The Fool: Poetry Prompts for Beginnings, Transformation, and Risks
In Tarot, The Fool represents new beginnings, trust, transformation, taking risks, and leaping into the Unknown. But its deeper lesson is about the paradox of wisdom through messy lived experience.
In Tarot, The Fool represents new beginnings, trust, transformation, taking risks, and leaping into the Unknown. But its deeper lesson is about the paradox of wisdom through messy lived experience.
If you've ever felt like you didn't know what you were doing (and who hasn't?), you're in the right place.
Every artist, every poet is a Fool, taking leaps into the unknown. Every poem is a new leap, a new trusting that you will be able to convey some deeply felt experience into something another person can understand. Trusting the language to carry you.
Astrology - Uranus
As the planet of revolution and disruption, Uranus gives us an insight into the truly life-changing energy of The Fool. Uranus gives us a new way of looking at things, an original perspective that can change everything. He asks us to break with traditions that only keep us stuck, to question every story handed to us, to create a philosophy of life that suits our actual lived experience. Sometimes this is accomplished violently – a lightning bolt that burns the house down, an earthquake the uproots a tree. Sometimes it can be more subtly disorienting. Uranus pushes us to take action that changes our lives, not to just sit around waiting for something to happen to us.
Numerology - #0
As 0, The Fool can be placed anywhere in the sequence of the Major Arcana, making their journey through the archetypes and stories therein. They are simultaneously the beginning, middle, and end all at once. They are the ever-present infinite potential of every moment. And, they are nothingness, the blank space onto which we project our selves.
Themes & Mythology of The Fool
- The Cliff - the edge of the known
- The Bundle - don’t carry what you don’t need
- Parsifal - wisdom belongs to the one who doesn’t yet know the rules
- Hermes - messenger, traveler, boundary-crosser, patron of thieves and poets
- Sacred Fool - says the truth kings/others cannot
The Paradox of The Fool
Writing Prompts for The Fool
- Intentionally write the worst poem you can.
- What truth could only a fool say aloud? Can you trust your self enough to be foolish?
- Write a poem made entirely of questions.
- What rule deserves to be broken?
- What have you delayed because you wanted to appear competent first?
- What would you create if no one could judge it?
Recommended Poems for The Fool
“The Red Wheelbarrow” - William Carlos Williams
“Introduction to Poetry” - Billy Collins
“Sometimes” - Sheenagh Pugh
“The Laughing Heart” - Charles Bukowski
These prompts and thoughts come from my workshop series The Labyrinth: Poetry for the Contradictions We Carry, live at Ixora Collective in Colorado Springs, CO. Join us biweekly as we journey through Tarot, astrology, mythology, and poetry, writing toward the tensions, longings, paradoxes, and transformations that shape a human life.
