Solar Return: Appreciation

Today is my solar return. My birthday is tomorrow, but today the Sun returns to the place it occupied at the time of my birth.

This afternoon, there’s an opposition between Pluto and Mars — the third pass — squaring my natal Jupiter. I have been preparing for this moment since the buildup began last November, with another exact pass in January. These months have been a blur — so much Pisces energy: Saturn, Venus, Neptune, Mercury, the North Node, and more — washing through.

We finally had the culmination of Venus conjunct Saturn and the North Node in Pisces in the last few hours. On the 30th, Venus will meet Neptune again — but this time in Aries. This marks the end of the cycle that was so potent around Venus retrograde, while at the same time initiating a new way of appreciation, a new way of valuing from an individual, different place.

This time went really deep, and I am not sharing everything right now. I don’t think I want to share it — because it is something I want to digest.

It is something I want to live.

It is not something I say because I want to sound cool.

It is something that is very much in the bones and the breath.

Even though it seems like a blur, there is a lot of definition that came out of my journey into the dark side of Venus — into the underworld.

I sense more maturity now.

More sternness.

More measuredness.

I can barely grasp the memory of it all, but I can begin to speak about the feeling.

It feels like tension — a pressure that demands breaking away from the past, from what I know works. Taurus desires firmness and security, but I am being invited to remain in the tension of the unknown. Uranus is nearing the end of its journey through Taurus after six years, and I have learned to become more adaptable, less afraid to confront new ways.

I am curious about what new ways are coming.

Tomorrow’s New Moon calls for an altar to new ways of seeing — especially in ideas and perspectives — because it activates my third house, with the Sun, Jupiter, and Mercury there. At the same time, the tension between transiting Pluto in the twelfth house and Mars in my sixth house, close to my Ascendant and Descendant, squaring this planet, gives me a deep sense of hope and inquiry: even if I do not yet see the shape, the shape will allow itself to be formed.

In meditation, I asked: What is the purpose of these days?

Yesterday, I saw the answer: beauty, creativity, appreciation.

Today, the word is appreciation.

To appreciate. To perceive as precious. To value. To hold something as having weight, worth, presence.

I value my life. I value everything I have been doing. I value every inquiry, every step, every minute spent learning. I value every experience I live firsthand and every act of sharing that follows. I value, I value, I value.

And I will say it again:

My perfect present is to resonate, to be in tuning, only with those who appreciate their lives — and who, therefore, appreciate mine.

If they do not appreciate their own lives, they will not be able to appreciate mine, and they will not resonate with my journey from now on.

That is a sentence.