It’s funny how memories change… It’s funny how memories differ… It’s funny how lost notebooks resurface…
The D. O. didn’t start off as the D. O. There’s been a long list of names proposed and discarded since co-conception. Though the solid working title which reflected the original aim of the project was Ferrytales – tales from field and well. The idea was to journey to speak with the Norns and then bring back shamanic fairy tales… I was to draw images seen in other worlds and co-conceptor was to write stories…
By 2016, the project felt to be dead in the water… I cast the images aside but they wouldn’t stay quiet. I didn’t understand why they held such a grip on me… Why I just couldn’t forget about them, let them slip away like the countless other half-finished projects I have strewn around my house… My big piles of work that started off as my next big thing then slipped into being Meh…
Why wasn’t this project quietly fading away?
Certainly I’d invested hundreds of hours in commiting images to tangible products to be held in the hand… But then I’ve committed hundreds of hours to plenty of other things… So that didn’t seem to be the answer…
There’s a part of my brain that likes to solve Rubic’s cubes. Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me how I do it… There’s just something about seeing scrambled things that makes my brain work out ways of putting them into order…
This bunch of somewhat seemingly disparate images was my Rubic’s cube waiting to be solved… I can’t explain how I solve Rubic’s cubes other than I locked myself away refusing to emerge until I cracked it… I emerged having cracked it, not by formula nor by design… But by recognising certain patterns and how they shifted from one to another… Moving this, moves that but won’t change this bit… I jiggle until I recognise a pattern I can easily resolve into order… Often this means creating more disorder and looking as though I’m moving further away from the answer before suddenly a flick of the wrist brings everything into place…
I spent 5 years trying to work out how this ‘deck’ would twist and turn… Maybe it wasn’t even a deck? Hmm well that’s an easy question to answer. Is it a deck? Simplest way to find out… Read for someone and see what happens. I read and was quickly convinced it was a deck… But what kind of deck?
What kind of deck? Now this took much longer to work out… There were many clues but not until very recently did the pivotal flip come that slotted everything into place…
Between now and 2015, I’ve explored various avenues of spiritual art… I’ve studied and taken residential courses… Sat in private study circles… I’ve spoken to people from all across the globe – tutors, learners, psychics, mediums, designers, artists, scientists, skeptics, mystics, and muggles… My initial conclusion was that it doesn’t really matter what story I want to tell or what my intention is/was, people will always read your words coming from their background and experiences and read what they see in ways that are meaningful to them and their personal memories, dreams, and imagination… I brushed that off with Meh… Of course! People always want to be written in as the hero of the story…
I’ve never felt fully resonant with the title tarot reader… I long ago gave up trying to reason and explain to people how it worked and instead would feed them the easily digestible line of saying that all it is is a conversation with a few pictures thrown in… A conversation where we spend some time talking all about you as the main character. That line has had the biggest of hecklers eating out of my palm… So my deck narrates your mythos! Qu’elle surprise!
Though NO! Something was different with this… When face to face with people, instead of me narrating to them… They were spontaneously speaking to me… They’d slide through the deck, pause on a card and tell me a part of their life…
I thought and thought on this… And still no clearer… How could I logically explain this in a way that appeased the lapsed Geneticist/Statistician in me? I couldn’t… So I decided to quit thinking about it…
Now Mr S was very quick to notice one of my patterns that’s repeated many times over the years… A couple of years ago it happened again! I hold my hands up and make overly dramatic quitting noises and then I plunge in even deeper and things come back to life again… The coming back to life again occurred whilst idle daydreaming in the garden… Somewhere in that floaty dreamy asleep but still aware of what’s around and drinking in the heat of the bone warming sun… Two words landed in my mind with a plop that had me bolt upright and boom back in the world…
Two very simple words… I wondered what they meant… Another part of my brain grokked them and laughed – yes! That’s what you do! That’s how things work… A distant far off voice whispered in another word… Saelig…
Saelig?
No… Acronym… S.A.E.L.I.G.
OK… Meaning what?
The voice replied in a somewhat unhelpful but kindly reassuring way… Oh… You’ll work it out…
I did indeed work it out…
Am I going to spell it out for you, here? Now?
Nope… It’s part of the story of the OO. It will be spoken when the time is right…
The pure and blessed way 