The Beginning

I started working on The Journey deck last fall. It all started with my love of the Faeries Oracle by Jessica MacBeth and Brian Froud. Playing with the deck sort of sparked off my creative thought process. Then add to that my wonderful rich history of the "supernatural" (for lack of a better word) and I thought....hmmmm....might those life experiences be developed into a deck. As a personal deck, I felt I would have a strong connection to the cards and also an instant ability to read them easily...because I already knew the stories they were based on...

Well after working on the "ideas" for the cards for a few months...life got busy and time just sort of escaped me...I used index cards to create a "draft" copy of the deck so I could play around with reading with them and perhaps get a better feel for missing elements. Then I sort of
"put them to the side" for a time as other interests and responsibilites came up...

Now it's almost autumn again and I feel the need to get back to the project...along with the help of "my team"...consisting of my nieces who lived some of the experiences and my daughters who lived some of them but have also heard the tellings and retelling many times. They all helped develop the draft cards the first go around. This time I will also be adding my sister into the mix as we strive to fully articulate the stories and meanings behind the cards. In my mind we will journey together as we relive, laugh and maybe cry over the tales that unfold in the process of this very personal creation.

This is a personal deck and as such its development is a personal endeavor. It is not really a venture to produce and publish a deck. Simply a way of celebrating a history that includes some quite unique and interesting aspects. I mean when you grow up on a haunted farm...there's just a whole lot of stuff that happens...and as a woman of "age" I think it is a wonderful way to pass down family history and leave a "mark" so to speak in much the same way that a scrapbook does.

If my team wants authorship rights on the blog...that can be set up...and as we meet, reflect, laugh and share...we will build a deck that fully explains, The Journey.