all.

And he walked away from it all to become a healer – a process which had to start with healing himself. That’s really the aim of all evolutionary astrologers. Embodying the highest expression of our field, he is living his chart as a path, not just as a “personality profile.” Once again, that’s the way we “walk our talk” in this branch of astrology.

A WORKSHOP

For years, Ricky and I have been talking about teaching a live class together. That is finally going to happen. It will unfold over this coming Halloween weekend in the little southern California desert town where Michelle and I live – Borrego Springs. It will be called Living With the Shadow. We’ll limit attendance to about sixty people. If you feel moved to think about joining us, here’s a link with all the details:

https://www.lilaverse.app/events/living-with-shadow-weekend-retreat

If it feels right, I hope to see you there.

You might enjoy hanging out in our back yard too . . . Borrego Springs is in the middle of the vast Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.