Today's
TarotReading

The Fool carries the energy of the sacred first-stepping-maiden — the one who begins. She is the card numbered zero, standing outside and before the whole sequence of the Major Arcana, the open circle from which every journey starts. Yesterday the World closed the circle; today the Fool steps out of it again, lighter and new.

The Fool does not, faithfully, mean foolishness. In the old decks her number is zero: pure potential, the breath before the first word. She is associated with the element of air — open sky, fresh wind, the space where anything might happen. On the Sun’s own Sunday, with the first crescent just returning, she is the spirit of the whole new cycle.

Her teaching is simple and not easy: you do not need to see the whole path to take the first step. You need only to be willing to be new.

A young woman stands lightly at the edge of a cliff on a bright morning, her face lifted to the open sky. In one hand she holds a small white rose; over her shoulder rests a staff with a small bundle tied to its end, a sprig of lavender tucked inside. A small white dog leaps at her heels. Behind her, the sun shines full and golden, and far below, the mountains wait.

The white rose is the open, unguarded heart. The small bundle holds only what she truly needs — the lessons of every journey before, packed light. The dog is instinct and loyal companionship, alert to the edge. The sun behind her means she walks with light at her back. She is not unaware of the cliff. She is simply not afraid of beginning.

The Fool on the first morning of the cycle asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what am I willing to be new at?

Not expert. Not already accomplished. New — the way a child is new at walking, or a traveler is new to a city, or a heart is new to loving someone.

The Sun’s own Sunday lends the reflection warmth. The light at the Fool’s back is the same light on your face today: steady, generous, asking nothing but that you step into it.

And because the Fool always follows the World, her presence is a promise: every completion you honored yesterday becomes the ground you step from today.

Beginning, softly chosen, is not recklessness. She is the sovereign feminine at the cliff’s edge with an open face and a light bundle, trusting that the path will rise to meet her foot.

I step, softly, as the Fool steps — with an open heart and a light bundle, willing to be new, trusting the first morning of this cycle to carry me.

1. What are you willing to be new at in this cycle, even if it means being a beginner again?
2. What three things would you pack in the Fool’s small bundle, and what would you leave behind?
3. Where does your inner “small white dog” — your instinct — tug at you, and what is it trying to tell you?
4. What would your first step look like if you took it with your face lifted instead of lowered?

Helen Keller — born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880; who lost her sight and hearing to illness before she was two; who at nearly seven met her teacher Anne Sullivan, and with her found language through the word “water” spelled into her palm at a pump; who in 1904 became the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor’s degree, from Radcliffe College; who wrote a dozen books and spent her life speaking for the rights of disabled people, women, and workers; and who died in 1968 at eighty-seven — wrote this line in her 1940 book Let Us Have Faith, just after observing that security is mostly a superstition, and that avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than meeting it.

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. The line is often read as a call to bold action, but in its setting it is gentler and deeper: Keller is saying that no one is ever truly safe, so the question is not whether to risk but how to live inside the risk that already exists. Coming from a woman who met the world through touch alone, it is less a boast than a quiet fact — every day she lived was an act of stepping forward into what she could not see.

Today’s Fool lives in Keller’s line directly. She steps to the edge not because the ground is guaranteed, but because she knows it never is — and the only real choice is between living the adventure and refusing it.

“Brave” — Sara Bareilles (from The Blessed Unrest, 2013)

Sara Bareilles — born in Eureka, California, in 1979, who played small clubs in Los Angeles for years before her breakthrough — released “Brave” in the spring of 2013 as the lead single from The Blessed Unrest. She wrote it with Jack Antonoff, and has said it was inspired by a friend finding the courage to speak her truth. The album went on to a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year.

Today’s Fool moves gently in this song. It is an encouragement to say the thing, take the step, and let yourself be seen as you truly are — the courage of the open face. On the first morning of the new cycle, it walks beside the stepping-maiden to the edge of the cliff and cheers her on.