Is there a lot of kvetching in your life right now? It wouldn’t be surprising, given that Mars is in Virgo, and retrograde to boot. This transit is great for editing and tweaking: incremental reform. But if unconsciously channeled, it makes us prickly and irritable. In Virgo, Mars’s default is fuss and worry.

What’s especially interesting is that the sign opposite Virgo — Pisces — is getting a lot of action right now as well, from Neptune and Chiron. We have here the planet of aggression, rendered all skeptical and fidgety by Virgo, coming up against two mysterious forces whose modus operandi is passivity and indirectness.

Neptune and Chiron are blurring the clarity of what Mars is doing and what it thinks it wants. They are pouring energies from the right brain into the workings of Virgo, an otherwise straight-ahead, left-brain sign. Those who tend to use Virgo for fussing and worrying will find that these Pisces planets are providing plenty to fuss and worry about.

In the social arena, we see an orgy of fault-finding (Mars in Virgo) operating against the backdrop of an elusive, vacillating mass mood (Neptune, Chiron in Pisces) that disdains practical considerations. Examples abound of obsessive nitpicking  fed by unconscious spiritual malaise. Consider the fuss being made right now about birth control by the Catholic Church, an institution that has displayed an astounding lack of concern over child rape.

For the USA in particular, the War of the Mutables is raging. America’s natal Mars-Neptune square is being provoked by transiting Mars; its station last month was exact within a degree. The transit’s effect on the national climate is to thicken the fog of emotional reactivity while emboldening the agents of blame.

The country’s ongoing political vaudeville act, recently described by no less a critic than Fidel Castro as “the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been”, sets the scene for an endless stream of complaint unconnected to any rational methodology for improvement. “Freedom from big government,” chant the GOP nominees, a call to arms that gets foggier and vaguer with every repetition, hypnotizing (Neptune) their base into forgetting the facts of recent history, e.g. the role these guys played in the Wall Street bailouts.

The recent fog fight over a Clint Eastwood commercial that aired during the Super Bowl is another example of outsized group feeling pitted against real-life details. The ad was a standard-issue bit of capitalist jingoism, on the order of “What’s good for General Motors [updated here to Chrysler] is good for the USA”. Juiced up with movie-star glamor (Pisces), it was the kind of sales pitch we hear regularly from the spin departments of both political parties. But the ever-vigilant Karl Rove found grounds in it for partisan point-scoring, and up rose a great hue and cry of impassioned noises from pundits and populace alike.

Pisces isn’t about to let a little thing like facts prevent it from indulging in a good drama. Amidst the hooplah was a pesky bit of relevant data that managed to get lost in the fray: the company in question is no longer American. Italy’s Fiat SpA now owns a majority of Chrysler.

Culture analysts of the future will surely roll their eyes incredulously when reading about societal antics such as these. As denizens of the present, we can take heart from remembering that each of us, as individuals, has a better shot at channeling these energies creatively than the group as a whole has. The only way humanity’s consciousness gets raised is one person at a time.

The 14-year tenure of Neptune in Pisces, the sign of its rulership, is a teaching about healing at the soul level. The more we open to it, the more we will change our lives in subtle but unmistakable ways (see my lecture The Surrounding Sea. In the Skywatch for March, I’ll be talking about the Pisces tenure of Chiron, the mythic teacher of heroes.)

These transits guarantee that we will be taught, but they don’t guarantee that we will learn. Learning depends on whether mindfulness is brought to bear. To the extent that it is, the impulses we’re getting from Mars in Virgo will be beautifully blended with the grand, sweeping sensitivities of the Pisces cluster. Then a perfect balance is achieved, with each sign revealing its most exalted side to the other. This is exactly what we need to happen, as 2012 gains momentum.