Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Chain of Fools

Driving amid busy Friday afternoon traffic listening to Aretha Franklin belting out the lyrics to Chain of Fools, my mind moved single file from myself, to my mother, my grandmother, her mother, the idea of her mother and so forth, envisioning a long chain of fools; women passing down their attachments, behaviors, and perceptions of the world, for better, and of course for worse.


Part of finding peace and harmony in our inner and outer lives requires the work of sorting through family history, and self in relation to family. Mothers to daughters, fathers to sons. Gender identification is one of our very first mirroring behaviors as developing humans. We are told we are a girl and we understand easily how “girl” likens to “mother” and we proceed to base much of our personality and self-image development on that person. (Or the equivalent substitute.) The progression is natural, naive, and mindless. This is why adolescence is such a second birth. We rip through the canal of childhood into a world of self-consciousness, self-judgement, and usually, self-doubt. The most precocious and confident kids that age tend to be the ones most full of doubt. All the roles are reversed, all the logics turned on their heads. What am I supposed to DO here in this strange place? becomes a real (and often painful) driving question. Traditionally, in many cultures, this is the exact time for rights of passage, both religious and otherwise, acted out by the individual under the guidance of the group or elders. And thankfully so. But our culture these days lacks pervasive ritual with any sincere meaning, leaving these children (and they are still children) leering back and forth in a fast-paced world with the equivalent of a bag over their sweet heads. No wonder this is the precise time so many of us begin to act out against our parents, in particular the parent of identification (i.e. mother to daughter). We don’t want to be anything like them and yet that is a large percentage of how we are in the world. We feel trapped, duped, fooled.


And there is a chain of us stretching back by name, Amy, Jeannie, Doris, Frances,... onward with names I don’t know, some I will never know. Each woman in a different time and place perhaps, but passing down the vestiges of human conditioning, one to the next. It is a duty of love that has swords and nails in its tenderness. Without it we are nothing, with it, we are someone other than ourselves. Fools.


In tarot the fool is the zero card, the ground card, the air card, the all encompassing One. The figure carries a satchel over shoulder and a walking stick, traveling an indistinguishable road with a faithful dog at heel. More often than not the location is at the precipice of a cliff, and more often still, a white rose appears on the scene. The fool is on a journey to self-awareness, the journey of life. He walks and walks, seeking some peace, seeking God, doing all the things he has been conditioned to do so well, never realizing that everything he needs is already with him: a satchel (the reality within us), the stick (material support), a dog (relationship), and the haloed rose (possibility, faith, unexplainable beauty).


So the fool makes mistakes, gets depressed, seeks pleasure in fleeting forms and attachments-- just like his or her ancestors-- but the fool is one with life already, with God called Life, and will begin to find what is sought on the eternal whisper of human breath.


When we begin to see ourselves and our parents (and grandparents, ad infinitum) with such detachment as the breath allows, we begin to enter the space of compassion, forgiveness, unveiling. As important as it is to see ourselves and our behaviors in the context of our family conditioning, it is equally important to then take responsibility for ceasing those which do not serve us in the way of love. Beyond that, all is forgiveness. We must forgive them for being fools. We must forgive ourselves for the foolishness we have been involved in, all the foolish words, foolish and unskilled emotions. And since we will always be a fool, as we are human, no matter how many times we attain enlightenment; our forgiveness must be a practice, like piano or swimming. Practice doesn’t make perfect either. Practice makes us the weak link in a long chain of fools.


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