The Fool’s Compass is available now

“Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.” – Aldous Huxley

The Fool’s Compass is a collection of poems thematically unified around The Fool tarot card. In tarot, the Fool embodies the most expansive, unbound self stepping into the unknown, seeking knowledge, experience, and wholeness. They are often depicted as a radiant youth walking in sunlight and smelling a rose while a dog barks at their feet. Traditionally, the Fool teeters at the edge of a cliff, caught in the moment between blissful oblivion and expansive, yet occasionally painful, insight. The card is number zero, which denotes the point of greatest potential—all possibility, the Tao, everything and nothing.

In our culture, fool is shorthand for naïve, reckless, or stupid. Because the Fool is all-encompassing, they are all of these things, but also infinitely more. They move freely, treading lightly, unburdened by the weight of life’s accumulated experience. Yet the Fool carries a small bag: a bundle of tools, lessons, and ancestral wisdom to aid them on the journey. The dog, too, is more than a lookout; it is the instinctive companion within, the psychic guide that helps us navigate our pitfalls and discoveries. 

Like the Fool, I have been on many adventures, both literal and metaphorical, that expanded my awareness of self and the world. I have stumbled off plenty of cliffs, repeatedly returned to zero, and each time emerged with a renewed sense of possibility. I have striven to travel lightly, shedding the weight of expectation while learning from experience. And in moments of peril, I have discovered tools that I didn’t realize I possessed.

These poems trace those moments: wrong turns and dead ends, vistas and revelations, mishaps and awakenings. The title The Fool’s Compass is in itself a paradox, for the Fool has no map, no clear direction. Yet even in unknowing, there is a purpose to our wandering. We fall where we must, reach into the bag, and find our way. Walking our own path may make us appear foolish or even dangerous to the outside world, but it also makes us inspired, bold, visionary, and alive. In my own life I have learned that it is the only journey truly worth taking.

“Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.” – Hermann Hesse