iconic vagabonds: the fool & moondog

I love these iconic vagabonds – The Fool, and Moondog aka the Viking of Manhattan, whose eclectic musical genius it is hard to rival.

Like The Fool, Moondog was a wanderer, exploring the polyphonic expressions of worlds both within him and around him – he was a wildly accomplished musician who after losing his sight as a teen started inventing new instruments and entering deeper and wilder into the vast world of sound, sensation, and invention.

The Fool is, among other things, an energy of eclectic learning.

They take unconventional paths and rarely compromise their vision, but they rarely define it: definition is not their aim, but exploration, variation, diversity. There are no goals or destinations more important and more fulfilling than the process – the Journey of discovery and learning, through trial and error, rising and falling.

I imagine the Fool saying:

“Even when I am a work in progress, I am Myself”.

Progress means realising that the process is everything—when we are truly fluid and dynamic in our quests, the things we fashion become more alive, more animated, pulsating with truths and discoveries that are intensely personal yet resonant (and potentially electrifying) with the collective.

The Fool is all about finding one's own rhythm in the unpredictable vicissitudes and flows of life.

The Fool is someone who, consciously or unconsciously, hears the Call of the Precipice – a place of unpredictable, mysterious, and infinite Potential.

This is an archetype that (often through the most vibrant vessels and enactors of its energy) reminds us that hungry explorers—in their truest and boldest essence—are unstoppable, their eccentricities being an expression of their courage to be themselves.

Answering the Call of the Precipice means that they engage in the kind of daring and surrender that the path of eclectic learning and authentic living requires.

Sometimes, in order to truly be ourselves, we have to risk falling.

Whether we fall or jump, we inevitably land – where, and how (and whether our egos survive it) is something that our own inner Fools have to find out. This is one of those cases where we can't learn it through reading or observing, we have to go through it ourselves, in order to connect with our own ways and places of falling, plunging, landing, and eventually rising.

This is how individuality is forged, how we truly come into fuller expressions of who we are.

Freedom lies not in ridding ourselves of all influence or burden, but in the permission we give ourselves to engage with our burdens through exploration and play.

The Fool carries their possessions with them – just like we carry our experiences with us, while entering new ones. A fresh new start doesn't mean a total break with the past selves – take your pain on a journey with you, and it will transform just like you will.

Whatever the content of our psychic bag or mind or history, freedom is lived through moving and expanding the limits of what we think is possible for us. We can always make something out of what we've been made into.

An invitation: take your setbacks and your blessings, wrap them in a bundle and take them with you, and have courage to set foot on a new road, a new chapter, a new idea.

Surrender to magick, follow its call. Suppression (or watching from the sidelines) won't do anymore. It is time to be bold, to be daring – it is time to be The Fool.

Suggested listening: Bumbo, Bird’s Lament, Dog Trot by Moondog; Wild West (Twin Peaks version) by Lissie