Closeness - Illustrated Haiku + Prose (First Posted July 3, 2011)

Okay.

Let’s try this ...

For her, this degree of closeness is real precisely because it is the stuff of faery tales.

She says this because faery tales, myths and fantasies are all stories designed to be deeply felt as well as be instructive.  They are all peopled with archetypal characters who are deeply familiar on a feeling level.    So, for her (a person whose dominant faculty is one of feeling and who also lacks the faculty intended to ground her in everyday, concrete reality) sinking her feelings down, down, down into strong, recognizable "characters" - and their stories - is the stuff of real life.

And, if the truth be told, the more her life feels like (and can be told to herself as) an archetypal story the more it makes sense to her and the more it feels real to her.

Vivid characters appear in tales such as this and they interact and test each other in profound ways.  Challenges of sometimes extreme proportions are undergone (or undertaken) with predictable results (depending on the characters involved).  "Isn't this what life is really all about?" she dares to ask "out loud".

Although she knows she - and everyone else - are only shadows of the archetypes who touch so deeply she also knows, from experience, that some shadows are more substantial than others.  She finds the more she can see an archetype shining through another the more she is attuned to that person.  The clearer the archetype the deeper she can fathom her/him with her feelings and the more she understands the underlying dynamics.

Looking back to her childhood she can see how she was able to draw from the character of a sub-archetype in her psyche - to come to the aid of her mother and younger brother - because she desperately needed to at the time.  Nevertheless, her dominant archetype (the one she personally feels the deepest and the one she has slowly but surely been burning away the dross to best reveal over the course of her life) has always been present and has always been urging her on.  In the final analysis it's all really "just" a feeling BUT it is a feeling that follows a pattern and has a purpose.

At this stage of her life her taproot into her archetype is firmly anchored and this helps make the challenges that come along more understandable and manageable.  She understands that, in the feeling world of archetypes, she is bound to attract the challenges best designed to hone, define and reveal her type.

"Isn't this what life is really all about?" she dares to ask "out loud" once again.

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archetype 

–noun

1. the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype.

2. (in Jungian psychology) a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches.