Becoming The Fool
By Annar Veröld
“I take a look around my inner-scape and all I see is decimation,” I tell my therapist. Think: abandoned brutalist architecture, dystopian film, Chernobyl.
For over a year, I could not harbor any life or laughter within myself. But last you left me, I had championed through, taken some lessons from the Death card, and leapt into my Fool era — which, let me tell you, has been a fantastic time. There’s now motion and fertility in my life — a life that, for so long, only moved within the shadow of the absence of someone I loved.
The Fool card from the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot.
I have only ever considered The Fool a beginning, instead of what it became for me — a major shift after a grueling grief cycle. After Joe’s passing and moving through the teachings the Death card had for me, I was left with a newness, yes. A hollowness, yes. A space that I held open, like a door, for Joe and my love for him — yes. But as I moved forward, that special space remained and called to be adorned; it called to be built upon — expanded, even.
Because remember: The Fool is a card that not only comes before The Magician, but also a card that comes after The World. As The Fool takes a cosmic leap forward, they carry with them the lessons from a life before.
When I began to pull The Fool, there was relief. There was hope for joy and levity to move through my life again.
For so long, The Fool has been the first card I see when opening a fresh Tarot deck, the first card I would quickly shuffle past, moving on to my personal favorites: The Empress, Strength, The High Priestess. But then I began pulling The Fool. And then I pulled it again.
When I frequently pull the same card, a favorite tradition of mine is to take that card out of every deck I own and study all the versions together as a whole. Most Fools really don’t really do anything for me. However, the love was instantaneous when my eyes fell upon The Fool in the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot deck, which presents this archetype with a play on the tragic but inspiring clown stock character, Pierrot — an icon for yearning and resilience! Pierrot, often performed in mime, wears his longing on his sleeve. Like in Kenneth Anger’s short-film Rabbit Moon, Pierrot’s every step and every reach is large, dramatic, sweeping, and known.
The Fool in this deck has charm, confidence, and grace. She is taking a leap on a sunny day. She has the support of her black cat familiar. As a sad clown girl myself, I welcomed this picaresque and adventurous energy as an invitation to be ravenous and open with my curiosity, a complete animal.
***
I first sensed The Fool in me when I went to see the Kris Kimura Quartet at Parker’s Jazz Club. Jazz has a primal energy and wilderness in it that fills me with so much life. Of course, I love the music, but what really lights me up is watching the musicians transcend into a dark, music-filled space. It is raw, it is motion, and my god — isn’t jazz beautiful to witness live? Perhaps the most beautiful of all things!
On this night, however, I had an openness, a purity, a curiosity with which I drank up that gorgeous performance with tears in my eyes. As Kris performed, beautifully lit on the Parker stage, the rest of the world melted away. Kris in a trance; Kris ascending; Kris and the sax becoming one, together a beautiful beast. I recognized within myself a longing to return to music, a jealousy for the confidence that mastery holds, and an appetite for the unpredictability of improvisation.
I wanted the wilderness I witnessed to break open within me. I wanted to leap into each note like the musicians on stage.
The next morning, filled with desire for that jazz energy, I wrote this poem:
I saw the animal float out of a man on stage
He was playing Caravan from memory
and a hunger panged within my chest
This is divinity the cool fervor jazz
How I yearn to manifest this world within
to build it to mother to call it my own
***
Encouraged by a friend and inspired by The Fool, I returned to the community orchestra after eight years of inconsistent solo practice in the closet of my home. The florescent lighting in a church rehearsal room on Tuesday night is a far ride from a jazz club but nevertheless a suitable container for my first love, music.
The orchestra is composed of almost 100 musicians, many of whom, like me, have returned to their instruments after years, perhaps even decades, away. Many of them, before their return, may have felt unprepared for, unworthy of, and now unfamiliar with a space like this, too.
Near the end of rehearsal one night, I leaned over to the hornist on my right, who was getting an earful of my false notes and poor sight-reading skills. “I am so sorry. I somehow managed to miss every note.” (The Fool, here, whispering to me: we’re all learners, we’re all human.) There are twelve other French horns in our section, and they all play beautifully — golden and rich, like if honey was a sound.
“It’s fine. It’ll come back to you in no time,” my neighbor responded, extending me a kind of grace that felt incredibly healing, a word that may be too vague, so let me explain: For almost three years, “self-compassion” has been a topic of discussion with my therapist, but never something I could truly access. My comrades in music gave me (and each other) the luxury of grace when my heart and my body were drenched in grief, vessels for a toxic cycle of self-hatred and negative self-dialogue.
Perhaps it’s the magic of a community orchestra — a group of people who say come as you are. Here was a space that held hope for excellence, but also accepted me for who I was and what I could offer in that moment. In the first few months of rehearsals, I was not only raw with grief, but also unpolished as a hornist and so far from the first chairs and regional orchestras of my youth. The small gestures of acceptance I found there rippled into the rest of my life in ways that felt significant.
With The Fool guiding my heart and my newfound sense of community and connection, I began to slowly give myself compassion where I needed it.
Slowly, it became easier to accept the person I was — I am. And then it became easier to accept accountability. And then it became easier to apologize. And then it became easier to ask questions, and to grow, and to love, and to explore, and to play, and to fail, and to fall, and to dream, and to leap, again and again.
In Etel Adnan’s poem “Baalbeck,” she writes, “enter the labyrinth that you are.” Colluding with The Fool and returning to a seat in an orchestra provided an avenue to do just that. There was surrender — an egolessness and an openness to fail — that allowed me to explore the labyrinth of me.
Like in a noir film, I followed clues to what may be laid before me — recurring invitations that challenged old ideas about myself that I thought were true. I’m bad at drawing, I could never paint. I’m disorganized with my thoughts, I could never write. It’s been too long since I played my horn with others, I can’t keep up.
By curiously following that path, I also found: an oil painting class, a return to writing, a community of musicians who embraced my messiness. The beauty of The Fool and the breadth of my labyrinth rippled like a tide into my home and work. Relationships deepened and strengthened. Insecurity lessened as curiosity widened.
The Fool card from Taro as Colour.
I look at Ithell Colquhoun's “The Fool” from Taro as Colour (Fulgur Press), and I see myself right now, as I near the end of my journey with this catalyzing archetype. Everything around me is green, a promise of spring and vitality. There are yellow and orange sparks of motion. Within me, still some blue, but brightened by the yellow heat of love. The dark blue of my skin, reaching in every direction — my appetite for wanting to know just a little bit more, wanting to give what I can.
***
Embodying The Fool has made me a better person, I think to myself as I remain composed at my desk while a string of berating emails from a customer land in my inbox — his rage reaching towards me but never arriving. My dystopian city now a lush meadow with a quieting expanse, fertile and magnetic. That which does not serve me cannot ricochet, that which does not serve me falls flat, without echo. I hold space for this customer’s disappointment, but don’t allow it to touch the yellow core that The Fool has gifted me. I listen, I try to make things right, I let it go, I forgive, I move on, I grow, and I leap forward.
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about Annar Veröld
Annar Veröld is a Honduran-American writer and filmmaker living in Austin. She serves as managing editor for Host Publications, and co-hosts the literary podcast “The Host Dispatch.”