The Fool’s Journey 🃏
I’ve been reflecting on 2019 through the lens of tarot. As a writer, I am a deep believer in the power of stories, archetypes, and imagination. A friend of mine, a witch, explained this in a way I’ll always keep with me:
“Imagination is powerful. We know this instinctively as children, but we forget it as we grow—as our shadow sides occlude behind ego, trauma, and conditioning. What our mind creates is as real as we allow it to be. When we make believe, we are literally making belief.”
We know Jesus Christ was a real person who was crucified. But did that death redeem the sins of the world? Christians of course believe this, but I’d argue that the empirical reality of the atonement is irrelevant. Through belief, Christians make it as real as anything. Ask any Christian: do you believe 2+2 equals 4? Do you believe Jesus atoned for the sins of the world? They’ll answer both with confidence. The power is not in empiricism, but the story. Faith and imagination are the very same thing.
Reality is malleable, and interpretative tools exist beyond monotheism and religion in general: astrology, tarot, nature, magic, Jung, yoga, the occult, the otherworld, the arts.
My spirituality has taken on new dimensions as I’ve embraced this idea. People might say they believe truth is everywhere, but they often mean it in a cliché, bypassing sort of way—compartmentalizing lower-case truth (other religions and philosophies) and capitalized Truth (their own). In this way, their pre-existing preferences hum merrily along with a COEXIST sticker slapped on the bumper.
Archetypes vanquish these hierarchies. With archetypes, there is only the symbol and your relation to it. The deepest, bone-soaking truths are found and created with your own imagination. They are not revelations. They are birth.
This is why I love tarot. Tarot cards are prisms. They reflect my learning and sojourning in iridescent fractals, helping me claim my own narrative. Recently, I did a bit of numerology to discover my tarot card of the year. One of the many ways to do this is to first, figure out your Soul Number. Add up the numbers in your birthdate—then add the numerals of that integer together. For me, that’s 6+1+4+1+9+8+8 = 37; 3+7 = 10. Then, to get your card of the year, add 2+0+1+9 to your Soul Number. For me, 10+2+0+1+9 = 22.
There are 22 cards in the Major Arcana. The first and last (numbers 0 and 22) are associated with the Fool, as the Major Arcana tells the story of the Fool’s journey. This was my tarot card—my archetype—of 2019.
The Fool represents new beginnings, new experiences, personal growth, and courage. Our hero stands on a precipice, leaving everything behind, with only a small knapsack and a white rose representing purity and innocence.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite decks, Our Tarot, where the Fool is represented by my dearest Joan of Arc (😭).
Like her friends and family, we cannot know how the saints’ voices sounded to Joan. She might have hallucinated them, or she might have invented them to support her cause. Regardless of what provoked her to act, Joan of Arc believed in her purpose in life. The Fool signifies the beginning of a journey; it means living out your personal truth even if you must take risks to do so. Joan of Arc as the Fool sends us a very clear message that we should keep our eyes, ears, hearts, and souls open to receiving direction.
This is the year I embarked on my Fool’s journey. Like Joan, I started listening to voices—not of saints or angels, but of my ancestors, earth kin, past selves, and intuition.
I stood before the lone and dreary wilderness and then ran into it. Literally—I ran three hours into a godforsaken desert without another soul or sound for miles. I got a nice new job 37 floors up One World Trade Center and quit it eight days later (RIP, sunset views of Lady Liberty). A sidewalk poet in New Orleans wrote me a poem with a prophecy. I went to a cabin upstate and catalogued the plants and animals around me. Visited the Hezbollah Museum in Lebanon (sorry mom, didn’t tell you) and drove the Beirut-Damascus Highway. I went to therapy every week, and yoga almost every day. In the Azores, I fell in love with Brock again at Bar Caloura. I took a French class. My writing was published in a magazine under the title “Let the Land Speak.” I read more and wrote more than I have in a long time. In Utah, I broke covenants and curses. I found a coven. I mourned at graves and spoke to the dead, caressing the grass where they lay. I made offerings in Central Park—squash and fruit and flower mandalas below a gentle tree. A white-haired crone spoke to me of night vision, and invited me for a walk—where else?—in the desert.
I’ll close with lines from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman.
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
Thank you, 2019. Thank you, 2010s. You were magic, you were seismic. Your lava and ashes laid fertile new ground. My walk has just begun.
Thanks for reading Gemini Mind! Elsewhere, you can find me as @yokizzi 💫