As you may have noticed, I have changed the name of my blog. Many years ago, I had decided that if/when I wrote my autobiography or memoirs, I would entitle it Excerpts from the Diary of a Fool. At this point, I am not likely to write either, so this blog may be the best opportunity to play around with that title.The archetype of the Fool has always appealed to m ever since I first encountered this character in Shakespeare's and the Tarot. The Fool enbodies both innocence (even naivete) and wisdom. Life has not always been easy for the Fool. She is a misfit because she follows a different path ("the road less travelled") and "marches to the beat of a different drum". These propensities have often left the Fool feeling alone, separate, isolated, distant, rootless, and driven to craziness. She is a will-of-the-wisp, akin to the wayward wind and the tumbling tumbleweed. She makes life-altering decisions which appear to be whimsical, ill-advised, impulsive, counter-intuitive. She wanders the highways and byways of life with seeming insouciance and carelessness. Somehow she survives the pitfalls, stumbles, and somersaults into which her foolhardiness often leads her, and manages to land on her feet. She is an iconoclast. She travels along, questioning answers, upsetting cliches, exploring forbidden territory, challenging taboos. She sees that the Emperor has no clothes on and voices this unpopular observation to the unwilling crowd. In her later years, she becomes almost predictable in her unpredictability, acquires some degree of wisdom and is even surprised by joy.
This is the image of self that I have tried, paradoxically, for most of my life, to both live up to and distance myself from. At this point in time, I have come to some degree of acceptance. I now understand that there are many roads but only one journey. Upon entering the stream of life, each one of us has the responsibility to create meaning in our own life, to solve the riddle of our existence, to attain a certain level of awareness, to give our own unique gift to the world. It is then time to surrender our individual spirit once again to the great spirit, the universal energy that sustains the universe.
