100 Books Like Follow Your Heart Oracle Deck

As an author, educator, weaver, and sacred storyteller deeply rooted in Ancestral reclamation, I create work that celebrates Blackness, spirituality, and liberation. My passion for intuitive tools and Ancestral healing is woven into every book and deck I create or recommend. I’m committed to honoring the wisdom of those who came before us while empowering present and future generations to connect with that lineage through spirit-led practices. These decks are a part of my personal ritual toolkit and I’m excited to share them with others on their journey back to self and source.

As an author, educator, weaver, and sacred storyteller deeply rooted in Ancestral reclamation, I create work that celebrates Blackness, spirituality, and liberation. My passion for intuitive tools and Ancestral healing is woven into every book and deck I create or recommend. I’m committed to honoring the wisdom of those who came before us while empowering present and future generations to connect with that lineage through spirit-led practices. These decks are a part of my personal ritual toolkit and I’m excited to share them with others on their journey back to self and source.

As an author, educator, weaver, and sacred storyteller deeply rooted in Ancestral reclamation, I create work that celebrates Blackness, spirituality, and liberation. My passion for intuitive tools and Ancestral healing is woven into every book and deck I create or recommend. I’m committed to honoring the wisdom of those who came before us while empowering present and future generations to connect with that lineage through spirit-led practices. These decks are a part of my personal ritual toolkit and I’m excited to share them with others on their journey back to self and source.

As an author, educator, weaver, and sacred storyteller deeply rooted in Ancestral reclamation, I create work that celebrates Blackness, spirituality, and liberation. My passion for intuitive tools and Ancestral healing is woven into every book and deck I create or recommend. I’m committed to honoring the wisdom of those who came before us while empowering present and future generations to connect with that lineage through spirit-led practices. These decks are a part of my personal ritual toolkit and I’m excited to share them with others on their journey back to self and source.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that finding a path toward a spiritual belief that accepted me for who I am was a lifelong pursuit for me. As someone who felt pushed out by the Catholic Church for my transness, I wanted to find something that kept some of those traditions but built on them in a way that made sense to me and included me. Italian-American folk magic had room for people like me in a way that organized religion never did. The magical memoirs of contemporary writers inspired me to synthesize what I’d learned into my own grimoire/memoir. 

I first encountered Spare in my early teens, when I was reading books about the occult, and then forgot about him for a few years. As time went by, I grew more interested in surrealism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, but I never quite abandoned magic, and I came to see it’s really the same area. I used to think it was funny that the Dewey library classification system puts Freud and the occult next to each other, but now I see it makes perfect sense. It’s all about exploring the mind and inner experience. And Austin Osman Spare, like Crowley and the surrealists, is among its most interesting figures.  

I often tell people that I did not choose to become involved in the Tarot; actually, it chose me. In the summer of 1982, I had a dream that was not like any other that I had before. In the middle of that dream, a dream phone rang, interrupting the storyline. When I answered the phone, I was connected to a dream law firm. I was told that I had an inheritance coming from an ancestor in England, and it is called “the Key,” The inheritance turned out to be the Tarot. Since then, I have designed over 20 Tarot and oracle decks and authored several books on the Tarot.  

Before becoming a writer I was a divorce lawyer, so I have plenty of personal experience about the dark side of relationships and I admit to a slight obsession with the human psyche, what goes on behind closed doors and beneath people’s façades! Consequently I love to tell stories about relatable characters who get caught up in extraordinary situations, relationships, pressures, dilemmas or crime. I also enjoy performing a literary sleight of hand in my novels and hopefully surprising my readers!

I have always been interested in the history of medicine, particularly the ways in which historical methods are portrayed to be inferior to modern medicine. As a historian, I am alternately amused and horrified at the way we go overboard in discarding historical methods of healthcare, ridding ourselves of perfectly useful techniques, drugs, and therapies. The more I learn about older curative methods, the more I’ve become sensitive to the knowledge and technologies that have been lost. At the same time, I am fascinated by new technologies, and find anesthesia particularly captivating as a technique that improved survival and recovery from what had previously been deadly conditions.

While the Bay Area’s impact on the way we eat as a country, being at the forefront of the farm-to-table and seasonal produce movement, cocktails are being equal consideration. Why not? Distilled spirits are agricultural products, the same way wine and beer are, and so it reasons that we would worry about how they are made, their history, and the future. Can cocktails be made in a more sustainable way? Can I use beets in my cocktail? Do spirits have a sense of place? And will applying beer to a wound help it heal (note: it won’t)? Here’s a selection of books that explore the past, present, and possible future of how you drink.