New Workshop Offering: Build a Personal Oracle Deck

a Joyful Practice community experiment (and other workshop opportunities)

In February of this year, Sarah and I began offering a writing workshop series we called Joyful Practice for Dark Times. We met on Zoom with a small group of participants weekly to have fun with experimental prompts. As part of our work together, Sarah introduced me to oracle decks—sets of cards with 50 or so images that can be pulled at random for divination, meditation, or inspiration. I’d always been intimidated by Tarot, but I loved the ritual of pulling cards as a way to settle into an image and calm my brain before writing.

As I incorporated these cards into my creative practice, I began to notice that I have my own set of internal, archetypal images—from childhood, my dream life, the animal world, etc. I suspect we all have our own catalogue of images—an internal oracle deck.

I want to start exploring these images by building my own oracle deck for personal use, and I want to do this in community.

This is potentially a long term project. This 12-week workshop is likely just the start, but here's the idea:

-Let's mess around with art supplies and make images every week.

-Let's get to know what objects, archetypes, and symbols are hanging around in our brains—and which ones we want to give attention to.

-Let's start drawing, painting, collaging these images on cards. Scrappy, awkward art is encouraged. No AI, please.

-Let's further explore these images through writing.

-Let's figure out as we go how our decks want to organize themselves and which images make the final cut.

We will all build wildly different decks. We will also cross-pollinate, inspire each other, and experience some shared consciousness. I'm pretty sure that the work on the deck will lend itself to other creative practices and projects.

I’m so excited for this collective experiment! Can you join us? It will be on Zoom, and the relevant details are available here in the registration form. (Feel free to reach out if you have questions for us!)

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In other news, we’re planning an in-person outdoor workshop in Olympia, WA on June 25 -27. Stay tuned for details!

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I want to give a shout out to these special summer workshops offered by the amazing BK Loren. I reached out to BK recently because I’ve been inspired by her teaching and her concept of Emotional Chronology which she describes as “a way of creating structure without relying on templates or even ‘arcs,’ a la Aristotle.” She’s offering a one-week class on Emotional Chronology in July. I’ll be there and I hope to see you there too!