Dear Unknown Friend
This is an unfinished marker sketch for a card made during a vision card class (early 2022), where I created my first series of cards. That series later laid the foundation for my Mayura deck, though this particular card never made it in because it was left unfinished. I captured the visual idea, but never moved on to the painted card stage, as I did with the others in that series. This sketch was made in response to the prompt friendship.
“An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: ‘No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.’ ”
At the time, my intention was not to represent friendship in its social sense, but something closer to an inner orientation, the act of befriending the Self, and the kind of relational field that can emerge from that stance. The notes on the back reflect that line of thinking. They include the Jung quote, “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you,” along with a reference to Valentin Tomberg’s use of Dear Unknown Friend to address his future readers, and a brief interpretation of the Two of Cups, pulled by some random soul out on the interwebs around the time of the sketch’s making.
The artifact resurfaced recently through my own deck, by way of another card, which puzzled me until I did some quiet raccoon-ing through old material. It feels a little like a system returning one of its own early seeds once enough time, distance, and experience have unfolded. It had gone into storage bundled with ideas and passing scraps, and came back out suddenly networked to a much larger map of meaning that had since taken shape. There’s no explaining that, or fixing it into a single interpretation. Its possible connections sprawl outward in many directions, but the one point they all return to isn’t the image itself so much as its witness and creator.
I’m making note of it here not to interpret or resolve, but simply to acknowledge a correspondence. Things, including this sketch, remain unfinished. The window is still open. The candle is still lit.
