Healing Mars

DREAM that G. and I were husband and wife, but we were not intimate. He was morose and closed to me, and when I tried to do things for him, he ignored or rejected it. We were always near each other but never touched.

In another dream I saw a young oriental woman running a business. She had 3 or 4 younger people working for her. She was showing them how to do things and I saw her pull out a stack of cash and looking up pointedly into the camera, as if I was on the other side of the lens watching. I had a flash of Vivi’s face then. A young man was put in charge of a certain daily task and he reported by writing on a small chalkboard. But the writing was in Chinese and I couldn’t understand most of it. He seemed to sign off at the bottom with 3 characters that mean “together we shine”.

DREAMWORK:

This is a familiar dance of melancholia that I have had in dreams as well as waking life. The “I rather be alone than stick my neck out to be hurt again” choreography. There is wounded pride, resentment, revenge, vulnerability, and a lot of longing inside that false wall of aloof aversion. Where did it come from?

It is my masculine that has suffered the wound of rejection and unrequited love. I remember suddenly that I had ask Mars (part of my special project to learn astrology from reading Caroline Casey’s “Making the Gods Work for You”) to send me a dream before sleep last night, and I can see now he did. Remembering this also helped me to remember something else, that G. is the puer eternus to me, Peter Pan who never wants to grow up. In me, he is the boy child who was hurt very young, and never grew up from that point on. He is sulking still.

Had I made or do something I was proud of and some adult ignored or rejected it? I don’t have memory of any but it seems quite likely. Even ‘kind’ criticism can feel like rejection, and children are not fooled by the sugarcoating. The message is: I am not good enough the way I am. And just like that, the Mars’ fire of enthusiasm is doused, his internal temperature went from hot to cold in seconds. He has been left out in the cold ever since.

But it wasn’t just his enthusiasm that was snuffed, that flame was also the fragile budding of his, my, self-confidence, self-assertion, self-worth, my Fool’s desire to go out into the big, wide world that was my oyster. I’ve struggled with this lack all of my life.

I know too, from my dreams and life, that behind the rejection is the withholding of unconditional love. How to heal all this then, to retrieve this lost part of myself? I sense that learning more about Mars will give me the answer…

Sign: Aries; Scorpio (interesting yesterday was the first day of Scorpio)
Key words: Desire, energy, eros… Desire as incentive for growth… All desires are pure if we distill them back to their original intention…
Festivals: Vernal equinox (when the magnolia tree flowers… I think spring is coming for me very soon!), Halloween (which is in a few days)
Way of honoring: by answering the question, “What do we desire?” By working with desire, we begin to understand the interrelatedness of all things…
Shadow, when not honored: Anger; violence; heartless sex; war. (that’s the hell we’re in!) if we violently suppress our desires or doubts (which are merely counter-desires), we will become externally violent…

Under the title Mars, she had: The Power of Fierce Compassion, then a beautiful quote from J.R.R. Tolkien:

“The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward.”

These words went straight into my heart. Compassion, deep and wide, and all-encompassing as it is meant.

So, I need to heal my masculine, my Mars, with feminine healing, from Neptune… back to you, Neptune…