The Story of the Robin, The Egg & The Fool

When synchronicity is your coach.

ABOUT THE ROBIN PART I.

Twenty years ago or so, when I moved into my house in Brooklyn my landlord planted a very small cherry blossom tree out front. The tree is now as tall as the house, and this year, for the first time since I moved into the house in 2005, a bird has chosen the tree as the site of its nest.

Seeing this nest feels like a sign that this land, and this timeline are all moving together in flow because I am also in a nesting season in a way…

The bird happens to be a robin. Which is weird because we never see robins in this tree. The sparrows love the tree. Sometimes we get some mourning doves. Once in a while a blue jay will appear or a cardinal will click in the evening. But a robin, never. And now a whole nest.

Robins and I have a relationship. On my 22nd birthday, I uncharacteristically decided to get a spontaneous tattoo on my collar bone, inspired by (of all things), an image of a small bird on a shopping bag from a gift I had received.

I got the tattoo very very small. I liked it. A few weeks later I popped into the shop and asked if they knew what the bird on the bag was.

’I think a robin?’ they said, with a question mark at the end.

I had to laugh. At that point, I had been in a very confusing relationship with someone named Robin for a few years that was on and off and on and off, and looking back, was one of the most formative, magnetic and strange relationships of my life.

And at 22, there I was, still friends with Robin, now with a tattooed robin on my collar bone… I explained to him it was unintentional. I think he kind of believed me. To this day, I don’t really know if he did... Good grief.

PART II.

In 2015, ten years or so after the tattoo, I was sitting in my brick and mortar shop, located in a very sweet and quiet(ish) part of Brooklyn when one of the regulars from the bar where I worked came in. She tried on a few shirts that my friend had screen-printed her collages onto, and at some point she said to me,

‘This is my friend Ida’s old shop! Did you ever go to it? It was called Orange Marmalade.’

Well actually, I had gone to that shop. I had even interviewed to work there, but in the first weekend I was scheduled to work, I was let go because she couldn’t afford to have an employee…

I had also gone to that shop another time… on my 22nd birthday with my friend Jessica who bought me a present, and gave it to me in a little shopping bag - with a robin on it… which I tattooed on my collar bone.

Ten years later, I was now the owner of a shop in the exact location, running a clothing store - (that was actually secretly a school for mystics, and a portal into another dimension, though I didn’t know it at the time.)

Realizing I had inked my body with a souvenir from my future reality startled me. What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? Maybe it just meant I was on the right timeline, on the right track… maybe it meant I wasn’t alone…

PART III.

And today, nine years after this strange feeling of being in a time spiral - (though, I’ve come to understand for me life feels more like a double helix than a spiral) - I have just finished facilitating a workshop called The Fool, which was all about the archetype of the Innocence and Freedom inspired by the tarot, and the moment we are in as a human species, which I believe to be somewhat of a quantum rebirth into a relentlessly unfamiliar space of new possibilities.

After facilitating the workshop, I realized that there were a few sentences I intended to read from a passage from Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom - which I had missed, which I will share with you below.

Rachel says:

“The Fool bears the number 0 because all things are possible to the person who is always ready to go in any direction. He does not belong in any specific place; he is not fixed like the other cards. His innocence makes him a person with no past, and therefore an infinite future. Every moment is a new starting point…

And then comes the part I did not read until after the workshop…

“In Arabic numerals the number 0 bears the shape of an egg, to indicate that all things emerge from it. Originally the zero was written as a dot; in Hermetic and Kabbalistic tradition the universe emerged from a single point of light. And God in the Kabbalah is often described as ‘nothingness’ because to describe God as any thing would be to limit Him to a fixed state… The Fool is movement, change, the constant leap through life.

For the Fool no difference exists between possibility and reality. 0 means a total emptiness of hopes and fears, and the Fool expects nothing, plans nothing. He responds instantly to the immediate situation.

Other people will receive his complete spontaneity. Nothing calculated, nothing held back. He does not do this deliberately, like someone consciously deciding to be wholly honest with a friend or a lover. The Fool gives his honesty and love naturally, to everyone, without ever thinking about it.”

After reading this passage, (for the first time since 2018 or so), I really let it sink in. The way, I had always been told I would be eaten up by the world if I didn’t toughen up. That I smiled so much people could tell I was ‘not from around here’. I realized how often I was talked out of my connection with The Fool, not by unsuspecting strangers, of people that were ‘too cool’, but usually, by those who loved me most and didn’t want me to be hurt by the gravity of life.

And life certainly humbled me; its gravity made itself known, time and time again. But life has also validated a belief I had in the existence of air streams of magic - this feeling that if you catch the wind just right, not only do your wings open, but if you trust that feeling of weightlessness long enough, you can learn to see through the Eyes on Your Wings.

When I put the book away and went downstairs, my partner, who had just come back from work, was looking into the robin’s nest and spotted two of the tiniest blue eggs I have ever seen. The egg. The 0 from which all things are possible. The Fool’s spirit winking at us.

We geeked out a little, and then sent a picture to our landlord, whose wife loves the birds so much, too.

And later that night, when I was hanging my coat, I felt in the pocket a little something… which I realized was some candy that my niece (who everyone thinks looks just like me) - had given me the weekend before: a small and packet of malt balls with candy coating aptly named Robins Eggs.

I felt them in my hand, and knew I was reuniting with The Fool in ways I never had before. I felt the Fool rise up in me, along with the indescribable feeling of being nothing, and everything at once.

PART IV ICING ON THE CAKE + WHY THIS STORY IS FOR EVERYONE

The really wild thing, the icing on the cake, is that in The Fool, we talked about how the notion of taboo is partially a mistranslation from when Captain Cook invited the Tonga people onto his boat, and they refused to eat because that would have been Tapu - which in Oceanic languages can certainly translate to forbidden (as it is in English), but also means something more abstract akin to the word *sacred.

The day after the workshop, I saw on social media that the spears Captain Cook had taken at Botany Bay - the first objects that the British had taken from indigenous Australians - were recently returned to the local Gweagal people in this beautiful ceremony. The Fool, is not an individual energy, but a collective return to 0. Not a denial or erasure of what once happened, but an opening to choose a new path from exactly where we are.

Mythical News for May:

• My 1:1 books are opening soon! Join the waitlist here.

• I decided The Fool was too juicy to take away just yet. It will be up for purchase on a sliding scale through 05/05 at this link.

• 2 More Days for Creative Seed: My other workshop Creative Seed is available here until April 30th. It is for activating your unique creativity.

• My next Workshop Series will be opening very soon. It is called… Creation Portals. Here is the waitlist for that.

• I also have a Mystery Waitlist you might want to join if you are interested in emerging patterns in the collective energy… or The Sun.

• If you’re a paid subscriber, I will be raffling off a 45 minute 1:1 session at the end of April. You are automatically entered for that when you subscribe to the Garden!