Cue the circus music and don your snorkel darklings because Mercury retrograde is here. I am a rabid fan of these all too regular transits for the insight, movement and creative boon they offer. Hysterical naysayers and astrodoomsday prophets, pipe down. Your control freakery is now a relic and your panic aids nothing. This entire year is built on discovering new ways to see and be and these cosmic curve balls are all part of the plan.

Dig in darklings for this is likely to be the deepest dark moon of the year. It is the deep breath in and the pause prior to the revolution. It is built on solitude and surrender and gently sifting through the detritus of the last eight years on a quest for uncommon wisdom.

Once more the anaretic degrees of fate in a curious choreography forced the break: up, down or through.

Venus leapt first, into the fresh air of Aquaria where she will remain throughout Mercury's retrograde next door. Here she stares through the lens of objectivity, a boon for tragic romantics and rose coloured fantasists everywhere. She trades her wishbone for a stronger spine and her delusions for a grandeur borne of her own heart.

The anaretic degree is the transformative portal of any sign and we're in it right now. When you see that magical 29 in a chart - of anyone or anything - you have unearthed a turning point, a harbinger of fate and an indicator of large lumpy change.

As we peer down the barrel of this week, the cosmic waves continue rolling in thick and deep and fast. Their power and beauty is cataclysmic in its execution of our new natural state. The evolution is here, darklings. This is more than a chorus. It is a no holds barred imperative.

With changeling as our default setting these heady evolutionary days, we are becoming adepts with zero time for naysayers and non believers. Today again holds quite the shift, all the better to prove our nonplussed adaptability and maintain momentum. Both of our cosmic luminaries now take centre stage. Together they glide through the powerful anaretic degree of the sign they depart, to stand tall at our next initiation point.

The icing on this week's cosmic layer cake is our impending full moon on the rise, and it's not even Wednesday yet. Her blazing gaze, magnified by proximity and purpose, peaks at the begin-again point in the house of the divine feminine healer. Initiation and medicine for a new life finding its feet.

Having spent years wailing and fighting, surrendering and accepting, the matrix is already rippling with your healing. In 2010/11 when our greatest cosmic teacher moved into Pisces, we were forced into deeper water and given little choice but to begin our life's greatest education. Today we graduate from Chiron University, with our sights on dancing post grad horizons.

That thing. Dangerous, they cry. That doing something different and strange and right like it hasn't been before. Versus everything you think you know up until now. Doing it anyway, your future a greater lure than your past.

The waxing moon in Cancer and the final day of my year whispered to me that today was the right time to harvest my mugwort. Artemisia is a plant of the moon, whose astrological home is Cancer. And I just so happened to have co-opted my kin for a day up this way, so harvest we did. Giant bundles of my dearest plant ally have been hung in my apothecary to dry out of the sun for use in smudge sticks, dreaming bundles and of course my Mugwort Magic anointing oil.

In just about every culture and tradition humankind has crafted, fire is a powerful transformer. Beyond an elemental requirement for life, fire is a cornerstone of ritual and rebirth. Fire creates and destroys, cleanses and purifies, balances and reclaims us as sacred. Smoke from flames carries our sacrifices and desires to the gods themselves. Fire is mesmerising and consuming, demanding our attention and respect.

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.