If there is one thing you can bet the gingerbread house on during a Venus retrograde, it is a return of your exes.

Our Lady of Love's annual retreat has begun as she withdraws to contemplate, revise and thus reinvigorate all that tickles and tugs at our hummingbird hearts. Venus rules those areas of our life that bring us pleasure - or her counterbalance, pain - and which reflect our values, desires, taste and attractions.

The mad season has passed in a tumbleweed of inexplicable plot twists. By now we have all had time to catch our breath, stretch our freshly minted wings or climb shakily back to our feet, and begin to survey our adjusted ground zero. Making sense of where we find ourselves now is the only job at hand.

As we begin today to come up for air after a typically torrid saison d'eclipsia, not for me the new moon intention setting or break neck fast track to my brave new world. I am wary of any kind of bring-me-this magic woven under eclipsing skies. We know eclipses to be portents of change, unpredictable beasts who do not bow to our attempts to tame or harness their peculiar magic. We know too that they ripple: across astrological and emotional axes, across years, pinging our past and future alike.

The new moon eclipse half a day away now and oh how I can't wait to float down the backside of this seasonal tsunami. Our main players have taken their position, each vying for dominance as they come at us from completely different scapes.

Still may we be, sitting through the spin cycle of les eclipses. In moments or minutes or more. Mars continues to throb away, testing the true nature of our firepower. The divine scramble is palpable, nostalgic and prophetic all at once.

The dark moon has slipped on its Aquarian coat and the heaviness of the agitation cycle is giving way to Neptune's call as visions now travel both ways down our personal highways.

This has not been your garden variety full moon. Rising in Virgo there was high likelihood of forces grounding us for good, anchoring us to home and hearth. Instead the lead up to this full moon just peaked was an extended player in whose strange grasp we found ourselves jolted.

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.

Time once and again for the deep dark moon dreaming that is de rigeur for the balsamic lunar phase, aka right now. You know the dark moon drill my darlings: declutter, release and repeat. This is *the* time every single month in a row to let go of anything / everything that irks, niggles, pains, blocks or bothers Beautiful You.

Sometimes when you're deep in the countryside you'll meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight.

I could not possibly list the myriad talents that constitute my femme friends. Mothers, lovers, daughters. Sisters all. Creatives, rebels, carers, weavers. Witches all.

Eclipse seasons should come with a similarly succinct warning but even with all possible due diligence, this mad season oft gets the best of us. If everyone or everything is feeling chaotic, unsteady or simmering as though about to boil over, remember this sandpaper is how we (all) make change. Not one of us is immune.

Monday will be the day we recall when the collective consciousness / worldwide Grammys audience was schooled in the gentle art of the divine feminine. Fully inhabiting the archetype of the Mother in every sense, Queen B's performance was grace personified.

Oh Valentines Day, here you are again already. Another Hallmark hero looming over us and the lore behind the day swallowed up in a sea of satin hearts and overpriced roses. Tosh.

Musing on catastrophe as a giant swathe of Australia today sweltered through a heatwave that induced catastrophic conditions. After our last fatal firestorm the top tier was upped, in order to avoid a repeat of that heartbreaking natural disaster.

By now the bizarre magic that is the core competency of eclipse season has its claws in your life. It ramps up from here. Feel the door to that cage of yours rattling as the entire structure starts to swing. Our lunar Leonic version of the species is less than a day away and in my little corner of the conservatory, temperatures are rising in every sense.

We are deep in the zone of the next pretty pair of eclipses. Our full moon in lovely Leo this weekend is a lunar eclipse and the new moon in Pisces' mystic river at the end of Feb is a solar eclipse. Notorious for their ending / begin again two step, eclipses also ripple along particular astrological axes and always ping the prior pigeon pair.