Entering Coordinates
When Friendship Enters the Map
A few weeks ago, I shared a card sketch that recently surfaced while working with my Mayura oracle deck. It was made several years ago in response to a prompt about friendship. When I conceived of that card, I interpreted the theme mostly inwardly (a representation of befriending the Self) and the sketch simply never came to full fruition.
It’s uncanny how this thing sort of pushed itself back to the surface, like a seed planted years ago that had remained dormant. Even when it appeared a couple weeks ago, and I connected it to experiences that had unfolded since its creation, I don’t think I fully registered how much it really belongs to this present moment in time.
“When a card first enters the deck, it usually represents a particular moment, realization, memory, dream, or theme. But once placed in the deck, its meaning doesn’t remain fixed. Each time the card surfaces, it accumulates new layers of relationship to whatever question or situation brought it forward.”
It showed up again this week, like a surprise obstacle in the middle of the road, while I was trying to finish up a certain part of my process. I could feel that there was some end still left untied, so I went back to the deck again, and sure enough, everything that surfaced pointed once more to that unfinished “Friendship” card.
I made up my mind right then and there. The drawing finished itself and, some three or four years after its initial sketch, it entered the deck this week.
That sentence probably needs some explanation.
The deck I use in the studio isn’t a finished oracle deck, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s an evolving collection of images (drawings, symbols, archetypes, dreams, and experiences) that together form something like a personal navigation system. Over time I’ve come to think of it as a map.
The deck is, in fact, both a mirror and a map. Each card marks a feature on the landscape: a symbol, an idea, a lived experience, or a question that proved important enough to generate a representation.
When I’m trying to understand something (a creative problem, an emotional response, a direction I’m considering) I sometimes shuffle the deck and pull a card, or several. The cards don’t exactly provide an answer. Instead, they sharpen the question.
This works for a very simple reason. The imagery in the deck comes from my own creative process. Every card originates in something I’ve drawn, photographed, or assembled in response to an entirely personal inner or outer experience. Those creative choices become the vocabulary of the system, and when one of those images surfaces again later, it brings its entire web of associations with it. And those associations evolve over time.
When a card first enters the deck, it usually represents a particular moment, realization, memory, dream, or theme. But once placed in the deck, its meaning doesn’t remain fixed. Each time the card surfaces, it accumulates new layers of relationship to whatever question or situation brought it forward.
The Friendship card—now officially folded in—is a good example of this.
The original sketch was made sometime in 2022. At the time I thought of it as an inward-facing symbol, the idea that if you commit sincerely to your work and inner life, connection tends to arrive in unexpected ways. Carl Jung wrote something similar once, that if you do your work conscientiously, unknown friends will come seeking you.
By the time the card entered the deck this week, it had gathered a different set of associations I’d never foreseen, not only the idea of inner friendship, but also a series of strange real-world experiences, some of which connect to the long arc of an entirely different project.
So, when the card finally took its place in the deck, it carried both things at once: the symbol and the lived experience attached to it. That’s pretty consistent with how the deck, the cards, and the inner landscape they map evolve over time.
Like so much of my creative process, my deck isn’t so much something I design as it is something I tend. Cards enter when an image insists on existing. Meanings shift as life moves around them. Sometimes a sketch sits dormant for years before revealing where it actually belongs.
Over time the whole thing has come to resemble a small ecosystem: images, experiences, and questions feeding back into one another, quietly reshaping the inner and outer terrain.
This week the Friendship card finally found its place in that landscape, which means the map has changed again. Somewhere down the road, when it surfaces from the deck in response to some future question, it will carry everything that has happened to it since, including the studio notes that documented its arrival on the map.
