Asheville, NC 6:47 AM

The question I asked they mysterious mystic woman was this… “Which unconscious boundary within my own psyche must I shatter to fully inhabit the absolute reality of my current existence?”

Thinking my question was too smart, she let out a cackle and said, “My dear child, how foolish is the fool who wishes to fool others?” Her reply made me pause. Was she really a mystic? I thought to myself. “Look child” She said, “Your spirit calls to what you see, think and hear, gaze your eyes upon thy journey.”

That’s when everything went black… the candles blew out and the crystal ball started floating. In the abysmal darkness, I wanted to leave but then that’s when I heard her cackle in a demonically.

“CHILD, PREPARE YOUR SELF FOR WHAT YOU SEEK WILL MAKE YOU TRUELY MAD” She woman said. Next thing I knew, the crystal ball suspended in the air started to glow with a neon nuclear green and a man with a dog appeared. It was… me… in the distant past.

The smell of tallow candles gave way to something cleaner — crisp mountain air, and the sweetness of wild grass crushed beneath my sandals. I had walked three days and three nights to reach this place, though I could no longer say why. A man does not always need a reason to walk toward the sky.

I stood upon the highest peak of a jagged range, where the valley below had vanished beneath a sea of rolling clouds. Behind me, the path I had climbed had already closed, swallowed by the thick mist, as though the mountain itself wished to forget I had ever come. Ahead of me lay nothing at all… A sheer drop into white void of nothingness.

My tunic was patched together from a dozen mismatched cloths, gold thread tangled against black, the garment of a man who had never once bowed to the tailor’s notion of order. Slung over my shoulder on a knotted staff hung a small bound sack. Inside it slept my memories, my learning, my fears and all of it folded away, unused, like tools a smith has forgotten how to hold. Maybe I’d left them there on purpose…. Because this walk was a last stretch on instinct alone.

In my left hand I carried a single white rose, held so loosely a shallow breath could take it from me. It was the last pure thing I owned… no bitterness in it, no old wound, no debt to the past. Here, I had no name that mattered… No history that followed me up this rock… I had given up everything, and so, strangely, I possessed it all.

In the distance I could see an old woman selling bread at the foot of the mountain, she had called after me before I began the climb.

“You’ll break your neck on those stones, boy,” she said, not unkindly. “Turn back. There’s a warm hearth and a full belly waiting for you in the village.”

“There is,” I answered her with a stonewall expression, “but there is nothing left for me to learn there.”

She shook her head and went back to her loaves, muttering that fools never listen, and fools never learn, and that was precisely why they were called fools.

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Now, at the summit, I didn’t look down at the rocks that surely waited beneath that fog. Beckoning me to jump, with promises to catch me. I tilted my face upward instead, toward the wide and empty sky, and I felt something that I can only call trust… And not the trust a man places in another man, but the trust a newborn place in the air before it has ever learned to fear falling.

At my heel, a small white dog wouldn’t be still. It had followed me the whole way up as if he was my guide. And now it leapt and snapped at the hem of my tunic, barking with a fury that bordered on grief.

“Shew, Get back,” I told it, with a stern voice. “You’ve done your work well. But your work is finished now, GO!”

The dog only barked louder, as if it understood my words and despised them. It wasn’t cruelty in the beast but instead it was love of a rougher kind. The kind that doesn’t want to see you break yourself on stone. It was every voice I had ever heard telling me to be careful, to be sensible, to stay where the fire was warm and the roof didn’t leak. It was my own instinct for survival, given four legs and a coat of white fur, howling at me to turn around.

“I hear you,” I said to it, kneeling for a moment to look it in the eye. “I have always heard you. But if I listen to you now, I will die an old man having never once truly lived.” I said with a break in my voice. “I don’t have anyone and I’m destine to be alone.” For those who follow a fool are foolish…

The dog whimpered and sat back on its haunches, as though it, too, understood there was nothing left to say.

As I rose, I drew one long breath of that thin mountain air, and the wind caught the loose edges of my cloak and pulled at them like a hand urging me forward. I didn’t close my eyes or brace myself. I simply lifted my foot from solid stone and stepped into the white abyss.

There was no ledge beneath me… no path… just falling, and the strange, unbearable lightness of a man who has finally set down everything he was ever asked to carry.

I have thought long on that leap since, and I no longer believe I was mad to take it. I wasn’t foolish for lacking sense, because I had sense enough, folded away in that small sack on my staff. I was foolish because I had found a wisdom greater than sense: the wisdom of surrender.

The white rose taught me that a man must begin new, unburdened by old wounds, if he ever hopes to begin at all. The sack was a reminder that knowledge isn’t lost by setting it aside, it only waits, patient, for the day I choose to open it again.

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The little white dog taught me that fear is not my enemy; it is only an old friend who loves me too cautiously, and who I must sometimes leave behind at the edge of the cliff. And the cliff taught me the hardest lesson of all… that the self I was so afraid to lose was only ever an illusion of solid ground, and that true life doesn’t begin until a man is willing to let that illusion fall away beneath him.

I don’t know, even now, what waited for me in that white abyss. Perhaps that not knowing was the entire point…

The moment my foot clears the edge, the wind stops. I didn’t fall downward. Instead, the entire landscape violently tilts upside down. The sky turns the color of bruised iron, and I hang suspended in mid-air, frozen by a sudden, paralyzing weight.

The small sack on my staff bursts open, spilling out a torrent of unpaid debts, old regrets, and the crushing anxiety of future outcomes. The white rose in my hand withers instantly, its petals turning black from the sudden grip of fear.

“What’s going on?” I pleaded as if I was now in an inverted state of mind, the dark mirror of my path. By refusing the leap and clinging desperately to the ledge of my own comfort, my innocence curdles into reckless stupidity.

I’m no longer a free spirit stepping into the unknown… I was now an absolute captive to my own hesitation, dragging the dead weight of a past I refuse to leave behind, completely paralyzed by the terror of making the wrong move.

The suffocating stillness breaks with a sharp, metallic snap. The upside-down mountains dissolve into geometric lines of pure white light, pulling me upright once more as I land on a cold, polished stone floor. However, I remain alive…

The chaotic, wild wind of the cliffside disappears, replaced by an eerie, absolute silence. Before me stands a massive table carved from a single slab of obsidian, resting in the center of an infinite, structured chamber.

On the table sit four distinct instruments: a heavy iron sword, a gleaming gold coin, a carved wooden wand, and a silver cup filled to the brim with water. A figure steps out from the shadows behind the table, cloaked in deep crimson, holding a double-pointed wand high toward the heavens while pointing her other hand firmly down to the earth.

It was the old woman selling bread. “My dear child, your foolishness has set you free, yet you’re enslaved to your own fears” My ears perk up… I’ve heard this voice before… but from where?

The wild randomness of my journey ends here, at the feet of the master of elements, who watches me with eyes that command the very fabric of reality. But who was this person?

Stay tuned for tomorrow journey into the mind of the magician, the second tarot. Read the prelude to the journey here. This collection of stories are allegories into your own subconscious. Each card represents an aspect of one’s life and tells a greater story at large.

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