A past return

Your Solar Return

The annual renewal of vitality, purpose, and direction.

Exact on August 14, 2018.

At age 82.0.

The cycle it opened ran about 12 months, from August 14, 2018 until the next Solar Return on August 14, 2019.

This return marked a threshold: the Sun completing its annual orbit and beginning a fresh cycle, carrying with it the larger currents moving through your life at that moment.

The Rising of this return chart in Libra set the tone as one of balance-seeking and deliberation. You were learning to weigh things carefully, to consider multiple sides. Yet the returning Sun landed in the 11th house, the realm of friendships, groups, and aspirations, placing the year’s central energy squarely in your social world and your sense of belonging to something larger than yourself. This was a cycle about community, about where you fit, about which people and causes genuinely aligned with who you were becoming.

The return Moon in Virgo, tucked in the 12th house, told a quieter story beneath the surface. Your emotional weather that year was introspective, discerning, even restless, a need to sort through inner complexity, to understand what you truly believed rather than what you’d inherited or assumed. The Midheaven in Cancer suggested your public presence was softening, becoming more protective of what mattered, less concerned with external achievement for its own sake.

The wider sky was turbulent. Uranus pressing directly on your natal Mars (retrograde) was destabilizing your sense of agency and desire itself. Neptune opposing your natal Neptune, supported by Jupiter, created a disorienting yet expansive fog around your ideals, you were questioning what you’d once believed in, yet simultaneously opening to something larger. Chiron’s harmony with Mars offered a gentler thread: the possibility of healing old wounds around assertion and autonomy.

This was likely a year of necessary unraveling, of friendships tested, ideals questioned, and a slow, painful clarification of what you actually wanted versus what you thought you should want. The lessons settled deep.

About The Solar Return

Your Solar Return marks the moment the transiting Sun returns to its exact natal position, your astrological birthday. Astrologers cast a fresh chart for that moment, relocated to wherever you'll spend the year ahead, to read the themes of the coming twelve months. Each Solar Return chart functions as a year-in-miniature forecast: a new rising sign, new planetary placements, new aspects, different territory than the year before. Once a year, every year.

The Return Chart, At A Glance

This is the chart of the return itself: the whole sky at the moment your Sun came back to the spot it held at birth. It describes the cycle that opens, not you as a person, and the birth chart underneath it does not change. That cycle runs from August 14, 2018 to August 14, 2019, about 12 months.

Cast for the return moment, relocated to El Paso.

Rising: Aries Sets the tone of the whole cycle: how this stretch of time tends to go about things. In any chart, Rising is your outward manner and first impression; the mask and lens through which you meet the world; Aries is adventurous, energetic, courageous; the 1st house is self, appearance, first impressions.
The returning Sun: 5th house creativity, romance, children The part of life this whole cycle works through, where Sun does its work for the next round. In any chart, Sun is core identity, will, vitality, the drive to express your essence; Leo is confident, generous, creative.
Moon: Virgo · 6th house The emotional weather of the cycle: what it will tend to feel like from the inside. In any chart, Moon is emotional needs, instinctual responses, habits, your feeling of safety; Virgo is analytical, helpful, hardworking; the 6th house is work, service, health.
Midheaven: Capricorn What the cycle pushes forward in public: the part other people will see. In any chart, Midheaven is your public reputation, career calling, and the face you show to authority and the world at large; Capricorn is disciplined, responsible, ambitious; the 10th house is career, reputation, authority.

How this sits with your own chart. A return chart is laid over a birth chart, never swapped for it. Your Sun is still in Leo, exactly where it was at birth, and that is what makes this a return at all. What is new is the frame around it: cast for this moment, that same Sun falls in the 5th house (creativity, romance, children), so that is the part of life this cycle asks about. Everything in your birth chart stays as it is; this chart only says what the cycle ahead does with it.

The Wider Sky Then

The slow, life-shaping transits active at this return, the backdrop the reading reads against.

transiting Uranus ℞ square your natal Mars · 0.0° Uranus shakes something loose, often without warning, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your Mars. Mars is desire, courage, initiative, how you assert or pursue what you want and sits in your 8th house, Intimacy, Transformation, Shared Resources. Uranus, the one making the contact, is change, originality, awakening, where you seek freedom from limits.
transiting Neptune ℞ opposition your natal Neptune · 0.2° Neptune blurs the edges and softens certainty, facing it from across the chart, a push-pull that asks for balance, landing on your Neptune. Neptune is imagination, ideals, permeability, where reality blurs with vision and sits in your 9th house, Philosophy, Higher Education, Travel. Neptune, the one making the contact, is imagination, ideals, permeability, where reality blurs with vision.
transiting Jupiter sextile your natal Neptune · 0.5° Jupiter opens things up and asks for more room, offering an opening, if it gets taken, landing on your Neptune. Neptune is imagination, ideals, permeability, where reality blurs with vision and sits in your 9th house, Philosophy, Higher Education, Travel. Jupiter, the one making the contact, is growth, faith, opportunity, the beliefs that broaden your horizons.
transiting Chiron ℞ trine your natal Mars · 0.8° Chiron presses on the old wound so it can teach, in easy flow, so it helps more than it demands, landing on your Mars. Mars is desire, courage, initiative, how you assert or pursue what you want and sits in your 8th house, Intimacy, Transformation, Shared Resources. Chiron, the one making the contact, is the tender wound that becomes wisdom; where you heal others through your own vulnerability.