Five years ago this was what Australia looked like from above. In the grip of catastrophic firestorms that had been raging for months and cost us all dearly. We could not see the sky. It was hard to breathe everywhere. Our PM took off anyway for his Summer holidays in Hawaii and famously told the journos who tracked him to a luxury hotel, mate I don't hold a hose. Or give a shit, as it turned out. A new norm was revealed, as dangerous as any inferno.

January 6th rings on the calendar as Epiphany. Its roots far more ancient than the Christian celebration of the Magi who followed a star. Far more seditious than storming the capital of ailing empire. Far more prophetic than either lets on. Ancient wise ones scryed these past twelve omen days, throwing bones in darkness to deliver cryptic keys and clues to the year ahead, falling like snowflakes brief and silent.

Early days of this fledgling year and change keeps dragging us across fresh thresholds. Get used to it this year because nothing will end up unmoved or unchanged.

First sweet cab off the old rank is Venus who has arrived into Pisces, deep waters embracing its queen of stars like a lover returning.

There's no rush. No need to bolt towards what has already arrived and smother it with exhortations and expectations, to give it a word or a number or smoosh it into a plan. Uncertainty remains the revolution's greatest tutor because it forces us to cultivate safe places far away from empty narratives and false promises, the webwide directives or the ever changing rules.

Anger is a dirty word.

Somewhere between political correctness and passive aggression, it was decreed that outright rage must be channelled. Reframed. Somehow remade into something less confronting and more palatable.

Cue the trumpets and reshuffle the get out of jail cards, darklings. Merc is now direct and will be taking names as he makes his way back across the Aries fireground and through the waning of a torrid eclipse season that has completely reshaped our ground zeroes. It is impossible to separate the two, their myriad impacts indelibly entangled in a hail of shock and revelation that continues to ricochet.

Eyes of fire turn now as Taurus season arrives like a balm, a field of corporal belonging we can sink deeply into no matter which way eclipse season has spun us. As the sun crosses the border from an incendiary Aries season that saw many an old world burn, he squares Pluto to refresh the dark lord's oldest refrain. The old world's death cult reaching its expiry as all the 'cides collide.

As well as Kerrie’s writing scrying the star currents and nature's tides, as Bohomofo she has offered readings, shadow work and imaginal healing for thirteen years now after many decades of study in diverse fields. No fly by night and well preceding the days of cheap regurgitation, this highly original witch's business has long been a lighthouse.

Welcome to the spectacle that has captured human imagination for as long as we've looked up. The cauldron that stirs the solar eclipse is gathering speed now and ancient magic is afoot. We are one and all in the turbulent passage to its occulting new moon, the deep stultifying drawing out. All creatures fall quiet now, burrow and wait for the shadow to pass.

Eclipses are a dance of shadow and light, conjuring both. Replete with endings and beginnings, mayhem and magic alike, eclipses offer us a regular reset button that knocks us back on to our soul's path if we have been led astray.

It is 30 years today since Gen X lost our prophet to the weight the world had placed on him, stupid and contagious. Well ahead of the times he occupied as we all came of age in a world that appalled us with its judgements and dictates. It spawned an alternative culture that we still harbour beneath long sleeves under t shirts, tucked somewhere deep inside Gen X's painfully salty identity wounds.

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.