I could speak of the story I tell myself when I look at this image. At simplest level: self as Fool ("The Fool is the spirit in search of experience. He represents the mystical cleverness bereft of reason within us, the childlike ability to tune into the inner workings of the world. The sun shining behind him represents the divine nature of the Fool's wisdom and exuberance, holy madness or 'crazy wisdom'. On his back are all the possessions he might need. In his hand there is a flower, showing his appreciation of beauty. He is frequently accompanied by a dog, sometimes seen as his animal desires, sometimes as the call of the "real world", nipping at his heels and distracting him. He is seemingly unconcerned that he is standing on a precipice, apparently about to step off. One of the keys to the card is the paradigm of the precipice, Zero and the sometimes represented oblivious Fool's near-step into the oblivion (The Void) of the jaws of a crocodile, for example, are all mutually informing polysemy within evocations of the iconography of The Fool. The staff is the offset and complement to the void and this in many traditions represents wisdom and renunciation, e.g. 'danda' (Sanskrit) of a Sanyassin, 'danda' (Sanskrit) is also a punctuation mark with the function analogous to a 'full-stop' which is appropriately termed a period in American English. The Fool is both the beginning and the end, neither and otherwise, betwixt and between, liminal.") In this image, the story I tell myself toys with the notion of a Fool in a moment of such deep doubt that she is either momentarily or entirely unwilling to stand and step off the precipice into the mystery blue beyond (seen through the window behind her), the holy madness/crazy wisdom. She is "wearied of wonders"--I am not entirely sure whether they scare her or just make her eyes ache. The momentum of her body is tending toward carrying her entirely (back) into the real world (the plain brick wall of normalcy). As the Fool is both the first and the last card....a second story that emerges ties into near-all hero myth: that the hero adventures out on behalf of the tribe on the mad Serendip and returns with wisdom or treasure for the "tribe"--but at a great cost. In the second story, she is coming back, and she's not yet ready (she is wounded by her travels) to come back. I like that (for me) the two stories I "see" in this image have equal weight: the exertion of beginning/the strain of returning...to the wisdom quest. Bridging the two stories a Zen saying is singing to me: Great Doubt. Great Faith. Great Effort. (And all three are equally necessary for the adventure of life.....) SERENDIPITY (noun): 1754 (but rare before 20c.), coined by Horace Walpole (1717-92) in a letter to Mann (dated Jan. 28); he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale "The Three Princes of Serendip," whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." The name is from Serendip, an old name for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island."