It’s only now beginning to sink in. What I’ve done, I mean. If you would have asked me a year ago whether I’d ever be a deck artist/creator, I’d probably have sighed and said, “Maybe, someday.” And then even after I started working on the Lenormand, I didn’t consider actual cards in actual boxes with an actual book… but so much momentum was building and there was only one way to go. And now here I am, reading emails and forum posts and blog entries that other people are writing about my cards, as they hold them in their hands.
It’s very surreal to me.
It’s hard to read the good stuff and the bad stuff. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. The bad stuff is just painful. The good stuff is just perplexing. You know how when you bake twelve dozen cookies for some big event and then you get done and everyone rants and raves about the cookies but you can’t even touch them because you spent all that time making them and looking at them kind of makes you a little queasy? It’s almost like that.
I’ve got a handful of decks left and then poof! What next? A book maybe. Who knows. Going back to the cards, going back to tarot. Back to my sitters. Back to self. That’s where it all begins.
The week I sent out the pre-ordered decks I also finished all the requirements of my Bachelor’s degree and my daughter took her first steps. In the weeks before that, my son turned three and I traveled to New York City for Readers Studio. Days earlier I got my cast off my fractured wrist — and I’m still healing. Maybe I just need to relax for awhile, but the wheel keeps turning and I’m compelled to move. There will always be milestones, challenges and rites, conferences, meetings and coffee with friends, roller derby, reading and writing, that creative fire burning, prickling my fingers to make something new.

The Rider, the Stork and the Snake cards from The Melissa Lenormand.
These are my cards today. This is what I am now. The Rider is the industrious maker — the push forward — the momentum that keeps the wheel spinning. The Stork is the divine inspiration, the seed of new creation. The Snake is the knowledge of good and evil, that precocious balance I strive for and sometimes hit — my head wrapped around these new ideas — my obsessive nature that won’t let me drop it, won’t let me feel at ease. It’s wonderful and dangerous and difficult — but it always is, I imagine, when you run 250 copies of yourself and fling them out into the world.


My name is Melissa. My sun is in Cancer and my moon in Aries. Scorpio rising 15°. What else do you need to know? I have been reading tarot and playing cards for over ten years.
