This is something very personal that I want to share with you. From how the arts can help us heal and how I became interested in Art Therapy in a much deeper and personal sense, in the sense of Psicomagic (Psicomagia) of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

After having faced serious situations of physical and psychological violences (wild beating, torture, strangulation, hand fracture and mutilation of middle of index finger) have been on the brink of violent death, death threats, betrayal of false friends and theft all my material and sentimental paternal inheritance, all in less than four months, at the end of 2015. After all that, and me forcibly isolated and abandoned by my former social environment, ─or of socialization─, this poem re-appeared in my life as a luminous signal during my initial recovery and served as emotional or existential handhold to move forward. It served to review what I had lived, to question responsibilities, to point out the aggressors and accomplices of so many injustices. To reinvent myself, but also to accept and understand that the forms of identity/identification that I inherited from my family, those that were imposed on me by society and those that I was choosing over the previous 32 years of life, could ─and should─ it deconstruct, reinvent, change priorities in life and converge towards something liberating. The poem worked as a revelation and as psychotherapy.

Transforming that martyred emphasis that characterized a large part of my previous experiences, that dangerous and unconscious tendency to "put the chest to the bullets", or what I then called "playing the role of lightning rod of violence", in a new way of understanding and live life. Freeing me, step by step, of learned helplessness, messianism or Stockholm Syndrome. As well as the energetic vampires, false friendships or camaraderies, negligent opportunists, and indolent hypocrites. Retaking and starting really empowering relationships and a new fuller life.

I leave you with the lucid and tragic poetry of a great wise teacher of literature and decolonial social history (Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015) paying homage to another great wise teacher of Latin American identity, philosophy and pedagogy (Simón Rodríguez, 1769-1854). The meaning of his life, his struggle and his tragedy, with which I came to identify myself, especially in his last sentence, like never before. This time to evolve.

IMAGE 1: Juan Agustín: Retrato de Simón Rodríguez (miniature), 1851.
Museum Pérez Chiriboga Collection, Quito, Ecuador.
IMAGE 2: S/A: Simón Rodríguez. Caracciolo Rivas Collection,
Graphic works, Audiovisual File of National Library.
SOURCE: Magazine Memorias de Venezuela. Nº 41, October 2016.
Caracas: National Center of History. Pages 31 & 34.

The lonely/The only/He alone (El solo)

Instead of thinking about Medes, Persians, and Egyptians, let's think about the Indians. More account has us that understand an Indian than Ovid. Start your school with Indians, Mr. Rector.

1851, Lacatunga, Ecuador: Simón Rodríguez offers his advices: that a cathedra of Quechua language should replace that of Latin and that it be taught physics instead of theology. Let the school raise a crockery factory and another of glass. That masonry, carpentry and blacksmithing be implanted.

Along the Pacific coasts and the mountains of the Andes, from town to town, pilgrim don Simón. He never wanted to be tree, but wind. He have a quarter of a century upping dust the roads of America. Since Sucre kicked him out of Chuquisaca, he has founded many schools and candle factories and has published a couple of books that nobody read. Clothes don't charge. Has nothing but that he's wearing.

Bolivar did calling him my teacher, my Socrates. Did saying to him: You have shaped my heart for the great and the beautiful.
People clench their teeth, for not laughing, when the crazy Rodriguez launches his perorations about the tragic destiny of these Hispano-American lands:
─We are blind! Blind!

Almost nobody listens to him, nobody believes him. They consider him to be a Jew, because he is watering children wherever he goes and does not baptize them with the names of saints, but he calls them Choclo (Corn), Zapallo (Pumpkin), Carrot and other heresies. He has changed his last name three times and says he was born in Caracas, but he also says that he was born in Philadelphia and in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It is rumored that one of his schools, that of Concepción, in Chile, was devastated by an earthquake that God sent when he knowsed that don Simón taught anatomy by walking naked in front of the students.

Every day is more alone don Simon. The boldest, the most lovable of the thinkers of America, every day more alone.

At eighty years, he writes:
─I wanted to make the earth a paradise for everyone. I made it a hell for me.