the fool and the magician

a year in review

The Major Arcana are a set of 22 tarot cards that represent significant events and lessons to be learned along the course of our lives. On one of my first days at Berkeley, I purchased a poster of the magician card, and it traveled back with me, now up in my room. I’ve admired this card since before I knew what tarot was, drawn to the figure’s commanding stance, the chalice on the table before them. It was exactly what it stated to be—magic—and fantasy, Gandalf and his grand staff, Dumbledore and the elder wand. The art is reminiscent of the part of Catholic mass I always paid the most attention to, communion rites, the priest breaking bread at the table, whispering something not meant for us to hear, a clear ringing bell, him drinking deeply from the goblet once we were all sat again. The magician does not just represent the manifestation of your dreams and desires, but affirms that you are the one with the power to bring them forward. The magician is the first card in the major arcana, but before it is the fool.

Previously unnumbered, now often numbered 0, the fool often depicts a young figure—with a sack of belongings tied to a stick that’s hoisted over their shoulder—embarking on a journey (the fool’s journey). It’s the beginning. It’s potential, embarking towards something, full of hope, not there yet but surely your way. At the same time, it’s naivety. Making reckless mistakes because you’re inexperienced and the unknown you ventured into so willingly is nothing like you thought.

For what has felt like this entire year, I’ve been trying to progress on my journey. To shed the fool, and become the magician.

I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant

to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A couple of years ago, I embraced being the fool. I was a distant and dissociative teenager, obsessed with melancholy because it made me feel connected to some bigger feeling that could give my loneliness relief. I’ve daydreamed all my life, concocting fantasies to lull myself to sleep, extra resentful when reality came back around. It was finding out that you could change your life that prompted me to change mine. Intentional manifestation, astrology, connecting to the universe, the natural world and her wonders, scripting, and shifting brought magic back into my life. Suddenly, being wide-eyed was no longer a scornful thing that meant you hadn’t lived or ever been hurt. It was an unfolding of everything I had tucked away to protect, and I was learning about myself again. I welcomed the fool. I cried freely, spent hours scribbling down experiences overdue to be examined. I spent time with my family again, had ambition again, a vision of a life I was bounding towards, every step a victory.

I’m no stranger to a new year rung in alone. For multiple eve’s now, Bryce and I have bundled up against the fireworks and I’ve spent the last minutes of each year journaling.

An excerpt from the last 19 minutes of 2021:

Sometimes I am carried away by anger, others I am sat, sinking, unable to see the light, but I will always know it is there. There is no one goal I can achieve that will make my life forever. Every kind word and good bite and warm touch makes my life. Every time I turn my face into the sun, burrow into my bed, and take a deep breath.

From the last 58 minutes of 2022:

I want to stop lecturing myself about what I should be doing and accept what I am doing, what I want to do. I was almost swayed just now to correct myself from saying “I want,” but wanting is the condition of the human heart. I breathe and eat and sleep and want.

I’ll admit I spent the last minutes of 2023 eating grapes under a table instead of reflecting, and some of the first hours of 2024 throwing up and swearing off tequila (it would take three more bad nights, spread out through the year, for that resolution to stick). But there was still hope there, bound with a premonition that the waiting was coming to an end, it was reaping season: I would get a job in my intended field, I would write consistently, I would grow in my spirituality, I would feel confident in my body, I would fall in love.

I have a bad habit of telling stories and assembling memories to illustrate what I want to say, which I’m afraid is unhelpful to anyone reading, because the picture is only completed in my head. So here it is, undelicate: this was not my year. In January of 2024 I decided I had felt stable enough for long enough to start tapering down my medication, then spent the next three months experiencing mental and physical withdrawal symptoms worse than the affliction I was trying to regulate. I had technically finished all my required classes, but wanted to officially graduate with my friends in May, and found myself in a halfhearted job-seeking limbo. I spent the majority of it listless, self-pitying, nauseous. Watching my ambition peter out as I let opportunities go by, then regretting it as soon as they cleared my sight. Most of my year was one drawn out “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and I feared I was unraveling the threads of self and identity I had spent so long knitting together. Like I had spent so long being the fool I crawled to the other side of the card, in reverse and resting there. Embarrassed of myself again, unconfident in my ambitions, assuming the worst. On my better days I wanted to take hold of this feeling and pick it apart, draw out the ill that was slowing me so I could be on my way again. But towards what, I wasn’t sure.

The time I had spent as the fool, and all the potential I had gathered, was squandered by my inability to remember what gives the magician their power. I slowly drew in each previously cast out line, and the world got smaller, and I came home and sat alone in this room with severed tethers still trailing out from me. Jobless, lonely, undisciplined; the idealism I had been building had been untested, and now tested, it had failed.

If I’m to grow now,

It will be through grieving;

It will be through this Deepening

I didn’t choose.

Gregory Orr

I grew up a hypersensitive kid, the smallest provocation leading to defensive lashing out or shutting down. I assigned the highest stakes to everything. I thought everyone meant what they said. I never understood why people would get their siblings in trouble on purpose. When my parents got upset with my older brother and tried to discipline him, I would cry and beg them to stop. Once, in our old Michigan house, they got upset with each other and he ran out the door, which was as good as goodbye to my younger self. I didn’t understand why my parents let him go—didn’t they understand it was forever? I took the shortcut through the backyard and sobbed on the hill facing the street, hoping to catch him and bring him back home. We went back together.

I’m still trying to shake the feeling that everything is final. I think because I’m waiting for something I’ve been trying to cushion my whole life, and I’m trying to guess what shape this Great Big Tragedy will take. Nevermind that in 22 years of living there’s already been tragedies, loss and regret and never knowing, revulsion and transgression and the quiet tucking away of things that should never see the light again.

It’s like I can’t grow new skin. When something or someone I love hurts me, my immediate path to healing sets course to an impossibility: before the hurt happened. If it could be like it was before, I tell myself, I could forgive it. Like pulling out a plant by the root and packing so much fresh earth over the hole, nevermind that no seed is there to be nurtured. Naively, ignorantly, I didn’t want to forge new trust or learn from my mistakes, and so intention that could lead to growth was waylaid by foolishness.

It’s so easy to change the narrative on yourself. Suddenly letting something go becomes failing at it, well-earned moments of hesitation become self-sabotage. But I can’t keep feeding the monster. The one that demands penance with no taste for forgiveness. It’s not leading me anywhere I want to go. It’s not the journey I mean to take.

I think the magician follows the fool because your desire and belief must meet each other. Before the world can see it of you, you must see it in yourself. Somewhere I had lost this belief in myself and thus had an abundance of desire I expected to be thrown back in my face. I couldn’t send out hope without seeing its inversion, and the latter fate became easier to prepare for. I was a teenager again, tired, lonely, and adopting a protective cynicism that did nothing but smother the magic I had sought for so long. Not disbelieving in manifestation itself, but my own deserving, unwilling to be judged and found lacking in the face of everything I’ve been longing for.

The magician reminds us that our outer world can reflect our inner world if we remember that our will is the conduit.

I wish the year was coming to a neater end than it is, but the truth is I was only prompted to break my months-long writing hiatus because I was hurt, am hurting still, but I’m trying to extend a hand to myself. Still, a couple months ago, fed up with myself, I finally parted with the idea that in order to believe I could achieve something I first had to believe I deserved it. That’s not a battle I’m winning any time soon, so I started believing anyway. Leaving out the stipulations and caveats that result in self-bound hands, and just wanting. Affirming and imagining, back to the space of creation, where I don’t have to be good and it is enough just to be.

I’m no longer jobless—a true abundance of opportunities are behind and before me, and I’m so grateful to be able to learn and work. This was the year I put out my writing to the public eye (this substack), and the kindness I’ve received in return during these first few articles will be kept right next to my heart for the rest of my life. I’m healthier, I’m hungry again, I spend what I earn without guilt because it is mine, and I’m saving for a new vision of a future.

This can be a long life if I let it. Long enough to see the journey through to be the fool again—to love it when it comes, and release it when it’s time to go.

—you fish in open water

ready to be wounded on what you reel in.

Throwing it back was a nightmare.

Throwing it back and seeing my own face

as it disappeared into the dark water.

Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,

spitting the hook into my open palm.

Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.

Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen

if i ask you,

if you are the sort of life I think you are.

Maya C. Popa, “Dear Life”

In 2021, I was heading back from a dinner when I encountered a barn owl, my favorite animal, sitting on a lamp post just outside my neighborhood. Though they’re local to here, I had never seen one in Southern California before. I had told myself it was a sign from the universe. I even made a video on it. The next time I encountered one was Edinburgh in the summer of 2023, the same day as a date that, though it didn’t go anywhere, was so healing it felt like a new beginning.

Earlier this year when I lived in Berkeley I would walk around the marina to occupy my endless days. I always went with the hope of finding an owl, which a sign (and some owl-locating groups on reddit) stated lived there, but I never did.

Ever since the fire, there’s been an abundance of hawks constantly circling my hometown neighborhood. I’ve been afraid of a disrupted chain, one bird of prey overtaken by another. When they swoop and dive in the corner of my eye, they could almost be owls.

I was thinking about all of this when I drove home from my friend's house last night. Specifically how the last time I had seen one here, it had been summer, and will I still be here next summer, when I might have a chance of seeing one again? The residential road that tells me I’m a stoplight away from home was empty and quiet, so dark that extra flags have been added around the stop signs. I know the undeveloped land around me is private property, so fences apparently must be erected around the boundary, but I also know the acres of land they conceal are beautiful, brown mounds of dirt though they are. The barn owl wasn’t facing me when I rolled to a disbelieving stop, but while I was exiting the car and hesitating over hazard lights, it turned. I matched its stillness as we looked at each other, and then it flew away.

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Happy 2025! Thank you so much for being here on this blog with me this year. I sincerely apologize for my hiatus. I have a firm resolution to pick up the pen (word document) more often next year. I also apologize for this meandering recap of a post, if that’s how it read—I honestly cannot tell! Woooo! See you soon!