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.

Welcome one and all to the circus that Mercury retrograde has become in our terribly modern culture that has lost its way. The one that appropriates pop astrology for its own ends while slavishly disregarding the deeper meaning of transit and planet, the greater cosmic choreography and the alignment required to maximise its mighty force.

Eclipses are notorious dealbreakers and all too often shine their blazing gaze on our shaky, just barely hanging in there, way past its use by date, already cracking or falling to pieces stuff. Sometimes all of it at once, a particularly brutal form of species eclipsia that can render us utterly inert in the shocking days that follow.

Being a witch does not preclude enchantment by the beautiful fables, tenets and architecture of other religious paths. If anything it has connected me more deeply. Tales of protection and betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection, grit and grace are more than stories from old books. Their resonance echoes in us and offers a vast humanist learning.

Eclipses ripple along our timelines as divine disruption to regular programming. They slingshot us in and out of the passages of our lives. This first eclipse will clear the path. The second on the Aries new moon is going to launch you like a fledgling, perhaps flaming, into what comes next.

She came through my window like spotlight, interrogating me from dead sleep. Strange dreams crawling in my hair unseen and the covers wrapped around me like a cocoon. Her moon head in her hands in the dark before dawn, perched on my balcony wanting coffee.

Curious indeed the cages we pop ourselves in, the limits we place on our dreams and ambitions, the cultivation of hopelessness we can indulge from within. Even on the best days trapping ourselves in prisons of our own making, then gilding the bars with misplaced matyrdom, easy bypass or excuses. Eclipse season arrives twice a year to rattle those bars and our lives in the process.

It was 2 years ago today, on the then equinox, Morsel's final edit passed through my hag stone and sailed out into the world. I kept the oldest promise I made to myself as a fervent writer of journals, poetry and short stories. Still, with more on the way.

The Aries ingress delivers equinox as the wheel of the year creaks to its next notch. The time of exact balance between day and night, light and dark where the door swings open to the next season of our lives. The veil thins as we cross the threshold of this liminal space where the ancestors gather.

The equinox tipping point beckons but nature never goes early. Her time is ever ours to keep. For more than a day yet we are plunged and resurface gasping through the fathomless whirlpool of Pisces. Its inherent dissolution loosening the bonds to what has already passed. Its inexorable draw torrenting over the falls at the far end of the zodiac.

We are arriving to the edge of the world, the lashing tail end of the zodiac and its strange churning frequencies. Telepathing its fathomless currents, an oceanic flood of feelings clouding all but the present. It is hard to focus and easy to get carried away.

Venus swept into Pisces by the new moon's tides, its waters embracing the queen of stars like a lover returning. After her torrid Aquarian excursion with her lover Mars, Lady Love swans deeper into her pleasure state. Swollen with the magic of Neptune, rampant revolution cleaves to form fresh union with the fathomless psychospiritual currents that underpin it.

Dark moon, thy name is dissolution as we make our way through the liquidity of the far end of the zodiac. Cut off from the cult of knowing and planning by design. Released from the strict safety of hospital corners and known quantities. Floating on a sea of unlimited potential whose murky depths will demand a different kind of discipline.

This performative annual bullshit routinely finds me furious. Cupcakes and coffee while we politely discuss genocide in couched careful terms? Overpriced brunch in sunny AC while the world dies around us? Pretty empty speeches that change absolutely nothing from politicians committed only to re-election as femicide and domestic violence stats continue to rachet unchecked as we lose rights, respect and equality.

Swimming deeply through the mythical mutable realms of revolution and we are being relentlessly dazzled by the skies of the farthest reaches. Auroras have been blazing across a wide band from both poles, further afield since Pisces arrived as prelude to eclipse season.

The rampant revolutionising of life and love paired with the gentle oblivion of the far end of the zodiac demands mutiplicity but it is a slippery sucker to hold. Its pretty fleeting fish swim in two different directions. Hope defies certain death. Grief mingles with joy in brackish water. The future is a promised land just over a border we can feel but can't see.

In the cloudy backwash of last weekend's full moon, strange creatures are emerging from the depths. As though the supersonic blasts of sun and moon, frequencies and fuckery, keep conspiring to dissolve the barriers to necessary change.

The water always called, whispering in strange tongues as her blood rushed and the tides surged. Between the moon and her there were no secrets. Nothing hidden from the gloaming that promised its night of strange fables, already stippling her skin as she dreamwalked the shoreline.