AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùI myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

These lines from Walt Whitman are some of my favorite. Almost a mantra, words to conjure with. Whenever I think of them, I picture the first tarot card in the major arcana. It is The Fool. He is often portrayed as a jester, his belongings tied into a scarf on the end of his staff, a small dog yipping at his side, as he walks along the road or, in some versions, off the edge of a cliff. The Fool represents beginnings, the start of the journey when we are full of hope and promise, and perhaps a little naive. The Fool does not have a number…he is not the journey, just its beginning, but his exhuberance and optimism must not be forgotten even as the road chips away at our naivte.

The rest of the 21 cards that make up the major arcana–the group of tarot cards concerned with spiritual questions and significance–trace life’s journey through learning and love, conflict and change, even death, coming, in the end, to the World. Often portrayed as a hemaphrodite, the figure on the World card represents completion, the world at peace. It symbolizes what Czicksmalhyi would call it flow, the threads coming together into a moment when we seem whole, balanced, and focused. And from this sense of authenticity, we can move forward again along the road, like Whitman’s fool, “afoot and light-hearted…leading wherever I choose.”

I begin with the tarot because working with tarot cards, a practice I started sometime ago, has provided me with a powerful way into my own thoughts and feelings, a way to think about heady issues like ontologies and epistemologies. I first picked up tarot cards at a time of turmoil and change in my life, during the 2000-2001 school year when I had made the decision to leave the classroom and start my own business. I don’t remember what drew me to tarot, but I know I wasn’t interested in using them to predict the future. Instead, I wanted a way of thinking about the past and the present, and how I might use my understanding to move into the future. The stories of the cards–Jung felt each card represented an archetype, or universal story–help me think about my own story.

They also helped me see that, for most of my life, I had been trying to live out a story largely written by others. You don’t have to know a lot of the story, but a brief narrative–that focuses mostly on the past six years or so–will provide a better understanding of the context from which my ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology emerge.

Each day, I would draw a card. I would examine the picture then read about its interpretation. As part of the journaling practice I had started just about the same time, I would write, using the card as a springboard for thinking about my own life. What I learned from the tarot has helped clarify my deepest desires and most spiritual beliefs.

The most fundamental of those beliefs gets at my ontology. I believe we each create the world for ourselves. Reality is subjective; I cannot separate my view of the world from my biological, cultural, and personal lens. I am the product of parents with certain genetic predispositions and a community which had its own ontological and epistemological assumptions. My own personal experiences have served to help me understand my biology and examine my paradigm. This unique blend of biology, culture, and personality informs me

And it is these stories–lived forward but understood backward–that bring us into the world, weaving together our biological, cultural, and personal experiences. As we journey along, we pick up threads, then abandon them, perhaps completely, perhaps to pick up later when the time is right for that particular idea or activity.