just how, pray tell, do we lift the anvil from our chest and drag the shipwrecks from our belly? Because they sure as shit are not sparking joy, their interminable weight crushing our optimism and flattening fresh hope. Letting go, like healing, is a moment to moment wonder. Suddenly it drops or lifts, shifts or evaporates and you wonder how you dragged it around for so long.

One of my most brilliant teachers, a rakish afficionado of high school history, taught me two most important life lessons. The first was critical thinking: that it is crucial not to slavishly believe what you have had plopped in front of you. The second was to remember your history because as he proved to us ad infinitum: those who refuse to remember their history are condemned to repeat it.

So how's that whole Pluto Mars thing playing out for you? Still climbing towards tomorrow's torrid peak, well may we feel our cells rearranging. Today is an echo of a glitch from way back in the second week of March's retrograde, cunningly setting the scene for our wide eyed here and now. Ping back to see clearly, Merc's ongoing rx party favour.

Pluto's grind is here again as the dark lord of our underworld turns retrograde in Capricornia. Only five months to go. Unlike other rx's where we get to slow down, this actually amps Pluto's unholy purpose: to create the kind of chaos that forces us into our dark corners. We are transformed finding our way out. His retrograde takes us deeper and holds us under longer.

If you needed a million fabulous examples of the weekend's agitating astrology engendering very real positive change, here it is. Here they all are and there's plenty more where they came from. Kids forged by homegrown terror and trauma alchemising their pain into take no prisoners advocacy. They are reshaping a braver new world.

If you are waiting for this tetchy energy to subside, we have a few more days to go yet. This ongoing power struggle between Captain Chaos himself (Pluto) and our cosmic enlarger (Jupiter) is peaking all this week, having first smashed into our lives last November.

This is a trigger warning, darklings. And not just your particular flavour when the gun is cocked, oh my word no. Today is an across the board recipe for blown tops, epic frustration and the kind of sandpaper niggling that shreds even the thickest of skins.

When Uncle Pluto crashes the party, the ripples are tectonic. This no holds barred change agent employs chaos and disorder as his primary missile system, smacking his lips as our shadowselves come out to play. None of us are immune to his influence, though not all of us are charmed by his rumblings.

This guy is a walking community service announcement for the back end of this particular eclipse season and we all have Uncle Mars to thank for this. Our planet of Get Shit Done can fast turn into a war mongering trail of destruction when engaged the wrong way.

The next day or so represents the final slam of a series of direct astrological hits between Pluto (why hello chaos and destruction) and Uranus (agent of lightning change) whose sole purpose has been a tilt shift of epic proportions. Since the middle of 2012 we have been running at speed at this wall (or hurled by the hand of our own personal Jesus).