As a tarot reader I will forever be enchanted by what the cards reveal. More than the answers to your most vexing questions and beyond their ability to sniff the future on the breeze.

If you are mainlining ripples of dreamy fluidity and drifting melancholia in the matrix, you are well tuned in to the music of the spheres. Last Sunday Mercury dived deep into Pisces where our winged messenger will remain submerged until early April. His long surrealist soujourn will include his first retrograde of this year, just a fortnight away.

This week is a warm up in every sense with Mars dominating the outer reaches of Aries. Next week we enter a period of epochal change overflowing with once in a lifetime seismic shifts. The kind that tilt worlds and herald revolution. But first Uncle Mars is having his way with us, offering the kind of life coaching that is low on saccharine and heavy on imperative. All the better to set a fire beneath us.

You know by now darklings that I never send you hurtling towards potential astrofuquery without a strategy. Our twisted firestarter is throwing his significant weight around this week. See post below for why this isn't a terrible thing. See list below for what to do when Mars attacks.

Fool's gold glistens and seduces us because we want so badly to believe it is real. It speaks to the true nature of our desires. Most dreadfully, to our willingness to be duped in our ardent pursuit of them. Under pressure, its true nature is revealed. It never passes any real test and will fail as many times as you let it.

In the face of lifequaking transformation and the quite frankly unholy methods the multiverse has been reefing out of its bag o' tricks to shake rattle and roll us, it has been all too easy to overlook the balm of Taurus season.

If you collapsed just before (or on) the full moon finish line, you still made it. That makes every day of your life in a row you survived, which is an impressive consecutive effort and one of which you can be very proud.

We have a blessed few unaspected days in front of us now, astrospeak for drop your weapons.

Often the only way we ever make necessary changes and tweaks to our operating system, is to first endure a period of deep discomfort. Everything begins to turn to shit. We react and overreact and scramble. We lose something, sometimes all the things, we hold dear. We make poor choices and bad decisions in the fray. We hurt the people we're trying desperately to hold close. The rot sets in.

Our full moon mere moments from her peak is in curious aspect with her lunar nodes. These hypothetical markers that gate our past and future. This is your life, held fast between the two.

Depth charge anyone? Tis nearly time to dance with your darkness in the pale moonlight, if you have not already been occupying the shadowlands as a lifestyle of late. The incoming Scorpio full moon is built on ruthless regeneration provided you can live and let die.

And so we tip and the wheel creaks around again. Samhain and the Scorpio full moon, Pluto and Lilith, mayhem and transformation.

Welcome to your underworld. Samhain falls after the Autumn Equinox and before the Winter Solstice, traditionally marking the end of harvest and the descent into deep, dark Winter.

There is a palpable easing in the air and the ebbing is balm indeed. The dark arts supertroop marched us right to the edge, bless 'em, and despite all the wobbling we were not lost.

Transformation, the goring death and laboured rebirth, is a messy business. And in the thick of it, as we be now and for months to come, still nothing is fixed. This rolling transition has many faces yet unseen and greater depths to terrify and dazzle us.

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.

By way of antidote to the incendiary quake zone that was Aries season, now may we rest in the realm of the little bull. Ordinarily a luxe zone of sensual delights, we bypass pleasure for treasure with so much at stake as the sun stamps his entry into Taurus.

This week I had lunch with a wise man, one I consider to be master of his thoughts. I was shocked to learn his life had not been the zen lens practice it appears from the outside. He told me instead how the tiniest disagreement or harsh word would derail him, plummeting him into a fight or flight mode that saw him spend days isolated and spinning in his own head, plotting his escape and fleeing from his own life.

Because the flux zone is not shaking or stirring us enough - and we're really only moments into the process that is playing games with us until June - today we welcome the lightning rod that is the Sun and Uranus, shoulder to shoulder at the tail end of Aries. Thunder is rumbling and the air is crackling, the light shifting with the impending storm.