Best way to know you are in shadowy territory? You can't make it all add up. There are holes in your position you could drive a bus through. It's not working anymore. Because everything becomes business under capitalism - just ask organised religion - we all have a glaring stinking problem in the whitewashed West. Find it at the intersection of spirituality, capitalism and abundance.

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.

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.

Mere moments into Merc's retrograde wend through the Aries minefield and already the masks are slipping off. The first week of this regular renegade transit delivers secrets, lies and rippling revelation.

Not any journey to the shadowlands is a sunshiney walk in the park but all are undeniably worthy and transformative, a revolution within. When we accept the result is guaranteed - and my darklings it unequivocably is - we are better able to submit to the process itself. All of its many twists and turns, its great pain and even greater healing, its stunning capacity for teaching and understanding our sweet self.