The Liberatory Earth Medicine Oracle -or- the Animist Activist Oracle

Mood Board: The Path of Flowers. Sketching around the ideas, textures, feelings around plant wisdom & flower people.

Hi, hello!

Since 2020, I have been developing an oracle deck. Loosely, it’s titled Liberatory Earth Medicine Oracle or the Animist Activist Oracle; I’m not sure yet!

I’m designing this deck as a tool for the spiritual practitioner who grounds their way of being in their own human connection to all things.

This is a liberatory earth medicine tool. It is for folks wary of cultural appropriation, of consumerism in spirituality. It’s for folks that want to base their spiritual practice in direct relationships with the earth, while learning to be mindful of their own shadows. It’s for folk witches and animists that want to drop in and listen to speak with Others, without projecting our human consciousness onto non-humans. It’s for folks that recognize a relationship with land is an awareness of extraction, and an un-learning of exploitation. It’s a tool for acknowledging the colonial project and using our own magick to break those spells. It’s ultimately a tool of imperfection. Showing up and getting it wrong, listening, and trying again.

It’s also a tool for beauty.

Because we need us: human people that see the cosmos in a dewdrop. We talk to spiders, and feel kissed by the wind. It’s a tool for slowing down and feeling into the vibration of a family of woodpeckers making their mark on a pine tree we happen to have our spine pressed into. It’s moving to a big city, and noticing the gigantic plantain that grows where we daily park our car. It’s all so sacred.

I’ve developed this tool because I need it. And I imagine that others like me need it too.

This deck is taking its own time to be-come something physical for the world to reach out and touch.

I have spent four years “downloading” the various card titles and themes, making notes, writing, and feeling out the vision of the stories that want to come through.

This year, in the Autumn of 2024, I have begun making mood boards for each card, which I will share here. Then, I’ll make thumbnail compositions. Finally, I’ll paint the imagery itself that will be used in the deck.

This deck is a tool that I am designing to aid humans toward their own contextual journey. It is my belief, as an animist and spiritual worker, that de-centralizing the human experience , de-hierarchializing the human perspective, is key to the liberation of all beings on our planet.

And that is not to suggest humans don’t belong, or that we are a problem to be solved. We are here as animals, too. Living and breathing, connected to it all. We can collectively remember this again, and live from our roots and our hearts, in concert with all of the other beings in the world, as part of it.

I am designing this deck for folks who want to connect their Soulscape to Landscape. To relax more fully into Deep Earth Magicks, without fear, without appropriation, without projection. Just being in the medicine of earth connection and awareness.

These posts will feature the mood boards, and other parts of the process as I create the deck. I am thrilled, and a little nervous, to share the imperfection, the messiness, the experiences of elation and doubt that occur alongside making something meaningful.

Of course, I hope that when I finish this project, the end result is of use to all the people that would want to engage with it. But even still, before that, I hope the process can be just as beneficial. To artists, witches, animists, ecologists, nature-lovers, dirt-worshipers, and soil magicians everywhere.

Cheers to the Muses.

In earth magick solidarity,

Bri