All the World’s A Fool

Welcome to the Mid-Winter/Yule Tarot Blog Hop. The theme for this Hop, set by yours truly, is entitled “Wishing on a Star” and asks our bloggers to reflect on what they have to celebrate from the past year and wish for the year to come. Before we explore this theme, here are the navigation links for the Hop:

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Quite often, we get bound up in the chaos, excitement (or horror) of Christmas/holidays approaching and it just becomes an exercise in getting it all done and over with so we can draw breath and move swiftly on without pausing to reflect. Since I have, for the first time this year, been trading at Christmas Fairs, I began thinking about the season back in May, so to say it’s been a long haul is something of an understatement. Thus, my mental reminder to have a reflective checkpoint happened some time in June. (See, now there’s planning ahead…or possibly some form of masochism). Despite that, and quite to my surprise, I am still looking forward to the festive season and have managed to avoid becoming jaded and also to rise above getting annoyed by the ever-earlier onslaught of commercial pressure.

All digression aside, as you may have guessed from the title, I chose The World and The Fool as my cards. Simplistically, The World symbolises endings and The Fool beginnings, and while this adequately sums up the drawing to a close of another busy and full calendar year* and the anticipation of the new one, both cards have so much more to say. 

*Let’s face it, nobody really does anything much in the week between Christmas and the New Year.

In a shameless bit of self-promotion, I’m using the cards from my own deck-in-progress, the Meniscus Tarot, about which you will be reading more, if you haven’t already, at some point in this very Hop. Here are the cards:

Let’s look at The World. It is the culmination of the journey, the end of a cycle and one hopes the completion of a worthwhile journey with an accumulation of knowledge and experience. That said, those who decree themselves full of worldly wisdom are sometimes just fools (or idiots you’d like to stab). Whereas The Fool, with few pre-conceptions and a creative sense of adventure, can have all the wisdom he needs to begin an epic journey.

“To see a world in a grain of sand. And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. And eternity in an hour.” William Blake

A testament to the innocence of the Fool and a nice circular connection to the World, don’cha think? 😀

The key phrase that comes to mind when I see The World card, is usually “The World is your oyster“. An opening up of all the possibilities for new beginnings that come with endings. A clean last or page on which to write lies ahead**, you just have decide what you want to write. 

** Er, just to clarify: “to write…….lies ahead”, not “to write lies… ahead”.

The thing about oysters though, is that it literally takes an irritating piece of grit (or an idiot you’d probably like to stab…or push off a cliff, which may be where the Fool comes in***) to make a pearl, otherwise you just have a shell full of snot that some people regards as edible. Either way some form of nastiness in involved, but even from that may come something good. (Apologies, I don’t normally come over all inspirational, it must be the festive spirit…or wine). So, whatever sort of year you’ve had in 2017, there will have been some snot, some grit and, if you were lucky, the odd pearl or at least the beginnings of one. So there’s a reason for celebration, or maybe at least a little gratitude, even if it’s just that it is all over and you are still here to tell the tale and speculate about what may come in 2018.

***though the idiot…I mean, grit…will just get smothered in snot anyway, so save yourself the jail sentence

All of which brings up to the wishes for next year part and The Fool. For all the oysters I wish the humility to realise they’re encased in snot, and for the Fools, I wish them a bon voyage and bon chance. As for me, I’ll be happy enough with the knowledge that the world is my figurative oyster (I’ll leave the literal ones to snot-lovers and pearl divers), and that, armed with a little more experience and hopefully wisdom, I can ignore all of that and embark on the new voyage of discovery that will be 2018, armed with a packed lunch and my faithful, ever-alert-to-danger hound.

I hope you enjoyed reading my festive silliness. Thus, enlightened and full of worldly wisdom, I present you the navigation links for your onward Fool-ish journey, but before you go, kindly leave a comment here 😀

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