Solar Return
This week I turned 34.
It’s not a milestone birthday - unless you figure surviving your Jesus Year to be a milestone - but it feels somehow significant anyway.
I have an image in my mind of my four-year-old self. She is running full speed, barefoot, with hair made of sunshine and wind. She is joyful. Free. I don’t know if this is a memory or a fancy, but I know it is True. Even now, as I write, I am laughing and crying at the image of her in my mind.
I must return to her.
In astrology, the term, “Solar Return” references the return of the stars and sun to the place they were at your birth … aka your birthday. It’s a lovely thing to lean into the consistency of the earth, of the universe … to know that God moves us through cycles familiar and yet somehow new.
I like the term, “Solar Return.” I like the poetry of it, the beauty. But in my mind it’s not about celestial bodies coming back to ME. Rather, it is ME turning back to the sun. Turning back to warmth. Turning back to light.
Turning back to the child whose laugh rang with freedom and who carried the very universe within her.
I could end this here, and wouldn’t that be nice? A short, cheerful, inoffensive post that lets a reader nod in agreement and then move on. Yes, we should all get in touch with our inner child. How nice. Did I remember to put coffee on the grocery list?
(I did not, indeed, remember to put coffee on the grocery list. Whoops.)
I could leave this as an image presented with a smile designed to distract from the heavy weights I carry with me.
I am very good at that: Look at this shiny picture. Isn’t it hopeful and lovely? Just don’t look at this pile of things behind me.
The old luggage, tattered and worn from age and use, holding inside it the identities put upon me from others, that somehow I decided to claim as my own. Overweight. Fat. Too loud. Too sensitive. TOO MUCH.
The dark, inky, black box of tar - shoved upon me by someone who didn’t think my boundaries applied to him. 10 months later, when he reappeared (thankfully online rather than in person), he wouldn’t even get a warning from the police officer who told me that, “someone forcing you to have sex with them is a red flag,” and that “this is why you shouldn’t date online. But don’t worry. You’re a pretty girl. You’ll find someone soon enough.”
There’s a garden patch there, too. It’s beautiful, but the roots are all tangled. In it, church and family have become so intertwined that I can’t tell if I’m staying put because I want to or because it would hurt too much to uproot myself.
There are more boxes in the pile. But to list them now feels too much, and would somehow present an untrue image of myself. There is a stack of things behind me, but I am not overwhelmed by it. Perhaps down the road I’ll shed more light on more boxes, but this is enough for this day.
Many years ago I had a dream, one which has been playing through my mind a lot of late. In it, I picked my way through the ruins of what was once a house. I knew - in that way we all know things to be true in dreams - that the house had been mine. Once pristine and beautiful, it was now exploded, reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble. A glint caught my eye, and I picked up a shard of glass: a piece of mirror large enough to reflect back at me. When I saw my reflection I was surprised, and yet … somehow not. I knew it to be true. The face looking back at me in the mirror was not my own.
It was a lioness.
Somehow, I think she and the little girl with bare feet and wild hair are one and the same.
I would love to be able to say that I have it all figured out. That I know how to let go of the boxes that pull me down and how to build on the others that lift me up. But to say so would be a lie, and I’m not about that. All I know is that I am tired of being at war with myself - with my mind, my body, my spirit.
And so 34 is my Solar Return, whatever that ends up looking like. A journey of trust and courage, to turn back to warmth, back to light, back to the me with wild, windy, sunshiny hair.