Astrology's GOAT

My parents were married in the late 1960's and spent part of their honeymoon watching a baseball double header at Old Crosley Field in Cincinnati Ohio. The timing works out to suggest I owe some semblance of gratitude to baseball for my current existence.

You might say I was born into baseball.

Astrology is a different story.

My parents had to make a significant road trip north, to celebrate their new marriage in the grand metropolis of Cincinnati. Given the small pond they departed from in the south, a weekend in Cincinnati was a fairly exotic affair.

Back at home, that small pond hid it's Astrologers well.

It was a lovely setting in which to experience childhood but I must confess that I skeedadled past the county boundaries at first opportunity. I laid a bunt down the 3rd base line, dropped my head and ran for first base like my life depended on it.

I wanted to see Cincinnati myself! And why stop there? I could really stretch my legs and maybe even see Sheboygan! The world was my oyster and I was ready to see The Show!

Yet it would be twenty more years, a shift into a new century and a lot of traveling in the wider world before Astrology made a formal introduction to my conscious awareness.

You could say I was born into baseball and stumbled into Astrology rounding second.

It was a central casting set up. A summer evening in 2006 and a chance astrology reading at a Route 66 roadside motel framed in neon. The Astrologer was gifted and kind. The reading was not an Evolutionary Astrology reading but it got my attention. In fact it blew my mind.

I was hooked. I started hanging out in metaphysical stores with my ball cap pulled down low; forever worrying that a hidden psychic was going to jump out at me from the endcap. Nothing against psychics. I was just trying to learn the language. I was going at it incognito like - which made sense when I learned that I was Scorpio Rising. This also explained my fondness for cemeteries.

But, a lot of what I learned early on, was rather discouraging. Lots of folks tattering on with frightening predictions of doom, divorce and disease. Or conversely, star blessed promises of freedom from worry and life's burdens, whose secret ingredient always seemed to include abdication of all personal responsibility.

This banter seemed more like a hook or a shameless sales pitch. It just wasn't what I was seeking. It kinda started to get under my skin too. Around this same time I learned that I had a Virgo Moon.

Now doom might be a matter of perspective but divorce and disease are real occurrences. So are about a million other difficulties life can throw at us as we make our way along the dusty trail.

The trail is a trial.

Life can be a dark playground. There are losing seasons.

Who among us cares to dispute such claims?

But, life is also a thing to be celebrated at every opportunity. Sometimes we make the playoffs. Such are the opposites that seek to be reconciled in a lifetime.

Thing is, I didn't need an astrology chart to clarify that life could get dark and I'd never had much trouble finding reasons to celebrate.

So, in the early going it was sort of hit or miss. I was also reluctant to move along with it too fast. Astrology had to chase me down and corner me to get my attention. I had to take my time and be slowly led to it in many ways. I knew I was a Taurus Sun of course but I was starting to actually feel what that meant.

I did learn enough to understand that I had just survived a significant astrological transit called a Pluto square. I had also just started shaking off sleep enough to understand that I needed to unpack this Pluto business post haste. It just didn't feel like I was going to get very far by sitting around dreading my next Saturn transit or trying to predict the next looming crisis.

I didn't need to know when things were going to happen necessarily. It's nice to have an umbrella in your satchel when it looks like rain and all that - but what was the larger purpose? I didn't need fast answers, I was looking for a way to ask better questions.

Synchronistically, two books crossed the desk of my awareness during this time.

One was the spiritual classic, I Am That, a collection of talks given by Nisargadatta Maharaj.

I also came across a book by an astrologer who changed the whole game for me. The book is called The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest. A spiritual classic in its own right.

I had started to become feverishly curious around the notion, that the only way forward was inward. I was growing suspicious that the inner and outer had some kind of connection that I had never even noticed. I also discovered my North Node was in Pisces.

It is hard to describe the contours of what bubbles up around this sort of curiosity. It can be tricky to find someone else, who has been able put language to that process, that also personally resonates.

But, I had found a couple of good coaches. Both of these teachers spoke that language and their teachings began to fill up the majority of my free time. I started to feel like I had been drafted by the right team.

My Astrological studies got focused.

It almost seemed like Steven Forrest had walked right out of The Inner Sky and we started playing a game of catch. It was clear that this cat was All-Star caliber.

I once did some reading around the early evolution of the catcher position in baseball. It may provide an apt metaphor for the Evolutionary Astrology approach.

During the period in baseball that followed the end of the Civil War, the pitches were getting faster. Catchers were required more and more to move in on the plate and block the ball.

They continued blocking these pitches despite the increased velocity, with their hands!

Some sainted genius had invented the catchers mitt but a sort of brazen machismo still existed among the catching cohorts and many of them refused to use the mitts.

Maybe rawhide seemed an innocuous threat to the catchers who had returned from the war?

Regardless-

The photographs of catchers fingers from this period are gruesome.

Reading The Inner Sky was like the precious gift of a new mitt, given to a catcher, who was tired of looking at his own dislocated fingers. The pitches are still going to come. Fastballs, curveballs and all the rest but now we have some padding.

However, the padding doesn't protect us from the pitch if we don't know how to catch the ball in the first place. That adventure quickly travels from the Island of Broken Fingers to The Land Of Missing Teeth, padding or no padding.

The Inner Sky had me covered there too.

Beyond helping me stave off digit destruction - it offered advice on how to catch the ball and even how to - Frame The Pitch.

Pitch framing was a technique that became a part of catching philosophy at the turn of the 21st century in baseball. The basic idea was to teach catchers that catching the ball was not the end point of their job.

They were taught to move with the pitch and help guide it to the location it was targeting. A cutter thrown to the outside corner was not to be met with padding and stopped - but instead - the catcher was meant to move with the pitch and help guide it to its preferred location.

Part of this approach was to convince the umpire's eyes, that the ball indeed went where it was intended. A strike was a strike, if it looked like a strike. Crafty backstops could create the illusion of a perfect pitch, using a flowing set of movements that resembled the moving meditation of Tai Chi forms.

But far from being just some sort of attempt to bamboozle the ump - it was a very zen-like way of trying to learn to move with the ball.

Evolutionary Astrology has a similar objective. Learning how to move with the rhythm of the zodiac. Teaching ourselves how to get set up behind the cosmic plate, so that we have a chance of catching the ball and even helping it stay in the strike zone.

It's the funniest thing but the ball doesn't have a personal agenda. It's just following its path. Same is true of a Pluto Square. It ain't personal. But when that pitch runs off the plate and smacks into your ribs, it sure as hell feels personal.

We all know what that feels like.

The question might arise, so who is throwing the pitch?

Good question.

But lets slow down.

I might wanna write another one of these things and there is no need to be in a rush.

Besides, anybody who pops off an answer to that question with any confidence, should give us all pause.

In fact, if you're in too big of a hurry, baseball probably isn't the sport for and astrology isn't a speed read either. It's a process. We are all tired of hearing that phrase but in the case of astrology - it is simply true.

I'd say that it is worth the effort of participating creatively in that process by expanding our conscious awareness around the archetypal energies that make up the mandala of our natal charts.

A simpler way of saying it - Its worth showing up to practice.

There are endless amounts of things to discover and celebrate within the natal chart. Honest reflection on any area of the chart brings immediate results. Plus, learning to move with a difficult aspect in the chart, beats the hell out of it smashing ya right in the kisser.

Learning how to decode our charts helps us develop an intuitiveness around moving with the ball. The learning curve isn't as steep as you might think and there is no better place to start than with The Inner Sky.

Ponder Astrology enthusiastically recommends all of Steven Forrest's work.

This recommendation honors Ponder Astrology more than him of course.

Steven Forrest is a super star in many astrological circles. His mastery and genius are well known to many outside those circles. He has been celebrated by some of the most well known among us. He also has the distinction of being a co-creator of the Evolutionary Astrology system. But perhaps most importantly he is a wise and profound Soul Teacher.

The Greatest Of All Time?

I wouldn't dare stick my head into a South Side Chicago bar and yell, "Frank Thomas is a bum!"

No siree.

Folks can get all kinds of worked up about their heroes.

But if you ask me what I really think. Just between us -

Who is Astrology's GOAT?

I dunno, maybe it's a silly question.

Unless you know the answer.

Caps Off to Steven Forrest!

Perpetually Pondering,

Joey