Back to the Tarot, ho ho ho, THE FOOL

Keywords>ognuno per se e dio con tutti, put your mask on first!

The Fool is the first card of the Tarot and its number is zero. The Fool is actually the protagonist of the story which is the Tarot, which we can entitle "A Fool's Journey." And we could easily cut out the Fool's face and put ours in its place and that's the point, each of us is the Fool in his own story. We have met the idiot and it is us.

But I'm being a little hard on the Fool to call him an Idiot. What the Fool represents is us with the innocence and trust we had in the womb, swimming happily around and thinking that Life wasn't as bad as everybody said. The minute we begin the birth process, of course, a good portion of that trust is lost, because it is extremely painful and traumatic to be born. Sylvia Browne says that when she regresses her clients, they can get through all kinds of terrifying and painful experiences, including murders and torture, but the birthing process is just too horrible. So she doesn't even do it anymore.

The Fool has never been hurt, or betrayed, or disappointed, and literally does not know the meaning of the words. He is setting off on this crazy mission with the enthusiasm of a child going to Disneyworld for the first time. To the Fool, everything is beautiful, everybody is nice, and everything in the garden is just peachy. There are no curbs or checks on the Fool's energy. There is no thought of shame or social conventions.

I went a little early to my martial arts class yesterday and there were some kids grappling. I thought I'd die laughing. They had no idea what they were doing and they didn't care, they just did whatever, and then they would fall over, and then they would decide that since they were already lying down they might as well take a nappy-poo. They were driving the hotshot visiting martial arts guy insane. You could see the veins popping out on his head.

These kids epitomize the Fool energy. They are not foolish, they just don't give a shit, and they trust that things are going to be ok. That is the Fool. Except for, while the kids have their parents lined up snapping photos with their digital cameras, and watching like hawks to make sure the sparring doesn't get too rough, the Fool is alone, apparently, except for a dog, which inevitably appears on almost all the Tarot decks.

It's an accepted bumper sticker fact that dog is God spelled backwards, and with all due respect to the cat lovers of the world, there is no animal that incarnates God's love for us better than our woof-woofs. The love of a dog is complete, unconditional, and unending. The dog doesn't care what we look like, how we treat it, or what we feed it. It thinks we are just the bee's knees. I have seen so many dogs in Italy, abandoned on the roads by their owners, trotting along with their tails wagging, racing up to every car to look inside, confident that they will find their owners there.

I don't like to use the term owners. The idea that any living thing can own any other living thing is ludicrous. But I don't know what else to call them. The point is, those dogs will get run over and they will be happy about it, because they're sure that it was their owner who accidentally killed them when he came back for them. There is a dog in Altopascio who goes to visit his dead owner at the cemetery every day. Sylvia Browne has a Spirit Dog from another lifetime who accompanies her everywhere to protect her.

So this is my idea of God. Always there, protecting us, loving us, following us around, never failing, never doubting that we are The Best. Because God has the incredible capacity to see each and every one of us as the most wonderful of His creations.

I want to appease the cat people of the world for a minute with a quote that I really like:

Dogs teach us how to love, cats teach us how to live.

There is no cat depicted on the Fool card, but that doesn't mean the cat isn't there. The cat is on the couch, or under the bed, or something. So the Fool card is about learning to live, and learning to love, and the two things chase each other, just like a cat and a dog. Because what is life without love?


And although most often, the Fool is talked about as an open-hearted and trusting approach to life, the same goes for love. "Why do fools fall in love?" asks the song. The answer is that fools fall in love because nobody else is that stupid! It's not the smart person in us that falls in love. It's that little tiny bit of Fool that survives the slings and arrow of outrageous boyfriends that still has the crazy audacity to poke its heart out of the shell, one more time, and get clobbered.

When the Fool appears in the spread, it reminds us that there is another way to be, besides suspicious, and wounded, and hopeless, and despairing, which is the way we might end up feeling when the going gets rough. It reminds us that we are not alone, as long as we have the Dog-God and the Cat-Act. The cat tells us to ACT on impulse, saying, "If it feels good, do it."

My hotshot martial arts guy could serve as the antithesis of the Fool energy. The Fool has no agenda, and is just as happy when he fails as when he succeeds, because he doesn't know the difference. The martial arts guy had the Fool energy smothered basically the minute he was born by a father who expected him to carry on the family dynasty. His whole life has been on an agenda, and the worst thing is, it wasn't necessarily his. The guy is now 60 and he is still working on his father's agenda. He is one of the all-time greats in the martial arts, and nobody will ever match his record, but he's not free.

I am not judging the martial arts guy, quite the contrary. He has gone literally beyond the limits of human capability, he has reached the maximum of his own potential and gone beyond it. I have an enormous admiration for people who can be that focused. What I am saying is that it might be nice for this person to be able to experience the Fool energy at this point in his life.

As The Fool reminds us, It's never too late to have a happy childhood.