Hello you,
It’s the Thursday before the new moon and we’re boldly embarking on a new series, exploring the tarot from an embodied perspective. I’m rather ingeniously calling it Embodying the Tarot.
We’ll be working our way through the tarot, exploring each archetype and how we can work with that energy in our own lives.
Why the tarot? Because it’s been one of my own supports and obsessions for years. Because each of the 78 cards in a tarot deck is a portal. A key that opens up door. A way that energy moves. And we can play with what it feels like to step into those energies, embodying different facets of the human experience, and expanding our understandings of ourselves and our capacities.
We can ask ourselves: What is my relationship to this energy? How does this archetype show up in me? Is there some medicine to be found in this card?
Each moon I’ll speak a little about my own perspectives on the card, and then we’ll jump into ways that we might meet it in our bodies. You don’t need to be a tarot devotee to practice along (though I have to confess I’m secretly hoping to convert you if you’re not). Every card is just a framework for us to go within.
Let’s pull our first card and begin at the very beginning, shall we?
0.
The Fool
You’re standing on the edge of a cliff. No, not standing, more like striding, dancing. Stepping forth boldly, a little white dog at your heels and not a care in the world. A change is afoot. You’re setting forth, though you don’t know where. You don’t know what will occur as you strut on your way, whether you’ll fall or fly as the cliff’s edge opens beneath your feet. But you know you’re free. You’ve got the things you need, your bindle slung over your shoulder and a flower in your hand. Your intent is clear and you’re on your way. You know that some spark of “yes, this” is pulling you forward and you know that you trust it.
The Fool is pure potential. We start our journey at zero, in the void that is everything and nothing at once. Some space out beyond the material plane in the fruitful darkness from which everything emerges. Ideas, inspirations, whispered truths, aliveness.
I often feel this card like the expansiveness at the top of an inhaled breath. This is the liminal space beyond the known. The vastness of outer space and the vastness between our atoms. The Fool brings a sense of opening to all that might be possible, before the idea is brought down into something tangible. We’re here in the void, holding the potential for things to be more than one thing at a time. Feeling the way life wants to move through us.
It could be a creation, an expression of something we feel, a way we’re being called to show up in our lives. Hell, it could be something as day-to-day as a new way to arrange your living room furniture. The Fool is the spark of “yes!” in our gut before we bring it into material reality.
And, in that space of imagination, I think it’s safe to say that The Fool is a card of change. That’s the cliff, right? The leap (or is it a trust fall?) that we’re being invited to make.
We can often walk through our days tracing the same ground. The same habits and reactions, the same neural pathways. Forgetting that in fact each moment is not plotted out and set in stone. A doesn’t always have to lead to B just because that’s the way we’ve always known it to be. A could lead to Q or 17 or a banana instead.
The Fool stands outside of the status quo, outside of the normal way of doing things. They don’t know the ‘normal way’ and so they move with a beginner’s mind. Curious and stepping into the void free from presumptions and assumptions. They just know that they need to follow A and see where it leads.
And for that reason there’s a lot of trust in The Fool.
We might prefer to know exactly how that leap will work out. We might want to plot every step and control all the outcomes so that we can guarantee that we’ll land where we want. Plan it all out so that we won’t have any moments of free fall or uncertainty or abject terror as the solid ground disappears from beneath our feet. Or we might put off our leap altogether, telling ourselves that we need to gather up a thousand resources. Just one more course. An attempt to ensure that we’re really truly ready.
The Fool asks us to trust that things will work out as they’re meant to. The path will unfold as we walk it. And they gently remind us that we already have everything we need bundled up in our trusty bindle.
Step forward and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work out, maybe it won’t. Either way you’ve gained some information and a new perspective. We can always begin again.
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