This morning, I closed a journal. Not just physically, but mythically. One more volume in the chronicle of my inner life, full of wandering thoughts, fragmented truths, and soul signals scratched into paper. And it ended, quite fittingly, with the Fool.

Not just any fool, but the Jester. The Eternal Trickster. A hunched figure in green and red, mischief tucked into his sleeves and riddles stitched into his gait. He appeared through a archetype card drawn at random—or so it seemed. But I’ve learned by now that nothing truly random ever shows up when you’re walking a mythic path. Synchronicity is just the soul’s way of waving hello.

The Jester crouched on the page like a hidden glyph, a secret smile behind paper eyes. I laid the card across the final written lines of the journal like a seal, a punctuation mark, an archetypal signature. And then I sketched his cousin—the one who lives in my own imagination. Crude, sure. Just ink lines and shaky hands. But expressive. Eyes wide. Mouth curved just enough to unsettle. A face that sees through things.

There’s something poetic about ending a chapter of self-inquiry with the archetype who doesn’t play by the rules. The one who slips past guards, tells truth through jest, and dances at the edge of every threshold. The Jester is no fool in the way the world imagines. He’s the fool in the mythic sense—the zero in the Tarot deck, the wild card, the beginning that never ends. He shows up when a journey is ending only to remind you: this is where it begins again.

And for me, that lands.

Because journaling isn’t just something I do—it’s something I become in the doing. The journal is both map and mirror. It tracks my myth and tricks me into seeing what I often avoid. It’s a quiet ritual, a sacred dialogue, and some days, it’s my only anchor in a world that feels too loud, too fast, too shallow.

To end a journal is to complete a small cycle of becoming. A ring has closed. A mask has cracked. A story has been witnessed and released. And when I look back at the first pages—those early scrawls from weeks or months ago—I see a different man. A younger version of me, still clinging to certain patterns, still performing parts I’ve since retired. Still asking different questions.

But it’s the questions that keep me coming back. Always questions. Never quite answers. That’s why the Trickster speaks to me so deeply. He doesn’t hand you the truth. He makes you trip over it. He hides it in plain sight and chuckles when you finally see.

And in a way, isn’t that what I’ve been doing all along? Playing the jester in my own inner court? Writing riddles to myself? Creating safe spaces for the wild questions to roam?

As I write this, the journal lies beside me, closed now. Its spine bent from use, its pages fat with thoughts, sketches, dreams, and doubts. I feel a strange tenderness toward it. A kind of reverence. Because even though it’s just a notebook, it held space for my becoming. It held me.

And now, with that last gesture—the card, the sketch, the scribbled line: “We end this journal with the Fool, the Jester, the Eternal Trickster”—I realise I wasn’t just documenting a journey. I was embodying one. Living one. Closing one.

But the Fool has no end. Only a cliff’s edge and the promise of air.

So tomorrow, or maybe later today, I’ll open a new journal. Fresh pages. Empty lines. The silence of possibility. And I’ll begin again—not because I have to, but because it’s what the myth asks of me. What the Jester dares of me.

To keep becoming.

To keep dancing.

To keep writing my way into who I’m meant to be.

Prompt for your own reflection:

What archetype walks beside you as you end one chapter and begin another? What might they be whispering as you take that next step?