By Len Wallick
Over the weekend Venus forms a sextile from Virgo to Mars in Cancer. Sextiles are simple: what you put into them is what you derive. We can understand Venus as attraction and receptivity while Mars is palpable as the assertive. Cancer and Virgo are perceptible as need and care, respectively. Very much like our lives right now, the circumstances are not ideal but the fundamentals are there. After all that has served to provoke and confront us recently, this aspect is an opportunity to stop and evaluate our personal and collective relationship to the concept of simple harmony.
You may recall that we recently had you draw a triangle with equal sides and surround it with a circle that just touched the three points where the sides come together. If you have the paper and pencil handy, you may find it useful to make that diagram again. Remember that a part of the circle between any two of the triangle points is the distance between objects in a trine aspect. A sextile is simply half of that distance.
The trine inherently connects a set of three signs that correspond to the same element — either fire, earth, air or water. That connection endows trines with ease and flow that can get out of hand if not handled consciously. Objects in sextile aspect occupy two alternating signs that have neither element nor quality in common.
What alternating signs do have in common is harmony. It’s a little like learning to play the familiar piano piece known as ‘chopsticks’. Any two alternating keys will create a two-part harmony which is the basis of many a composition. Similarly, a sextile is the foundational aspect of astrology, a simple relationship that rewards the extra effort of finding the middle ground that compliments either side.