Fooling
the ordinary miracle of being human together
The Fool appears as a lightning rod of freedom, relational intimacy, and universal life force.
To Fool is to practice showing up without having to be cool or clever, without having to prove our goodness or demonstrate our worth. Instead, we create from what is available in the moment. We build capacity for awkwardness, for aliveness, for togetherness, and for making room for Something New to emerge - all the things we desperately need if we are to become disobedient to the dominant culture of the planet.
“It feels like this [Fooling workshop] is the safest I’ve felt to be seen and witnessed in a really vulnerable way.””
I believe the Fool is a living field, a mystical archetypal energy that lives within and around us. I have witnessed the absolute magic of the Fool over and over in my personal and professional practice. It's real, and it shows up.
The Fool is not a character to try on (a role) nor even a character to discover (a clown), and the Fool may or may not be, well, foolish, as the word is commonly used. Like all the very best things in life, the space of the Fool is transparent and slippery.
You may be familiar with the Fool in tarot or in the medieval court. You may have heard of Fooling as an improvisational performance art, a way of entering into the empty space and engaging with audiences in radical presence with no plan, no net, and no cleverness. In my practice, our audience is each other, and I apply the more liberatory aspects of the art of Fooling to the work of busting binaries and becoming ourselves. I hold a strong container of cueing, play, and connection.
Fooling is an opportunity to be who you are and who you are not in front of other people, to be fully alive and seen doing it, to take a break from managing, curating, and polishing yourself into presentability, to speak without having something smart to say.
A Fooling workshop has games, laughter, improvisation, connection with the senses and somatic consciousness, and a nearly indescribable blend of intimacy, innocence, awkwardness, and risk.
We practice listening for the offer, following the impulse, challenging the assumption that there is a separation between internal and external experience, and reaching outside ourselves into the ether of poetic imagination without knowing what will meet us there. We bear witness to each other's Fool, cheering as we see another casual step toward the unknown. It's an unforgettable ride.
We are creating-creatures in a world that wants not only to dictate who and what we can be but to monetize and control it. We are meant to become the evidence that something has blown through us, but we have forgotten how to pay attention. It lives in us, this memory, this echo of being alive, of being moved, of letting our expression be the mouthpiece of love, of wonder, of a planet capable of extraordinary passions. The urgency is not that you must express yourself. The urgency is that you must express the exquisite imprint of that which moves you. The poetic longing inside you is part of your humanity.
If the Fool is calling. It's time to answer.
“The Fool is the essential poetic integrity of life itself, clear and naked, overflowing in cosmic fun; not the product of intellectual achievement, but a creation of the culture of the heart. A culture of the genius of life. I believe that there is in life, and in the human psyche, a certain quality, an inviolate eternal innocence, and this quality I call the Fool. It is a continuous wisdom and compassion that heals with fun and magic.”
— Cecil Collins
Fooling is an ordinary laboratory in which we practice:
-conspicuous aliveness
-collaboration with accident
-befriending embarrassment and embracing the medicine of self-consciousness
-being seen not knowing and doing anyway
-the permeability of self to the social to the mythic
-liberation from mastery-as-currency
-finding where the risk of being seen is pleasurable, sacred, and life-giving
In practice
The Fool exposes three fallacies:
The Fallacy of Intellect
The Fool shows us that information will never satiate (Kay) and that cleverness exists in opposition to generosity (Bass). By agreeing to the superiority of the one way of knowing (rationality, logic, proof, truth, science), we help maintain a false hierarchy, a split of self into matter and spirit, and a world that lacks meaning. The Fool helps us let go of truth altogether and risk occupying the not-knowing that leads to true nourishment and growth.
"But modern society, by its concentration upon Science to the point where it threatens to sterilize the growth and life of the human psyche, has outlawed the priest, the artist and the Fool; and has consequently outlawed an entire field of human vision." (Collins, 1947)
The Fallacy of Self-Protection
We believe that curating, editing, and molding ourselves in a particular way will keep us safe from judgment and rejection. Even if it's sometimes true, we must consider the cost. Our inner queen keeps things functioning but not alive, safe but dull. The times when we can manage to let ourselves be playful, even our play is mechanized (Gaulier). We repeatedly allow our internalized oppression to dictate our vitality. Unlike the queen, the Fool dares, risks, and trusts. By following suit, we confront the infinite and sacred self and discover much more than safety. We find an immediacy, a spontaneity, a poetry that sparks feelings of true freedom and possibility. We find the belonging we seek.
The Fallacy of Authenticity
The Fool reveals that our desperation for authentic self-expression is misplaced, or at least misnamed. When we find ourselves painfully unexpressed, we think the answer is to change our content (what we say, do, and make) in order to reflect something “real.” But in doing so, we become even more deeply obligated to our content as representation of our truth, defense of our worth, and validation of our right to exist.
The Fool sees the world as a stage and everything as performance. The Fool calls us to a path of self-creation, one where the isolated self dissolves altogether. I become the not-me, and I become the we. In this context, authenticity doesn't even exist.
“I’m taking away a lot of things from Fooling: a sadness or wistfulness that most experiences and most social interactions don’t feel like this, a hunger for more of the feeling of not planning and rolling with being awkward, and a craving for even more spaces where there’s permission to do that.”
-Susannah Brister
More on fooling
Fooling is about showing up as yourself, yes. And we use the more traditional performing art lens of Fooling with which to do that. Come up on “stage” and be yourself. Be the one we are looking at and feel worthy of our witnessing, attention, and affection without having to impress us or show us anything more than what is present in the moment. Equally important for you is that are you creating a “performance” from what you already have and who you already are (experience), as well as what new thing you are creating as you begin to walk toward the cliff of your own becoming (imagination).
The practice of combining experience and imagination is part of what orients us toward our own development and growth and helps us to see ourselves as changemakers and creators of culture, rather than simply consumers (or even victims) of it.
It’s not only about performance. Fooling is also about perception.
“The Fool represents that innate, inviolate, primordial innocence which sees clearly, directly, or perceives directly and clearly, the recovery of which constitutes for me the object of all real culture, and all real education and civilisation…The Fool is not interested in success or failure, or the vanity and burden of external knowledge. He is interested in life, in the mystery of consciousness and the exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the transformation of consciousness which comes about through direct perception. He is interested, in other words, in love and its manifestation in that harmony and wholeness which we call beauty.” -Cecil Collins
How do we invite ourselves into new ways of perceiving? Contemplation, inquiry, dishabituating how we show up in spaces with other people, allowing ourselves to be imagined by what is imagining us, land communication and connection, play, making silence, using a magnifying glass to discover new worlds, befriending what frightens, and using self-consciousness as a wayshower toward our (and others’) liberation. The list is endless.
Fooling practices vary, and what they all have in common is a leaning toward life and how life wants to express itself through us. Uncertainty, pleasure, and emergence are all hallmarks of this work. We do what we don’t yet know how to do, we let ourselves enjoy it, and we make space for the unexpected to arrive.
This means that we as facilitators must strike an interesting balance between planning and unfolding, between holding and allowing. We model the welcoming of aliveness and stay in service to it, trusting that whatever emerges is undoubtedly for the benefit of all.
“The Fool fearlessly begins the journey into the unknown. To do this, she does not regard the world she knows as firm and fixed. She has a seemingly reckless disregard for obstacles. She sets off with gay abandon with the innocence of a child coming into the world, full of trust, alive, playful and completely open to whatever comes her way in the present moment. This openness invites synchronicity. The Fool is the energy in all of us that is seeking to become full individuals, which carries vital, fresh inspiration without judgement."
- Mary-Jayne Rust