Week 1, Day 3
O Sacred Fool, Light of my Life, Fire of my Heart, my Joy, my Soul!
Not to mention, the love child of humor, authenticity, and mysticism!
La Sacred Fool, c’est moi!
I am she and she is me and we are all together.
O Sacred Fool, light of my life, fire of my heart, my joy, my soul, my delight, my spirit, my plot to power. Sa-cred Fool: the tip of my tongue using your energy to find the spark of humor, the trigger to laughter, the way to get a point across such that they won’t know what hit them till they get halfway down the block. Sa. Cred. Fool. Who gives me permission to be authentically me.
She’s based on a tripod or even more aptly, a trinitarian foundation.
Good things come in threes, especially humor.
There’s something magical about the number three. According to Buckminster Fuller, the triangle is the strongest structural element.
Our beingness may be wired that way given we are innately tuned into stories and their telling. So beginning, middle, and ends are ingrained in our psyches. Three act structures abound everywhere, including our lives — youth, middle years, and old(er) age. Dialectics — action, reaction, and a higher form evolving from their synthesis. Have I convinced you, yet?
All that being so, I define my life by not one word but three. For a while, it was humor, integrity, and creativity. It still is. But I’ve tweaked it a bit since moving into Medium.
Now it’s humor, authenticity, magic.
Lately here, mysticism has landed in my spiritual imagination, making a substantial nest here. Were I to tweak again, I’d say, humor, authenticity, mysticism. So you can still HAM! It up with Marilyn!
Hence the sacred in Sacred Fool.
So my sacred fool runs on all three of these elements.
She’s funny. That’s the whole point. Humor like sugar is the bitter medicine or harsh truths go down. Humor is how the fool gets to speak truth to power and keep his or her head attached to his or her neck.
Think of your favorite late-night comic. Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, or fill in the blank with your favorite. What makes them so engaging is, we laugh while hearing the latest horrific event. That edgy twist makes those events palpable. The humor lets us see their absurdity.
The last four years have been a great example.
I learned about racism and its insidiousness from ground-breaking comedian Dick Gregory.
He joked about Columbus discovering America. That would be like he and his wife seeing you and your wife in your shiny new Cadillac and saying, Honey, let’s discover it!
He made me laugh, but more importantly, he made me think.
Authenticity means I get to be true to myself.
Integrity, but without the heavy edge gives me room to make mistakes, to see the beauty of my wabi-sabi, rusty edges, and other imperfections.
Who you see and hear is who you get. Me.
In case my joke bombs and you end up wincing, there’s the blessing of being a work in progress. Life-long process. Never static, never complete. Poetry, prose, or poop in motion.
Authenticity gives me my material. I draw from the ups and downs of my life to share creatively on these and other pages.
My last post here pulled from my college days, looking for love in all the wrong faces and places. Those moments of absolute desperation as the barkeep hollers Last Call, and we, or at least, I scramble to find someone awake and willing to help me make it through the night.
My life is my story.
I get to carve it up and serve it many different ways with a variety of sauces and flavors so it tastes different every time. But it’s all me. From promiscuous midnights’ dark nights of the soul to fawn-footed, doe-eyed dawnings of recovery.
From finding the lump to the surgery through the radiation therapy to remission. From taking an unpopular stand, to angry attacks, through forgiveness to healing.
Through all of that, Spirit has been my Anchor, my Lifeline, my Guardian Angel, my Soul Keeper, my Guidance, and my All in All. Without Her holding me up, I wouldn’t even be here.
It took multiplying misbehavior exponentially to willingly take that spill from grace that rendered me surrendered, kick-(in-the-butt)-starting my Higher Powered journey.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That journey took me through Twelve-Step recovery, Liberation Theology, Unitarian Universalism, and metaphysics to my new love, mysticism. Which is a fancy way of saying, having a personal experience of the Divine. Putting the sacred in Sacred Fool.
She’s me. But not just.
Because she’s also an archetype.
Larger than life. A psychic pattern appearing in all cultures, in all times. How cool is that?
One of my favorite descriptions of her (in my case) comes from Alana Fairchild’s Oracle deck called Sacred Rebels. How could I resist?
Here’s a snippet of what she says about the Sacred Fool:
The sacred fool is a great rebel, able to thwart convention and tell the truth without restraint. (There’s my authenticity!) She lives according to an inner wisdom that cannot be dictated to or controlled by anything!
She says to you, don’t try to be appropriate, don’t try to be socially acceptable — just be. If you want to wear a mad hat while doing so, that would be just fine.
It’s time for you to play, to let life happen in an unscripted way. The more bizarre, left of field, unexpected, and apparently ridiculous, the better. It is the desire of life to operate radically through you so you become the conduit through which miracles and crazy synchronicities can occur.
So there’s a method to this madcap madness after all. I get to be a conduit of miracles and crazy synchronicities.
Let those be the gifts flowing when my humorous humanity harmonizes with my mystical melancholic melodies!
When that happens, I’ll know all is in Divine Order, Sacred Foolishness in action. I’ll put on my mad cap, turn a metaphorical triple flip, and shout, wahoo!
Thank you, Diana C. and Aswin for this juicy reflection!
Marilyn Flower writes political humor and satire to delight socially and spiritually conscious folks. She’s a regular columnist for the prison newsletter, Freedom Anywhere, where she writes about faith and prayer. Five of her short plays have been produced in San Francisco. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!
