You Can Be Such A Fool

Open up the Fool archetype within you and run the program of pure Potential.

Right now you have a chance to recognize that you are surrounded by limitless possibilities. Right now is the time to take a chance. Keep redefining your life and what it means to be open to experience — come with enthusiasm, wonder, and the stupid smile on your face that celebrates the bliss in your moments of ignorance.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Do you hear the discouraging, doubting Voices saying:

• “It’ll never work.”
• “Who are you to even try?”

Where are those Voices coming from? Are they actually playing within you? How did they get there? Who put them there?

When and Where and from Whom did you originally download the Voices that say “You Cannot”?

When did you choose to do their dirty work for them? To berate, to undermine, to sabotage your own sense of hope and optimism?

Right now is the time to take a completely fresh look at what you believe to be your options.

You say you know [or don't know] what your options truly are… look again.

• Are you sure you’ve considered everything?
• Are you sure you haven’t dismissed a choice too early?
• Are you sure that door has closed?

What about the options that may have spontaneously appeared since the last time you looked?

What about that Dream that meant more to you than any other, at one time? What about that Thing that you used to be so excited about? What did you have to deny, cover over, bury, stuff, in order to be “okay” with telling yourself “That will never happen.”

Really? Are you just that scared — so afraid you can’t even risk it?

The Fool within you doesn’t know any better.

The Fool is the kid with the towel around his neck, perched on the edge of a wall, who has observed that the birds all seem to start their flight with a giant jump off something…

If the word “Fool” disturbs you substitute “Divine Child”

• Dorothy, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” before the Twister lands her in Oz
• Harry Potter, living under the stairs, before the letter from Hogwarts arrives
• Buffy, before she bears the burden of the Slayer
• The Halliwell Sisters, before they discover the Book of Shadows in the attic
• The American Idol contestant, in those painfully foolish audition rounds
• The Author staring at the blank page
• The Student who thinks “That class sounds cool…”

Personally…

I’m totally going out on a limb.

I’m starting Something — a course of actions, a venture filled with new projects and new approaches — and I have no idea where it will lead.

I have no guarantee that I will be “successful.”

You know, come to think of it, looking back at everything I started or tried, every big idea I ran after wide-eyed and convinced… Whether they Bombed or Rocked — at a certain stage, they all resemble one another.

At the beginning. When I am always playing the Fool.

When was the last time I really started at Zero? And felt excited about it?

You know, it’s honestly been about seven years since I really started with nothing — with only a hint of a direction, no knowledge of where I was going to end up, how I was going to get there… just that I was going to Go. It wasn’t a physical journey, it was a virtual one.

In 2003, I was advised to build an audience by publishing my non-fiction, spiritualist material — perhaps in a syndicated column of some sort. Well, I ultimately turned down this absolutely shitty disappointing old school out-dated publishing deal, and proclaimed to my agent and everyone who was close enough to me to care (it was part wroth; part froth) that I intended to Do-It-Myself.

“These people [big house NYC publishing companies] are so stuck in the past; they’re not even looking for the future, they’re walking with their heads pointed at their feet. I bet I can find the future faster on my own.”

I can’t say I consciously knew it at the time, but I had some inkling — that to find the future we want, we have to create it.

When was the last time you started from scratch?

For me, back in 2003, with no job and no tolerance left for giving my creative energy to people who did not value it, with $35 in my checking account, I bought my first domain and set out to learn how to Put Things On It.

I didn’t know anything — but I had such a blast blundering through the source code of the Internet and learning. I would spend entire sleepless nights surfing the web developer’s web, reading blogs on the emerging language of CSS, teaching myself HTML through trial and error… There seemed to be no end to the amount of material that appeared before me — I could not absorb it fast enough. I would start at one site at supper and it was a magic carpet ride until dawn…

God, what a maniacal Fool I was indeed. Everyone who cared about me told me to “get a job” and to “give it up.” I got T/here. It was messy, it was bloody, it was uncertain, it was not guaranteed.

For me, that (finally!) felt like living.

I desire — I’d say in normal speech “I want” or “I need” but those words imply lack, so I’ll state them as conscious affirmations — I desire to be a Fool like that again. I desire to try something I probably should not. I desire to just head out and see where I end up. I desire to start something that I can’t even describe. I desire to really learn something I don’t know.

Last week, I found myself There again, on the Fool’s Journey. I haven’t really surfed the Web and devoured entire blogs on an entirely New Topic in a looong time. I’d forgotten how delicious that is.

You’ll be the first to hear about it when I Arrive anywhere worth sending you a post(card). The basic premise of my career, my business, my web presence is quite simple — I leave breadcrumb trails for others who want to follow me…

Have you been feeling it too?

I like that I can absolutely ignore astrology and still discover after the fact that I felt it.

I felt Uranus shifting into Aries — the sign of the Fool Archetype, the Hero at the Beginning of the Journey. (For me, approaching my forty-first birthday, this is also my Uranus Opposition, or what we call the “Mid-Life Crisis.”)

You may be interested in reading about how Uranus has been affecting you recently — I advise you to look into not only your Sun, but also (if you know them) your Ascendant and your natal Uranus — check it out: Uranus in Aries

Image credit josh.liba via Creative Commons on Flickr