I didn’t take a straight path here. I was a kid-artist born into a family of government careers, the one who always wanted to know why things looked and felt the way they did. Art school came first, then a crash course in philosophy that left me haunted by the question, “How can we ever really know what we know?” That curiosity became the thread I’ve followed ever since, through a degree in Visual Communications, years of painting, photography, and design work, both solo and collaborative, and eventually into a master’s in Humanities.

For more than a decade I worked in communications for mission-driven education, leadership, and conservation organizations developing strategy, design, and storytelling that helped good people do good work. Along the way I kept on making art: drawing, painting, illustrating, photographing, always circling back to the same question of how images help us make meaning, and how creative work survives alongside the demands of ordinary life.

My fascination with aesthetics (yep, the Kant kind) eventually collided with Jung, alchemy, and the symbolic imagination. Around that time, I had one of those dreams that rearranges your life from the inside out. It led me to a vision-card class, where I created the first pieces of what would become my own Mayura Oracle deck.

The process of creating the deck changed how I understood creativity. Image-making stopped being just art or expression and became something more, a way of locating myself, sustaining attention, and building an ongoing relationship with meaning. Creativity revealed itself not as a single act, but as a practice that unfolds over time, shaped by return rather than inspiration alone.