A past return

Your Solar Return

The annual renewal of vitality, purpose, and direction.

Exact on August 13, 2025.

At age 89.0.

The cycle it opened ran about 12 months, from August 13, 2025 until the next Solar Return on August 14, 2026.

This return marked a threshold in your relationship to your own worth, what you owned, what you valued, what you were willing to claim as yours. The Sun’s return to its natal degree always opens a fresh cycle; this one landed in your second house, the domain of possession and self-value, making the year fundamentally about reckoning with what mattered.

The rising sign of this return chart was Cancer, giving the whole period a protective, introspective tone. You were not expansive outward; you were tending something. Meanwhile, your return Moon sat in Aries in the tenth house, the public sphere, suggesting that your emotional life ran counter to what the world saw. Where others might have perceived you as bold or pioneering in your work or reputation, you were likely feeling something rawer, more vulnerable, more urgent inside.

The era’s backdrop made this especially acute. Saturn was grinding directly on both your nodal axis, the soul’s axis, retrograde and exacting. Pluto opposed your natal Mars simultaneously. This was not a year of easy forward motion. This was a year when old patterns of assertion and desire were being systematically dismantled, when the structures you’d relied on were asking you to prove their worth. Chiron’s contact to your natal Pluto deepened the wound: you were learning where your power had been fractured.

This was likely a time of necessary contraction, of sorting what was truly yours from what you’d inherited or assumed. The lessons were hard. They still are: you learned then that value cannot be rushed, and that what endures is what you choose to keep.

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 13, 2025 to August 14, 2026, about 12 months.

Cast for the return moment, relocated to El Paso.

Rising: Sagittarius 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; Sagittarius is optimistic, honest, adventurous; the 1st house is self, appearance, first impressions.
The returning Sun: 9th house philosophy, higher education, travel 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: Aries · 5th 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; Aries is adventurous, energetic, courageous; the 5th house is creativity, romance, children.
Midheaven: Virgo 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; Virgo is analytical, helpful, hardworking; the 10th house is career, reputation, authority.
On the angles: North Node on the Imum Coeli The loudest placements in the chart: a body sitting on one of its four corners shapes the cycle more than its position alone would suggest.

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 9th house (philosophy, higher education, travel), 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 Saturn ℞ square your natal North Node · 0.2° Saturn tightens, tests, and asks what is built to last, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your North Node. North Node is your evolutionary pull and the qualities you are stretching toward in this life and sits in your 1st house, Self, Appearance, First Impressions. Saturn, the one making the contact, is structure, discipline, boundaries, lessons that mature over time.
transiting Saturn ℞ square your natal South Node · 0.2° Saturn tightens, tests, and asks what is built to last, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your South Node. South Node is your accumulated past patterns and talents that feel easy but can keep you stagnant and sits in your 7th house, Partnerships, Marriage, One-on-One Relationships. Saturn, the one making the contact, is structure, discipline, boundaries, lessons that mature over time.
transiting Pluto ℞ opposition your natal Mars · 0.4° Pluto strips a thing back to what it really is, facing it from across the chart, a push-pull that asks for balance, 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. Pluto, the one making the contact, is power, purification, shadow work, deep cycles of ending and renewal.
transiting Chiron ℞ square your natal Pluto · 0.6° Chiron presses on the old wound so it can teach, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your Pluto. Pluto is power, purification, shadow work, deep cycles of ending and renewal 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.