Why I Flew 4,000 Miles to Spend My ‘Solar Return’ in Alaska

I’m deep in an Alaskan forest halfway through an 8K race when I find myself alone. Above me, 100-foot spruces bend and bellow, set upon by wind so loud I mistake it for an airplane. Below me, a slushy, icy mess of a trail.

Ahead of me — no one.

It’s a drizzly November morning. My clothes are wet with rain and my fingers and toes hurt from the cold. I look down at my black running shoes, willing them to move faster. They don’t.

I can no longer see the two women I followed for the first half of the run, and I imagine the gap widening. Then I picture myself on a map: a speck some 4,000 miles away from my home in South Florida. I see my 7-year-old daughter’s chubby cheeks and dirty blond curls, my 5-year-old son with his thumb in his mouth.

“I’m going to die here, alone,” I think. In the past, I never had thoughts like this. I was all swagger: Back when I lived in Jerusalem, I ran on isolated trails in the forest almost every afternoon. But since filing for divorce in August, I’ve become fearful of being alone. And being in Alaska — with its vastness, the way it dangles, lonely, at the edge of the continent — has only magnified those feelings.

I try to catch up with the women, but I’m tapped out, No. 12 in a field of a dozen. I worry: What if everyone finishes and goes home? I don’t have my phone; there will be no way for me to call for help.

And then I ask myself: Why did I come all the way to Alaska on the advice of a total stranger, to chase something I’m not even sure I believe in — an astrological event called a solar return?

Tilting the stars in your favor

A solar return takes place at the moment when the sun returns to exactly the same location in the sky where it was at the time of your birth, explained Julia Mihas, a San Francisco-based astrologer. This usually takes place every year on or near your birthday.

The thinking behind solar return trips is that just as the place where you’re born has an impact on your birth chart — which supposedly reveals major themes in your life story — so can the place where you spend your solar return affect the year ahead. In essence, an astrologer, using your yearly chart, searches for the place where the stars will be most auspicious at the moment of your solar return, and then you travel to that location. It’s like hacking your horoscope.

These trips, known as aimed solar returns, or A.S.R.s, are central to an approach called active astrology, which holds that you can intervene in…