Much advice about the practice of writing includes the encouragement to dive right in, and skip the intimidating, beginning line on the empty screen. Instead of opening the door, just find the action and parachute right in; even if you have to go around back and burst into a scene already-in-progress, through the mudroom door like family, ignoring the fact that you are a stranger to whatever is getting ready to appear, fresh and unknown, with the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first story.
Strangers deserve more respect than that, and I feel this intensely now that I am mostly, these days, a stranger to myself again. Lifetimes have passed since I kept a blog about hauntings and the paranormal to promote two collections of true ghost tales from my hometown, and the energy that fueled those books has shifted dramatically. After several years of contented, consistent writing and promoting my books from a comfortable perspective, life maneuvered me into new territory, and it was more like a 6:30 AM eviction by the sheriff than an inspired journey toward a beckoning horizon.
It was kind of like decamping to a demilitarized zone with no ability to go back; and no good reason to go forward into what was, for me, a bare landscape fought over by opposing forces of past and future shapings.
Some energetic undertow swept me out, and I’ve been stationed like a buoy ever since, unable to get back to shore and sit at the desk in the same way ever again. I could not continue to be comfortable where I was, and also grow.
My understanding of ghosts and hauntings has always been from a spiritual worldview. As my spiritual ideas shifted – grew, or strained toward growth – my perspective on ghosts did, too. I use lots of different tools to help me understand the nonphysical world: my own psychic senses, journeying, and increasingly Tarot, to regain some kind of footing. I unraveled the religious culture in which I was raised in order to understand it even as I left it; and to embrace the disappearing-reappearing nature of the beliefs of my ancestors. Those old strangers simmered powerfully in my bones, asking to be stirred up.
The more I understand about the nonphysical world and its source, the more I realize the totality of it is beyond my thinking; it can only be felt and then wrestled into some assembly of words.
The Fool in Tarot starts at zero; he does not even have a number in the Major Arcana system, because he’s not accumulated anything yet. I am not exactly a Fool; or rather, I’m not the same Fool that I was, because I have some mileage on me.
That is to say, the soles of my boots are not slick out of the box but have some scuffs and tread. Yet this path is new to me, one of converging the things that I like to write about, and the things that interest and help me, in one place. I know they are all rooted on the same stock.
The Fool appears in Tarot spreads sometimes to announce or denote the presence of a stranger in our midst, and we are strangers when we write, even when it is a subject that we know something about. Especially when it is a familiar subject, or we are just writing the same thing over and over.
I am a stranger to you, and maybe you will stand aside and just watch me go by, having intuited whether I have something to offer you. You may think my hands and thoughts are empty, since I’ve figured out mostly nothing about the nature of our purpose and existence here, only dismantled what is not true for me. I can’t suddenly jump into your action, arriving with plot twists and reveals to move the narrative along, a character we saw three chapters back and expected to hear more from.
Like the Fool, I bring almost nothing but stories and instinct. My hope is that you will find something of worth in them, even if you don’t agree with me.
Your post about the energy of The Fool card feels as though you are well aware of the life lessons through which you are traveling. I suspect that most of the items in his journey bag are tokens of courage.
A really fun exercise — take that dinner party question, “If the house were on fire and you could only grab what you could carry in both hands, what would it be?” THAT’S what would be in our bag, if we were the Fool. The most personal, meaningful things. Not bits of string, a rock, some gum wrappers, one and half snack bones for the dog, and a leaflet he picked up somewhere about a community fundraiser. He’s not got random stuff in that bag; he has what he absolutely could not bear to be without.