You've arrived early to the eclipse but you can wait here in our biding room. The moon window isn't quite all the way open and life litter is piling up in the corners. The black branch leaning over you creaks in the whipping wind like the old ones do, wearied by the world and its clamour.

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 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.

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.

The full moon in Libra has nearly risen and just before 11pm tonight Wollombi time the lunar eclipse takes place completing the astronomical process of eclipse season, even as this potent window will continue to exert its significant effect in our lives for weeks and months yet. This tipping point highlights the big question that has been ruminating for weeks now:

Are you ready to eclipse yourself?

Eclipse season happens in series every year and this is the first for 2013, with two more to come in May. Eclipses are always times of transformation – of beginnings and endings, when our cages are rattled and life seems to tip on its axis. What happens during an eclipse often sticks – whether that is a difficult conclusion or a delicious new beginning. One thing you can be sure of during eclipse season, things will change.