Streetcars, Chiron, & The Little Mermaid

DREAM that I’m waiting for a streetcar with a bunch of people. One came but I couldn’t get on before it was full. Another one came and I managed to get on. It was bigger, a triple-car accordion, but even then I had to keep going to the last car before I found a seat I wanted. The seats were red.

I feel this dream came in answer to my constant if not always conscious question, when am I going to get on track? Am I finally getting on, late in the day as it is?? I have had countless dreams about buses and cars, but streetcars is a first...

Streetcars run on a prescribed track, with preset destinations, unlike a bus that can go off track if needed, or a car that can go wherever you want to. A streetcar is a people mover, we are moved en masse as a collective. So perhaps this dream is more about my sense of belonging in the collective. Funny I just read the following in an article on Chiron in Pisces (as in my chart) this morning:

“The nature of the wound will relate to betrayal of trust, possibly by the mother.”

“...when they do assert themselves as individuals, they encounter the pain of separation or even abuse. After a while, the Chiron in Pisces person gets tired of having their trust betrayed and starts fighting back. In the process, they acknowledge that they are an individual, that they want to remain an individual, and that they are willing to endure the pain of separation from others if they can be free to be themselves. Without this struggle, they would de-evolve back into group consciousness. The reward for their efforts is the ability to evolve into individuality without losing their connection to the whole. In fact, they discover that they have never left the whole, and they are connected to all beings regardless of their feelings of separation.”

So it is for my desire to remain free to be myself that I pay the price of not belonging to the group.

Like the little mermaid who gave up her longevity in exchange for her masculine self and eternal soul – wholeness – but at the price of constant pain and suffering, as well as the loss of her voice, for she is now a woman living under patriarchy. In spite of her pain she dances to express herself and finds out that the prince – her masculine self – is also searching and longing for her – the feminine. But he is deceived by fate and marries another. The little mermaid is left to ponder her losses and the futility of all the sacrifices she made in her quest for wholeness. Maybe because she looked outside herself for him, when he was inside herself all long... And though she was tempted by her sisters (mermaids symbolize both seduction and transformation) to kill the prince/masculine in exchange for her old life, instead she opted for a third choice: rebirth, by overcoming her fear of death, and throwing herself back into the sea of life where we all came from, and must one day return. But instead of the dissolution of the self (individual ego) into the collective that she might have feared, she became pure spirit – what the East might call enlightenment. She had gained her Self.

Most likely she didn’t ‘know’ that when she decided to follow her heart and take the big plunge, she was actually heading for the big prize. Like all heroes and heroines on their quests, they make their decisions from the pureness of their hearts and spirit - the innocence of The Fool in tarot. Little mermaid simply didn’t have the heart to kill her prince even though he is lost to her, nor make him pay for her suffering (scapegoat).

I think this is the lesson I need to live, and learn. And even though I've felt separate from 'the group' most of my life, I know deep in myself that I AM part of the whole, that I’ve never left. I accept that it is the price I have to pay for my individuation, my sense of personal freedom, but I remain hopeful that one day this split in me will be healed, that I can have that sense of belonging and not fear losing myself.

For it is only my ego that fears. Another piece of ego to give up... time to go down to the lake...