Fools Valley - Mirages and Miracles of a Solarpunk Future
The fool symbolises the beginning and the end of mastery. Idealistic dreaming and effortless becoming are the fools traits.
After some solitude in the desert, it was time to venture into the world of people again.
At Feytopia I had heard of an organisation called Agartha.one, a popup community that had a networking role between different community and with the mission to bring about a Solarpunk future. This time it would pop up with a monthlong residency at Fools Valley -a community space near Lisbon.
But before I could join the foolish dreaming about a Solarpunk future, I had some time to kill in Porto and Lisbon. Now, a couple of months after I had left city life and spend time in nature and communities since then, my senses had become quite defamiliarized with all the million different impressions a city sparks with. Further aggravating my senses was spring in its fullest unfolding and the effects that would have on the clothing of the opposite sex.
For a good while I had the feeling that something was brewing under the surface of our zeitgeist, now it felt like the layers were slowly stripped and the pheromonal scent of the new beginning came finally bubbling forth as what the murkier corners of my mythological entrenched Youtube algorithm described as “second coming vibes”…in the religious sense…
The symbol animating my project “Arrows of Longing” was acting across all the different dimension of my being. I was still in the search for the white fountain, the symbolic place where life force can express itself fully by nurturing its environment. That longing extended naturally also into the romantic dimension, but not engaging in it felt only right. I had faith that the urges and longings would pull me into an expanding possibility space.
I felt the air was buzzing with promises of divine reunion.
But other than in dreams and conversations with a full moon over the city silhouette, I could not really share this feeling with anyone, for I spend time in hostels in which life continued sleeping under suffocating Pub-crawl rites and uninspiring Smalltalk.
I met many people in transitionary phases genuinely looking for signs and inspiration what futures their lives had in store for them. Like for me, the rug of an ordinary but fulfilling life, had been pulled underneath a lot of people in these turbulent times. But with great pain I had the impression that the tourist industry, like a devouring mother, stifled their efforts by nursing them with a constant dribble of sangria and meaningless sensation seeking. I feared that many of them will never come across the opportunity to leave the comfort of the known world to embark into genuinely new territory in which they could update the maps of their lives. The pain of these impressions further confirmed my call to help people find their calling, by providing experiences in truly liminal spaces.
Burning on sensory overload I barely escaped the lure of Venus traps and made my way to Fools Valley.
The theme for the month was “house of games”, which revolved around the question how life could be gamified in a way that invites serious play.
Serious play is a curious attitude applied to real world problem solving, leading to flow states in which people are both most fulfilled and effective, because they are deeply in touch with reality.
That theme was of course deeply aligned with my work as an experiential educator and my storytelling practice “fateweaving”, which gamifies life in that it mythologises it.
Life during this month was indeed playful, 30 people all with weird, sometimes quirky but deeply meaningful projects all coming together to see how they can collaborate and support each other. It was truly a taste of the future, people here were striving and longing towards: A Solarpunk future.
Agartha.one is dedicated towards realising a future in which technology would be in service to harmonious ways of living in accord with nature. In contrast to the Cyberpunk aesthetic, Solarpunk does not see technology as an end in itself. Where cultural expressions of the Cyberpunk aesthetic centre around hopes and fears of utopias and dystopias, often times collapsing into one another, the memetic landscape of Solarpunk is more engrained by the faith in a protopia -a realistic striving towards a genuinely better future with the help of technology, that does not lose sight of what makes humans actually flourish: Being embedded in a community that is connected to nature and the divine.
If you want to read a more in-depth reflection on the residency, one of the organisers wrote a lovely article you can read here: https://agartha1.substack.com/p/honest-reflections-on-hosting-a-month
I arrived in high spirits and “get shit done” energy. After the previous experiences along the Pilgrimage, I now had arrived firmly within myself, my mission was clear and I thought no turbulent transformational inner journeys were on the horizon. Also, I did not want to plunge myself artificially into some self-created drama, just for some fancy story to tell. The two myths I worked with over the last months -Baldur and Parzival- were exhausted for the moment. Overall, I felt the story I was on, now had to sleep for a bit, it was time for service and integration.
Through the lens of the hero’s journey, I would now return to the village. It was fitting that Fools Valley neighbours right next to a Portuguese village and is overall a very grounded place that invites real work to be done. I wanted to actualize the shiny ideas I had found and make them accessible to others in the form of workshops, talks, writings and accompanying people in crafting their symbolic ecologies.
Lighting talks every Wednesday!
I now felt like a vessel, an open space ready to invite other people’s processes and stories.
One way I did this was to establish a container for intentional dialogs. The dialogs ranged from speaking about plant spirits and the stories that live in them, to the cultural narratives and myths surrounding romantic relationships (click to see read the summary), over to personal mythologies projected up to a cosmic scale.
Apart from these dialogs we hosted workshops for each other, gave classes in our respective sports and had more interesting unintentional dialogs than I could keep track of.
The residency as a little simulated village provided a space in which I could contribute in a way that reflected my skillset in an integrated way. I felt seen, useful and confirmed that this style of living is actually how I, and maybe humans in general thrive.
I got to know so many great people, with aligned goals and visions. Networking happened naturally without having to awkwardly pitch one’s agenda in an opportunistic style. In other words, this space was a fertile soil for humans and visions to intertwine and spiral towards a greater whole. Being able to be part and contribute to this felt like a little miracle.
At first, I did not know why, but sometimes a feeling of urgency, dread and uncertainty and a deep desire to be alone slipped through the cracks of this too good to be true life. In retrospect I think I knew that this residency was just living on borrowed time. We were simulating something we wanted to see in the world, but that simulation would soon end. And then I’d be confronted again with the question; now what?
One evening I was overcome with these thoughts and had a strong desire to have a more space around me. Overcome with hermit impulses I moved from the dorm into my tent far into the nature of valley where this poem emerged:
The Jump
The ocean throws itself against a cliff
where my feet balance on slippery stone.
Shadowy waves roar tales
about an awakening serpent
into the piercing wind.
The gaze plummets into the dark,
where can I recover my spark?
The legs are stiff, the skin wet,
what happens if I take a step?
My breathing and the wind stop in unison,
the senses come clear:
it's cold, it's deep,
but the jump is what I need.
My mind gets drawn
into the expansiveness of the sea.
But I cannot jump.
A needle had pierced the back of my skull,
attached is a string glistening in hollow air.
It is pulling me back.
The needle sinks into the depth,
sewing the vertebrae of my spine together,
forming a knot that only a sword could sever.
Who is holding the string,
and who could cut him down?
Where is my puppet master,
and how could one kill a clown?
I did not know what to make of it, but as these poems do, I would see traces of it again and again in my coming experiences. My conscious experience felt settled and grounded and was frankly a bit tired of jumping into the next pit of the unknown, I guess my unconscious had other plans for me.
Also, another poem emerged about a fool, but I should not be able to write it until the very end of my stay.
Other things started to slip through the cracks of this otherwise very sane and sober time. Experiences escaping the rule of what is considered to be consensus reality.
By that point in the Pilgrimage, I was quite familiar with these events, we may call them synchronicities or how I like to name them: “Story droplets”.
But none of these droplets really added up to a coherent story. Maybe because I was too enmeshed in it, maybe because they were not only mine, but other people’s stories. In retrospect I ended up with something resembling a coherent story but I had to leave out many storylines, also out of a need to respect peoples privacy.
I ended up staying for three weeks longer than the residency. Most of these almost two months were very grounded everyday life in “the village” but most of this text is about these experiences outside of the village, because they are what drives the plot forward.
One of the first story droplets came to me with someone I had planned an intentional dialog with.
Kalia was a Questmaker from New York, so naturally there was quite some overlap of interest between us. What exactly a Questmaker does is kind of obvious and not quite clear at the same time. She was very much in the process of finding that out by making it a reality.
So, we sat down to talk about our theories, experiences and approaches, but on that evening, she was not very inclined to throw intellectual concepts around. Maybe that is also not what Fateweavers and Questmakers are supposed to do. I proposed we could write a poem together, each a line at a time. She agreed enthusiastically.
After a long session of alternating lines of poetry with long stretches of listening to silence in between, the following poem emerged.
We felt this was a result that could conclude our session. Afterwards she asked me if I could take care of a sore spot on her back that had been bugging her for some time. I worked on it a bit until she felt something lifted. So, I went to sleep with a good day in my pocket unsuspecting of anything unusual.
Then in the middle of the night I woke up with sharp shooting pain in the exact location as her back pain was earlier, resulting in a completely stiff back that left me unable to tilt my head for a week.
The next day someone titled that spot the door of a thousand demons, according to some Tao scripture. I did not know what to make of it, as per usual I just notice these patterns without attributing too much meaning.
She on the other hand woke up to a revelation that completely shook the ground of her reality by giving her the ultimate quest. It also completely reframed our poem from yesterday:
She found out that a new life was growing inside of her. Looking back on the poem with that knowledge, we came to the conclusion that in our poem expressed something that her unconscious already knew. It felt like a miracle, the ultimate synchronicity, new life forming against all odds, but one that Kalia did not know what to make of yet.
The story droplets kept coming a week later, this time more in form of a flood on a field trip to another community with the beautiful name of “traditional dream factory”. It is a land regeneration project that opened its gates over the weekend for a little festival. Workshops on foraging, composting, community governance and lots of artistic things were offered.
Kalia and I wanted to seize the festival setting to combine our Questmaking and Fateweaving efforts into a synthesis that no meaning crisis could withstand. We wanted to envelop ourselves in a living story people could enter and then receive a quest based on what kind of role they would inhabit in the story. The story would thus be shaped by the people and shaping the people simultaneously.
We were performing a little private ceremony to get into the story by preparing a little stand and our magical instruments. I wanted to wear my little arrow of longing -a little arrow on a piece of antler- as a necklace, but it always tipped because the balancepoint were the chain connected was off. I was getting really frustrated and something was blocking me from dropping into the experience. The backpain from last week got very pronounced and slowly I mustered up the courage to speak of that frustration, which was of course sexual in nature. In that moment Kalia pulled a massive steel cast of a clitoris somewhere out of her trinket case. Obviously, we attached it to the Arrow of Longing and tadaa, it would not tip over anymore. My frustration gave way to the beginning of a story in form of a question.
Can you keep the tension, can you keep attention -on polarity?
Sometimes you really can’t make that shit up…
As soon as we were set, people were swarming in, seemingly attracted by some supernatural tension humming in the air. We were enveloping people in their and our story, Kalia would play the scribe and type the story in mystical fragments on her typewriter, culminating into little quest cards that people could then take and pursue during the festival or the rest of their lives. Going into all the encounters and their transformations here would be way too much. Some of Kalia’s story fragments can speak for themselves:
At a certain point during the day, we pursued different ways, so much is also not documented.
What I can share is an interesting reoccurring pattern: somehow during that process the story and I were able to tune into people’s soft spots. In the middle of the process people’s worlds came crashing down upon them, resulting in many many tears being shed. Always at this stage, some body part of mine really started to hurt. The pain then moved up and down my spine, ending up to concentrate in my kidney area.
In the end, the story managed to always catch peoples crushed worlds and rearrange the rubble in a way that resulted in an actionable story line for their future, of course in form of a quest. At that point the pain in my body subsided, but my bladder started to fill up drastically, leading me to pee a lifetime worth of pee after each encounter. I think I must have peed a good few litres that day.
I have no clue what was happening, but it seemed to be working and I again felt myself to be blessed and standing in a little storm of miracles. My stiff neck completely dissolved during that process.
At one point during the day, I wanted to tune in to my story, because it felt like I neglected it. As soon as I tuned into myself received inclinations of a religious vision but of which content I dare not speak. It frightened me a bit and I interpreted it, that walking the path of story is really powerful, but needs to be grounded in a place, in a practice, in a people, otherwise one faces the danger of inflation. I felt the nature of story to be a binding and transforming agent, something with no form, able to take all forms, shaping beings in an intelligent manner. But I was also just a vessel for the story to move through, without the grounding the humus, the humility, I was afraid to end up confusing myself for the story and thus get inflated. It dawned on me with dauting clarity: Spirit needs soil. I had left my old soil, my old life, to find more spirit, now I felt inspirited but was in dire need of a new soil.
Back at Fools Valley, the community life went on in its usual ways between, coworking, workshops and saunas in the afternoon. It seemed for a bit like it could go on like this forever.
But it didn’t, the last week approached and slowly people started leaving. A month is a long enough timeframe to really get to know people, but a short enough timeframe that the darker, or at least more annoying parts are not yet revealed. The month therefore felt like a little village honeymoon. It concluded with a little party where also people from outside the community were invited. Kalia and I decided to once more to play Questmakers and Fateweavers for the evening. I walked around with a big mirror asking people to dive into their depth, Kalia with her typewriter at the ready, wrote quests accordingly. At one point as we wanted to take a break from others people’s stories and tune into our own, we turned the mirror around and hid behind it. A few moments later a visitor Kalia knew from New York peaked behind the mirror to give us a quest, very much to my surprise. She titled him as her real world Questmaker. He spoke of some conference that could be very important for us and that we should be there tomorrow at 8am to sneak in and secure a spot to do exactly what we were doing at this very moment. I did not know where and what it was exactly but the encounter felt sufficiently eerie that I could not resist. Before I could ask to many questions, he was already gone. After two hours of sleep, we drove off to a location I did not know, to weave fate and craft quests for people I did not know.
It turned out to be more of a festival than a conference located at another community space called “house of the rising mojo”. A beautiful space near the sea, apparently with good ties to a neighbouring little town. The event itself was called the “the Fifth”, after a prophecy going back to the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzars dream by the Prophet Daniel and the Poet Fernando Pessoa’s, that Portugal will one day become the fifth empire after Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, and the West. But in contrast to the four empires before, it should lead as a spiritual power, uniting the world through love and peace.
The visitors during the festival matched that vibe by spreading a lot of welcoming loving energy and not skipping any opportunity to visit all kinds of spiritual workshops. It was definitely a hippy vibe, the more sceptical side in me saw some of them as bourgeois hippies.
On the one hand it was a beautiful gathering with genuinely interesting people, on the other it also felt pretentious in a weird way. During the whole day there were speakers with different esoteric and ideological flavours, preaching their worldviews, but for me it felt like they battled for the hearts and minds of the people, instead of presenting inviting different perspectives.
The atmosphere during the festival smelled like the end times and the new beginning simultaneously.
Even though I am very familiar with that scent by now, I try to be very cautious to not lose, what the old stories titled as a sense of shame. I was a little bit afraid that the speakers were selling a happily ever after, in form of all kinds of spiritual mirages.
We had our little stand hidden from the main mumbo-jumbo and instead of throwing more narratives at our visitors, we invited them to weave their own stories, which again led to beautiful connections, which also shaped and continued our stories.
In the afternoon on a break, we got to know someone by the name of Lucian, who facilitates events all over the globe -the UP-Games, where stories from different people and Changemakers are collected, out of which a new positive grand narrative of the future is supposed to be woven.
This sounded very interesting to me. What I tried to do on an individual level he tried to do on a collective level. Something I did not dare touch, especially on that scale. We talked a bit and he invited us to one of these events in the coming days. Intrigued by the neat alignment with our own work, it felt like a classic Kairos moment, the opportune time presenting itself right on cue.
After the event, to let the experiences of the day, Kalia and I retreated to the beach as evening fell. We stared into the mirror we still carried with us reflecting the ocean back on itself, while reflecting on the possible new beginning’s life might throw at us. All the prophecies of new futures dissolved into the present moment in which we allowed ourselves to dwell in saudade. Saudade is a national sentiment of the Portuguese. The word carries a deep sadness and longing towards something lost. It’s akin to the myth of the lost king; the realization that something irreplaceable has vanished, leaving you to stare at an infinite ocean with a longing that feels entirely necessary but hopeless.
But as we dropped deeper into the moment by watching the waves, it felt as though that hopeless longing was finally stepping ashore in the guise of a forgotten future. Reality undressed itself and stood bare before me, wrapped only in the translucid cloak of the oceans blue. It was a moment of utter, radiant hereness. That feeling burned itself into my awareness and found its way into a poem that I wrote the next day as I watched her type on her typewriter:
The Typewriter
Purple ink pressed into eternity,
stretched over slightly curled paper.
The air is pregnant, with anticipation
that we had imbued with meaning,
over long and arduous hours
of soul and future searching.
A sadness had prevailed that day,
two pairs of eyes had looked too deep,
into the ocean’s infinite blue,
just forgetting for a second,
the line between me and you.
Their hearts still ached from the realisation
that the fullness they had almost grasped
is in fact so inextricably inexhaustible
that it can (n)ever be experienced fully.
Now their eyes follow the sun
into the gap between the sea and sky,
to drift off into not yet dreamt dreams
and almost realized hopes.
But now they had crafted a new vision
with a yet to be determined scope.
Each click is a step on a tightrope,
spanning between mystery and manifestation.
Letters form into words, words enter into sentences
that together form a symphony of meaning.
The final click&ring, it all becomes clear,
the spell is working, the future is near.
On the evening, as I wrote the poem, the urgency of our story caught up to us. We tried to rearrange our scattered story into something we could make sense of. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that we had to follow our story fragments by attending the event Lucian had mentioned to us.
The act of collaborative creation felt so heavily charged that it demanded a poetic release in the form of a hyperstition letter to Lucian.
Lucian welcomed our letter with an open invitation, and we joined the "Fire Day." It turned out that this gathering was a bit different to the usual UP-Games since it was still part of the Fifth-Event, just boiled down to an inner circle. At first, the place seemed utterly beautiful and serene. People dwelled among a lush garden and attended workshops, as we waited to gather for the story exercise. Soon we formed groups of 12 with one “guide”. We were tasked to tell a vision of the future, from the future, as if it had already happened. The individual sharing of each person was limited to a minute whilst the “guide” -at least in our group- spoke for about half an hour. He raved on about esoteric things like how our DNA was on the verge of turning silicon-based, and how humans where all about to age towards 35 and stay there from then on. It seemed very ungrounded to me. The way he spoke about these things led my scepticism giving way to a cold chill in my bones that would not leave me for the day. The frightening part was that nobody else seemed sceptical; people were listening with glazed eyes, surrendering entirely to whatever he said.
When it was my turn to share, I wanted to usher in some grounding caution, while still contributing my ideas about stories. I said:
“In the future I envision that people will not forget that the very processes that make us adaptive, make us susceptible to self-deception. To deal with this we will have cultivated an ecology of practices that act as control mechanisms for our sensemaking and allow us to interact with something greater than us.”
Since this “something greater than us” is story perceived as an animate entity for me,
I proceeded to read a poem I had written the day prior, that seemed to fit that occasion perfectly:
What is a story?
A story is a path not of our choosing,
It is the gentle art of losing:
The dead ends of knowing.
A story is nothing for the faint of heart.
Because a story is a piece of art!
A mirror onto itself,
and a shadow of the highest wealth.
But what is art?
Well, it is an act of taking part,
in the universe’s holy choir,
singing from the highest spire:
A story is the interplay between words and way,
on which you will find the thing that will find you.
I felt my sharing was received well, but somehow after the sharing circles dissolved,
I was unable to connect to the people on this event. On the one hand side I felt grateful to be able to be there, on the other I felt strangely not welcome. Everyone seemed high on love and light and no darkness could be seen, but still I had a sense of deep unease in my body. Two times people approached me, whispering that I had "finally arrived home." But I did not feel welcomed; I felt watched.
The whole day I felt so incredibly cold, that I retreated indoors, where I let my hand sketch mindlessly on a piece of paper, and out came the image of a small, vampiric bat. I took it as a warning from my unconscious about the space.
Yet, my conscious self was genuinely conflicted. I did not really know these people, or what they are building, and it is entirely possible that it was just me that day, projecting my own walls onto their space.
The topics of the event revolved around everything my Arrows of Longing project aimed for: a sense of home, working with story, reconnecting to the spiritual realm, and navigating a world in drastic transition by trusting in powers larger than ourselves. But I never got an idea of what they were actually doing or building. It seemed I found myself in a mirage.
Seeking clarity, I searched a conversation with two figures that seemed to have a leading role, I said: "I am sceptical of all this light. Everything here is love and light, but where are the shadows? I cannot see the shadows here, and not seeing them frightens me." Both told me that the shadows were absolutely there, that I was simply feeling them acutely, but that they had learned to transmute them into light.
I left early and psychically drained, shivering from an ambient chill I couldn't shake.
The next days it felt like a missed opportunity, all the story fragments had been pointing towards this gathering. I remembered how I told my friends a few months earlier about how I felt that Portugal felt like the cradle for a second renaissance and that I wanted to contribute to that.
Now I had met these people that apparently had a similar calling and grand visions. But when I was asked to return for the following days of the event, I chose not to come. It felt like I had successfully resisted a powerful temptation and big relief washed over me when I was back among the grounded life at fool’s valley, where people also had visions of the future but actually dealt with the friction of reality. By saying this, I don’t want to cast judgement on the event itself, it could just as well be me that lacks the soil to interact safely with the spirits that I encountered there.
I remembered the poem “the jump” from the beginning of my stay at fool’s valley. It felt like that exact moment came true; I had the desire to jump into the blue, but something was holding me back while feeling stiff and cold.
I am torn about this pattern of hesitating in the face of seizing the moment. Kairos is depicted with a lock of hair growing from his forehead: you can only seize him as he runs toward you, and once he has passed, there is nothing left to grasp. A constant sense of urgency ran underneath all of these experiences that I did not quite know how to hold.
The original crew from the previous monthlong residency, had ventured of during my adventurous days, also Kalia was just about to leave, leaving just a handful of people behind in the quiet valley.
I was looking forward to the following three weeks of making sense and plotting my next steps.
Slowly a couple of new people arrived and among them a woman who was also a shaman.
One evening, after I asked her a couple of questions about her spirituality, she suddenly asked if she could read my palm. As I consented, she grabbed it, entered a trance state and left me with a few loadbearing words: "You carry great fortune. You are connected, connected to everything. You are protected by a higher force. It will be so beautiful, so beautiful, but don’t hesitate! When the great opportunity comes, do not hesitate."
Again, I did not know what to make of it. I try to not collapse into belief, nor to rationalize it away as bullshit. "I want to hold it lightly. In one sense it was comforting to hear; in another, deeply unsettling, because it played into this same pattern of feeling called with urgency toward something whose shape I still didn't know.
The next day I woke up to a swarm of fifteen strangers unexpectedly invading the community space. No one communicated that new people were arriving. At first, I did not know what they were up to, but soon a friend called me, telling me that they were setting up an, high-dose plant medicine ceremony centred around toad venom—5-MeO-DMT with a shaman from Egypt.
He was telling me that this is a great opportunity, and from everything we had been talking about, he would recommend for me to dare the jump.
The universe seemed to be screaming at me to jump again. The shaman’s warning from the night before echoed in my mind to not hesitate and I was wearing a T-shirt with a literal toad printed on it. The pressure to seize the moment felt immense. Yet, as I stood on that edge, my body was rigid cold and my somatic response was another clear, defiant no. It felt like an artificial jump, I stepped back and let the opportunity sprint past.
I spent my final days at Fools Valley immersed in slow, progressive work by writing, integrating, and allowing authentic connections to grow without the artificial inflation of esoteric hype.
Through the intense story droplets, that were sprinkled in between the otherwise very grounded time at fool’s valley, the next chapter of my journey was confirmed:
The search for soil. I had left my old life to find more spirit, and while I had successfully found it, I was now again acutely lacking any grounds on which I could do something with that spirit. Without a tangible canvas, a community, and a physical practice, the spirit can begin to shine so bright that it blinds itself.
I learned of an upcoming agroforestry workshop back at the Garden where I had stayed a year prior, beautifully titled The Art of Nature: Life and Death in Forest Regeneration. I needed to put my hands back into the literal dirt, preparing a physical soil where my spirit could finally act as light, pulling hidden seeds up into seedlings, and one day, into a forest.
The final poem, that I began writing at the very beginning, finally came to life at the very end of my stay at fool’s valley.
The fool had accompanied me over these two months by letting me partake in foolish dreaming and effortless becoming. I got to see miracles and mirages of a Solarpunk future. The path towards that seems to still be the game of endless circles, circling along a line, spiralling somewhere I can only sometimes faintly see.
(English version below)
Die Narrenweise
?: Ich sehe einen Ort, ich höre ein Wort, wo darf ich nach mir suchen?
!: Augen und Ohren hast du also! Ins Narrental wurdest du gerufen!
!: Fern von drögen Sitten und falschen Bitten sollst du beginnen,
die Fäden deiner Zukunft aus Vergangenheit zu spinnen.
Also sprich welch Wort und Tat in dir wohnt,
welch Narr- und Weisheit über dir thront!
?: Ich weiß leider nicht mehr was man sprechen kann.
Denn meine Zunge unterliegt nun einem Zauberbann.
Ich habe Angst, meinen Narrenhut verloren zu haben!
Ich fürchte öde Weisheit ziert nun meine dürren Gaben.
!: Weisheit?! Die kann man hier nicht brauchen,
da fängt einem nur der Kopf an zu rauchen!
Aber was ist denn das?
Versteckt und ganz allein:
Was ist das was sich in dir dreht?
Schüchtern und noch ganz klein:
Was ist das für ein Duft der um dich weht?
?: Er riecht nach süßer Vergänglichkeit,
und doch säuselt er von einer neuen Zeit.
Es ist eine Zeit die ward noch nicht geschrieben,
eine Zeit, um Wort und Tat in Eins zu schmieden!
!?: Nun komm mit und singe mit uns die Narrenweise:
Denn laut singen wir unsere Weisheit leise!
Tanzend singend und mit kühnem Wort,
entspringt aus neuer Zeit ein alter Ort.
Dort wo Erinnerung und Voraussicht im Einklang gehen,
Wird sich der Pfad nach vorn, wohl um sich selber drehen.
The Fool Tune
?: I see a place, I hear a word,
where am I allowed to search for myself?
!: You are in the posession of eyes and ears!
Into the Fools Valley you were called!
!: Far from dull customs and false pleading,
you shall begin
to spin the threads of your future
out of the fibers of your past.
So speak, what word and deed inhabits you,
what foolish wisdom thrones above you!
?: I no longer know what I'm supposed to say,
for my tongue lies caught now under some old spell.
I'm afraid I've lost my fool's hat somewhere on the way!
I fear that barren wisdom dresses now my thin, dry gifts.
!: Wisdom?! That's no use to us in here,
that just sounds like headache!
But wait, what is this?
Hidden, and entirely alone:
what is it that spins in you?
Shy, and still so small:
what scent is this that drifts about you?
?: It smells of a sweetness that will not stay,
and yet it hums softly of a time still to come.
It is a time that has not yet been written,
a time to forge word and deed into one.
!?: Now come, and sing with us the fools tune:
for loud we sing our wisdom oh so quiet!
Dancing, singing, bold of word,
a new time, gives birth to an old place.
Where memory and foresight walk in one accord,
the path ahead will spiral round itself.
