A.  The short answer is that you have one powerful year coming up. Here’s why: The solar return is a yearly chart calculated for the moment when the Sun returns to its exact birth position at the location where you’ll be spending your birthday.¹ When calculating solar return charts, some astrologers use the birth location; others use the place where the native currently lives; still others, where the birthday is actually spent. Your upcoming solar return occurs within one hour of the completion of the total eclipse of the Sun, on November 23, 2003, at 2° Sagittarius.² The eclipse occurs at 1°14' Sagittarius. Just as someone who is 1 year and 14 weeks old is in their second year, this eclipse takes place in the second degree of Sagittarius.

Total eclipses are compelling and evocative celestial events that, when contacting the natal chart, seriously ramp up the energy. Dane Rudhyar describes a solar eclipse as the past (the Moon) obscuring the present (the Sun), sometimes with karmic implications.³ Dane Rudhyar, Person Centered Astrology, Aurora Press, 1980, pp. 288-89.

I use the solar return mainly as an overlay to the birth chart. In this case, the transiting eclipse contacts your natal Sun, symbolically reconnecting you with the collective reflected powerfully in your birth chart.

Connections between personal planets (Sun through Mars) and outer planets (Jupiter through Pluto) reveal how the individual is related to the world at large. Your natal 11th-house Sagittarian Sun, in an applying, waxing square to 8th-house Uranus/Pluto, evokes your innate ability to challenge existing social structures for the betterment of humanity. Your natal Jupiter/Venus/Saturn, straddling your Ascendant, mandate your meaningful participation in the world, underlined by your 1st-house Aquarian Moon in a waxing sextile to your Sun. These birth placements challenge you and also enable you to become a force for social change, by identifying how you’ve been personally affected by society and how you want things to be different.

This solar return eclipse may set the wheels in motion for you to realize this capacity. Solar return Neptune squaring your natal Mercury/Neptune (in the 10th house) may inspire your latent activism, with the eclipse empowering you to actually get involved.

To amplify this theme further, the solar return IC conjoins natal Uranus and your progressed Moon. You are so ready to be involved with meaningful issues, and opportunities should be readily available with transiting Jupiter recently crossing natal Pluto. Have you ever considered becoming involved in politics, even running for office yourself? Entertain ideas that may seem outrageous. Be bold now! As your birthday approaches, ask yourself: “What do I deeply care about?” and “How can I make a difference?”