Mars in Virgo, Mercury-Saturn: Remember the big picture

This week, and today especially, is a day to keep perspective; keep the big picture in view at all times, and make sure your greater vision for any projects or situations is guiding your actions. This is sound guidance most days, but today’s astrology, featuring Mercury and Mars (in each other’s signs, incidentally) makes it especially important.

Usually this column is concerned with planets making aspects, but occasionally it’s the lack of aspects being made by a planet that calls for attention. That’s the case by Mars in Virgo right now: it’s not making any major aspects to any major planets.

Superficially, that sounds like no big deal; with some planets, it might not be. But Mars is the planet of drive, action, libido, aggression — it’s an especially energetic archetype, and energy needs to have a conduit or a purpose to be useful rather than chaotic or destructive. Mars not making any aspects means there are no boundaries for its energy; no clear, productive way to engage with it. There’s an element of danger to the situation — though in Virgo (a sign ruled by Mercury) this is more likely to manifest as an obsession with details that never really leads anywhere.

Hence the need to keep perspective and keep one eye on the big picture; the idea is to make sure all the little things you’re fixing actually add up to a sum that’s greater than the parts. You don’t want to step back at some point and realize you’ve chopped and tweaked and snipped things into an inchoate, mushy mess. If Mars in Virgo is a power tool, it’s one to be used with precision — and frequent looks at the blueprints rather than sawing away at everything you can get your hands on.

As long as you can tap into creative vision (represented by Pisces, opposite Virgo) Mars in Virgo is a real asset. You have to remember what you’re doing and why, and stay tuned into your intuition along with the facts.

The Sun in Sagittarius lends a hand with the whole ‘broader vision’ thing, too — which is good, since Mercury’s conjunction to Saturn in Scorpio (ruled by Mars) is exact today at 8:54 pm EST. Mercury-Saturn can provide some great stamina for seeing projects through to completion and a certain depth of mind. Unfortunately it can also be an aspect that lends itself to depression, small-mindedness and pettiness.

Mercury-Saturn echoes aspect-less Mars in Virgo in its ability to get lost in the details (in this case, of one’s emotions or thoughts about those emotions). On one level, depression is a loss of emotional and spiritual perspective, and it has a kind of obsessive quality in the way it can suck a person down.

You might not have that kind of experience at all. You may find that since this is the third Mercury-Saturn conjunction related to Mercury’s retrograde in Scorpio, you’re meeting the third stage in a project, or in a series of emotional insights. The other two Mercury-Saturn conjunctions were Oct. 8 and Oct. 29, in case you’d like to review events in your life around those dates.

If you do, just watch for any tendency to get lost in the details and forget the purpose of your review. If you encounter problems to solve, be sure they’re the ones that matter to the overall flow of your life and what’s important in the wider constellations you’re part of. Don’t let others steer you into trivial details, either.

With Mercury-Saturn in Scorpio and Mars in Virgo, it’s entirely possible to get so emotionally caught up in ‘fixing things’ that it backfires and you ‘fix’ to the point of making things broken in some new way. Again, it comes back down to perspective, a broader vision, creativity and purpose. Every time you feel yourself drawing in to get a closer look, pull back a few steps and look up. Repeat as necessary — or call a friend for a mutual ‘perspective check’.

With research and additional writing by Eric Francis