A little bit about me…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved symbolism in any form. Literary symbolism, visual symbolism found in art, TV, and movies, symbolic references in music… you name it. It all lights my brain up! The fluid language of signs and symbols is one I’ve understood easily and have been able to interpret since I was a child. And above all, it is my primary love language and how I receive messages and guidance from Spirit.

As a child, I was very artistically inclined. When I wasn’t outside adventuring like a proper feral ‘80s child, I was almost always drawing. This love of art mixed with my propensity for symbolic language led me to pursue a career in graphic design that would end up being my livelihood for close to 30 years.

In the early ‘90s, while attending college at Louisiana State University, I happened upon something that would change my life. A “new-age” book of the month club I subscribed to sent me a Tarot deck. It was a deck created by the fabulous Amy Zerner and Monte Farber and it stopped me in my tracks. At that point, I had had zero exposure to Tarot, but I took one look at that deck filled with lush symbolic imagery and knew I was holding something magical.

For the next 20ish years, I had a mostly private Tarot practice and began collecting decks on a small scale whenever I could find them. It wasn’t until social media hit its stride that I started to discover the larger Tarot community and found entire groups of people as enamored with Tarot as I was.

Fast forward to a day in early 2021, when I found myself carrying out a commonplace routine activity… serving my son a sandwich for lunch. My son has always been a natural disassembler. From the time he was very small, he would completely dismantle toys such as toy cars and trucks so that he could inspect all the individual parts. His father also enabled this learning style by taking apart old computers with him so that they could explore the smaller parts inside. I watched as he disassembled his sandwich into the individual ingredients so that he could inspect and eat each part separately (something I had watched him do 100s of times before). And in that moment, a metaphorical lightbulb appeared above my head and I thought, “I wonder what would happen if you disassembled the language of Tarot into its individual symbolic parts?” And the idea for Tarot Disassembled was born.

The process of officially birthing my first Tarot deck into the world would end up taking about a year. Creating the artwork for the cards themselves blended my love of design, symbolism, and card decks into one passion project… a no brainer for me. But when I sat down to write the accompanying guidebook, my obsession with the multi-faceted stories each symbol holds led me down deep rabbit holes of research, so much so that I couldn’t contain what I had to say in the standard “little white book.” I discovered (quite surprisingly) through that process, that there was also a writer inside me dying to come out and play… or rather, write.

Since then, I’ve self-published several other decks with no plans of slowing my creative muse’s roll anytime soon. There’s something wholly unique about card decks that will always hold a special place in my heart, and I have a backlog of ideas itching my brain and vying to be the next one that comes into being. Thank you for sharing a bit of this journey with me! And may the symbols guide you well!