Actually an Artist

What are you foolish about? How does being ‘made the fool’ bring you into relationships or sever relationships? How can it restore or rip apart?

Contemplative Writing Prompts 9, 2024

Every week, I’ll offer a prompt that invites you into deeper reflection. So write, draw, paint, or sing your answer. Share it, or don’t. I hope you’ll join me! If you answer it, reblog this post or use the hashtag #contemplativeprompts so we can build this together. My answers will be posted later in the week, to give us all some space to explore.

So, April Fool’s Day was during Spring Break. We’ve never made a big deal of it with our kids, but we did joke first thing in the morning that we were giving our kids something gross for breakfast-I don’t remember exactly what. Anyway, my 6 year old brightened up when we said April Fools! and said, mama, do you want some brownies? I was like, oh yes to the yes I want brownies! So he disappeared and returned with a paper covered in brown-e’s. It was a very good trick for a 6 year old.

It’s a small thing, but it made us laugh together, and laughing together is something I want to think about more. Since spirituality is primarily concerned with practice, (not theory), I think making a practice of building important relationships is so important. It’s essentially a foolish endeavor, rejecting empirical knowing as the primary good our post-enlightenment society has made it out to be. I looked up foolish, and it’s a 14th century word for fool, an official position in a king’s court. Here’s what I got when looking up fool:

The original fools were clowns hired by the king for entertainment. They were actually witty and smart, but today’s fools are not. When you call someone a fool, you either mean he’s gullible or just a run-of-the-mill idiot. To fool also means to play a trick or hoax on someone, and fooling around is carelessly spending time on something silly. If someone doesn’t believe something you said, you might defend yourself by saying, “I’m not fooling!”¹

So smart-not smart is the interplay here this month. I think about this a lot in spirituality. Certainly a bit of theological/theoretical backing has helped me on this spiritual journey, but just laughing with my kids, freeing myself of my controlling and demeaning educational background and teaching style, and embracing new ways of knowing (embodiment, intuition, lived experience) have certainly been important as well.

1. “Fool.” Vocabulary.com Dictionary, Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/fool. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024. ↩︎