I have five or so tarot decks and one oracle card set that make up a beloved collection I’ve been slowly adding to for about a decade. I buy decks with art and images I feel resonance with—lots of plants, insects, animals, people of color. The act of shuffling cards, cutting a deck into three piles, putting all the cards back together, spreading them out onto a surface with the palm of my hand, and then intentionally pulling one card at a time, is centering. When I am stuck, I’ll do this and pull either a single card or a set of three cards. This ritual is a way for me to do a few things: set a tenor for the session of writing I’m about to sit down for (today I pulled three oracle cards: Growth, Sleep, and Earth); frame and hold my thinking and feeling about what I am writing, or what I’m experiencing in general at the moment; or, if I am already into something I’m writing, take a break and see if something sparks from the card(s) I’ve chosen. I focus on the images on the cards (today: a pair of mushrooms growing inside a mossy jar, a bear hibernating in a thicket, a mountain range distilling into bone), what relationship they might have to one another, and how they speak to me and/or what I am working through at the moment (in my writing, in my life). Pulling cards feels like an invitation to openness and to inspiration, as well as an exercise in interpretation and finding connection that can help prepare me for writing.
—Michelle Peñaloza, author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems
(Persea Books, 2025)
Photo credit: Alex Cummings