I started boarding school in England for junior high, and I remember going to Harrods in London, which was renowned for its toy department. There were plenty of card decks, game decks, chess pieces, and toy soldiers, but no tarot. In the ninth grade, once we had moved back to America and I was living in Maryland, I wrote an essay about the tarot, sparse information gleaned from the Random House Encyclopedia.
Fast forward to summer after sophomore year of college at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My roommate invited me to visit her in California for a week - basically, I never left. In one fell swoop, I fell in love with Santa Cruz, met the parent of my child, pierced my nose, and bought my first tarot deck - The Motherpeace Tarot by Karen Vogel Vicki Noble.
About a year later, I bought the Daughter's of the Moon by Ffiona Morgan and Shekhinah Mountainwater, which was a black and white deck (now out of print). It took almost three years to hand color it it. Later, I hand painted the Du Wacky Du deck, using sharpies as they were glossy, but also embellished them with glitter and ended by using mod-podge. Years later, they're still slightly sticky, and when I use them, they make a satisfying crackle as I shuffle.
After a brief stint in Idaho, I moved back to Santa Cruz and began working at Aries Arts down in Capitola Village, where we had about seventy different tarot decks. This was the beginning of my education in the esoteric, and I soon began taking astrology classes as well. When I opened Herland, we had about fifty decks to start, but then a neighboring store, 13 Real Magick closed, and my collection doubled. Most of these I gifted to other metaphysical stores when Herland closed in 2004.
As a part of my PhD program in Holistic Health, I wrote my thesis, Journey Through the Tarot, on using the tarot as an integrated healing system by comparing the Daughter's of the Moon, Tarot of Transformation by Willow Arlenea and Jasmine Cori, The Osho Zen Tarot, and the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
I started my own deck, the Holistic Tarot, probably a decade ago. It's been through a couple of stuttering starts - watercolor and colored pencils, simply learning to get better materials and starting again, let alone increasing my art skills. I'm working on a Rune card project in watercolors, it's about halfway done.
I attended a Soul Collage class at Cabrillo college in 2016, which led to the creation of the Baby Crones Tarot deck and book. I made the images first, encircled them in copper tape, secured in glassine envelopes, and added affirmations later on the printed decks. Then I challenged myself to write the 78 accompanying meditations.
I did a series of twenty-two tarot portraits with Chip Chapin. We did the major Arcana, taking photo's in our kitchen but then I stopped, not sure of backgrounds or how to create the next 52 cards. I was just looking at them, wondering how to continue, when an ad for using AI to create your personalized tarot deck came up on Instagram. And so the Tarot of Kayla was born.
Now I'm working on the "little white book," not so much to provide the usual tarot interpretations of each card, but to discuss why I chose certain symbols, and specifically, the animals I added to each card - from chipmunks to vultures, orcas to opposums, so much rich animal magic to share. I've found errors on a couple of cards, and am not quite happy with the Lovers card, so will make some corrections and reprint.
