Southwestern College Santa Fe, NM
If I may mount my high horse for a moment I might have something important to say. And it’s quite fitting that I be way up here and you down there because it’s true what they say – it’s all about the view. Up here I can say things like ‘stay positive’, ‘just trust’ and ‘mind over matter’ metaphysical stuff. Easy to say that when I’m on top of a magnificent creature, not so easy when I have fallen off and have to stand up all by myself again and it’s especially hard when I haven’t been shown the difference between this and that limb. Maybe you too were born on top of the soft skins of horses braiding its strands of azule with strands of opal with strands of pearl like me. My feet didn’t touch the ground and my body was the horse’s body – it carried me strong and free up until the ripe old age of 33.
But today I see from down here what I couldn’t see from way up there: the intricacy, the subtlety, the accuracy of my body. Who knew it had all these delicately balanced systems and precise processes that assist me? Moment to moment I am held in my own soft skin, I am regulating – no, I am regulation. I am the regulator of irregularities. I am the first responder of respiration. I am not the creator of this intelligent design but I might be responsible for it. I can be respectful of it because from down here what I am beginning to see is that around 33 the tables start to turn and my body now needs me.
Sweet body, you are human not horse. Why couldn’t I see? I would have loved to have been introduced to you before. To have known your gentle tides and pools would have been a living dream for me. To have heard your pulse and throbbing beneath the thrashings of my mind would have been a true relief and to think, after all of this time. To have understood that for every toxic morsel I picked up you would eventually resume; I never would have asked that of you, not after all we would have been through. Not after I had seen your magnificent beauty, your natural laws, I never would have burdened you. If only I could have seen the truth; I would have thanked you.
Archetypally yours,
Heather Wulfers, ATR-BC, LPAT, LPCC
Heather is an archetypal art therapist, clinical supervisor and course instructor in Santa Fe, NM. She currently serves as Adjunct Faculty at Southwestern College teaching Archetypal Psychology and Internship Seminar as well as at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design teaching Who Am I? an Intro to Art Therapy. Feel free to visit her website.
