Try as we might it is nigh on impossible to ignore the siren song of the shadowlands when it keens to you. All this shedding year and well before it, shadows bigger than just the wayward facsimiles of tender selves and past participles, the vaster kind we pretend are not ours too.

Anzac Day and we wake before dawn. A nation of sharply divided loyalties lighting candles and wandering to shrines in the half light to honour. Alone together we observe in rare silence the sacrifice of those who came before us. Who endured war and hardship, trials by fire and unfathomable loss of life. We feel the thread of connection that tugs deep within and imagine what we see in the news in our backyards as we pale by comparison.

Counting the minutes to this month's dark moon, she who will deliver us beyond our first eclipse season of the year and slingshot us towards the future. After a rampant season of retrograde designed to shift the hold of the past, this seismic new moon operates like a deep space pulse that will ricochet through our worlds. The Taurus new moon incoming is heavily aspected by design and some incredible cosmic geometry is already taking shape.

The online inversion of our shadow, lightwashed for those looking for cheat codes to their underworld, isn't working. There are none but there is just so much more to authentic shadow work, the kind that changes lives and communities. Any wilful refusal to partipate in unspooling the cultural shadows that hold our worlds stuck at the crossroads of evolution is not everybody else's fault.

Taurus season hits different as the wagging tail end of eclipse season, just a week and change to go. Now grounding our freshest initiations into the body by reconnecting us deeply to the realm of our many senses. Here what we feel inside translates as bespoke wisdom for sentient beings coded for nature and wired for ground.

The world we inhabit is built on cycles of life and death and rebirth. We bear witness through unseeing eyes to the rise and fall and return of the moon, the tides, the seasons, our bodies. Yet resurrection remains a brutal story from a book we read once that we think bears no resemblance to our lives; to be observed with a toss of the head or chocolate bunnies.

There are moments in our lives that are portals. Quantum leaps we make effortlessly that shunt our reality from here to so far over there. The most recent eclipse season was such an animal, brimming with shadow and light. Often it is only with the passage of time and hindsight that it begins to make sense. We feel precisely how our worlds have tipped on their axis. We accept that nothing will ever be the same. We recalibrate.

I can hear a whisper, deep beneath the clatter and smash of the overworld. Finally far enough away to be struck in the middle of the quiet forest, in the still of the bright moon, in the shadows and grief that now walk boldly as stewards of evolution.

Spend a dreamy Wednesday eve in lovely bush surrounds as Kerrie transports us with her storytelling. Working at the intersection of imagination, creativity and the magical arts, together we will journey into realms of mystery and enchantment.

There's quite a full moon on the rise already and we're feeling a familiar ratchet. This usually lovely Libran peak is the first in what feels like forever that has not been an eclipse. Though we are still in the ebbing tide of that mad season, this full moon will rise from beyond it to deliver punchlines and spotlights on all that has been quaked and shifted.

Though Venus may have been out of sight since she slipped back across the border into Pisces, her retrograde influence has been working steadily below ground. In the darkest recesses of our hearts and its deepest hidden chambers, tendrils like acrid smoke seeping into the locked boxes stacked behind the thumping.

I attended and hosted Kerri Basha’s Imaginal Playground. And let me tell you: it was nothing short of astounding.

I went in curious. I came out cracked open. Yes, I learned things. Deep things. But more than that, I felt things—emotions I’d nearly forgotten how to have. Not performative catharsis. Not spiritual bypassing dressed up in gauze and glitter. I mean the kind of raw, unfiltered feeling that makes you question whether you’ve been living in grayscale and someone finally turned the saturation up to eleven.

Kerrie Basha took me—and others—on an imaginal journey as part of the Women of Wisdom 25 Summit. Not the soft, feathered kind, but the kind that waits until your back is turned before it slices you clean through. The point of the journey was to meet your oracle. Not just any oracle—yours—the one that has waited just out of reach, behind veils of thought and breath.

I've never understood the cynicism that exists towards magical thinking. While realists and pessimists cry into their coffee and rationalists claim to only believe in what they can prove or debunk, there are those of us who cultivate a deep and abiding relationship to the imaginal.

In the crowded hullabaloo of last weekend's epic apocal'eclipse, it was not easy to discern what was torrenting through our worlds. Many streams of influence converged to drag us all across the threshold of before and after. This period of time will be the passage generations to come will look back on to see the split, the place where history cleaved and the past's grip loosened its hold on the future.

April fools are some of my favourite pagans. The term a quaint shaming that dates back to the 16th century when annual inception was pushed from Spring back into midwinter by cardinals with other designs on power.

Tonight without leaving my bed I make my pilgrimage to the darkest corner of the forest. The shadow of black granite rises to pierce the rumbling sky. I do not let the chill in my bones slow my determined progress. I drag the ache in my heart behind me as I place my well worn doll into the empty chamber for safekeeping.

The dark moon shroud has settlled deeply upon us. Even as we feel the weight of the rampaging Aries eclipse taking shape, we still have blessed hours left in the balsam of the dark. Here may we tie a final bow on much of the unholy madness and mayhem ready to be left behind.