Saturn, As Masculine Authority

Another sliver of a dream: A girls’ school that is a whole street, that is, all the stores and buildings were the school, although the street was only on one side…

DREAMWORK:

Learning for the feminine, offered as merchandize for sale in a marketplace, which is a frequently recurring theme of my dreams. It is also a reflection of my mental process: wandering and sampling from store to store, stall to stall, room to room, but never getting any deeper into the experiences. I am not getting all that I can, all that I ought to, from what I’m learning about the feminine. Most recently, the feminine has been embodied in my dreams as the little girl child who belongs to me, and by whose wound I’ve come to know her as Vulnerability. My vulnerability. It has taken a while just for me to own her, and all of what that means. Maybe I haven’t yet realized ALL of what it means…

Ah, the other side of the street that didn’t seem to exist in the dream, at least there was nothing there except pedestrians like me. It ought to, following common sense, be the counterpart of the masculine, perhaps a boys’ school? I remember now that this series of dreams of babies and toddlers began with a couple of dreams of boy babies. What happened to them since then? Nothing. I’ve come so far as to find out who the little girl was, but I’ve not gotten around to the little boy.

If the little girl is my vulnerability, who is the little boy that I’ve yet to own? I know who he is, my inner knowing says. His name is Physicality, and I know I’ve denied him most of my life too.

The 2 dreams I can remember most recently with small boys were from Jan. 7 and 8:

Jan. 7: I was holding a baby or a toddler, his face forward. Everything was fine until I discovered that he had wet himself and my arm that was holding him. He said that he doesn’t do this very often anymore. I took him to his mom and she looked for a diaper for him but found the bag empty, because he doesn’t do this very often anymore she didn’t bother to restock. I decided to wash him and noticed that his body was that of a small dog with white hair, now damp.

Jan. 8: I was holding Luke as a small child. I was lying on my back and he was half lying on top of me, in my left arm. Tina, his mom, was a few paces away but attentive. Luke was sick with a fever, flushed but lucid. I smiled at him and said that I was the only one who could stand him because I couldn’t smell, as he was practically mouth-breathing into my face. I looked over at Tina to make sure she wasn’t upset by my having her child.

Looking at them again now, I can see that in both boys there was something wrong. But that’s not the point, says my inner voice, ever the wiser one. Okay, so what is the point? The point is the discharge, the expression of water as flow, and the expression of fire as breath. And if Vulnerability is the fear of receiving, then this is the fear of giving, of expressing, of creating, of making manifest the inherent nature of my Self, including my raw, animal nature, which has always intimidated me, in myself and in others. Boys are harder to handle, we all know that as women, they are like little animals.

So he is the Physical Animal, full of life, and the energy rearing to burst forth into life. His is the power of water needing to go (water always wants to go somewhere, said John Daido Loori), and the power of the fire needing to burn. This is formula for creativity, as far as I can tell, and manifestation of that creativity.

And I have yet to embrace, own, and love this awesome and unruly energy in myself. I feel up to the task of mothering him, but he needs a father too, so I hope my older and wiser masculine (my animus, maybe?) is stepping up to the plate… Apparently I ought to access this mature masculine in myself now (I wasn’t sure I even had it)… *Saturn, the Taskmaster, whose lesson to us is to teach us to own our own authority. I have trouble with that, and all authority, I’ll admit.

Age 7, rebeled against/succumbed to authority. Age 14, rebeled against/succumbed to conformity. Age 21, rebeled against/succumbed to conventionality. Age 28, rebeled against/succumbed to more conventionality. Age 35, rebeled against all of the above and became fed up with it all. Age 42, surrender in progress. Age 49, surrender complete, having risen out of the ashes, hopefully…

In the meantime, this feels like a tough lesson to learn, from a harsh master and father. My personal experience with him has never been an easy, or pleasant one. It seemed to me that he’s always trying to trap me in a box, and I’m always trying to escape, or kick him in the crotch. I know now that he’s been trying to teach me about myself, not least through my Saturn in Aquarius and Saturn in the 9th house.

Saturn in Aquarius says that I need to have clear limits with who I call my friends and my community. Who are the friends true to my heart, who are my spiritual familiars? That’s been a process I’ve become much more aware of in the last decade. At the moment I’ve winnowed my friends down to the ones I live with, although if I am quiet and listen, I can hear the faint calls of those kindred spirits out there, ones I’ve yet to meet. I know they’re there, these searchers of truth. My tribe, as I call them.

Saturn in the 9th house is about my quest for truth, the truth that can only come from experience for me. This is Saturn as a teacher that says to me, get out of the books and get out there, the only truth you can rely on is your experience. This is a necessary kick in the ass for me, I must admit. I’ll also say a big thanks to Saturn now, for cracking that whip over my recalcitrant butt, and pushing me out of the nest.

We’ve had such a history of love-hate for so long that, even as I thank him, I do not know how to love him. (Knowing Saturn, he’d rather have respect than love.) Perhaps I can start by surrendering myself to him, opening to what he has to teach me, the little boy in me who carries the power to incarnate, and together we can bring him up into a truly responsible adult flourishing under my own authority in the world.