It was a nudge of my shoulder. Or rather more like a scarf flying out as someone rushed past me. Barely perceptible but it got my attention. I was quietly on the dunes of Cape Kiwanda, Oregon, listening as the distant surf heaved onto the shores before me. There was no one near me but I still had the sense that someone brushed by me.

It was the summer of 2010. My teenage son and his step brother were romping across the Cape. Neither my wife nor I felt the same urge to charge about and sat relaxed on the warm sands. In a natural setting like the Cape, I often sit and connect with the landscape, as I did then - sensing the earth and sand, the wind sculpted trees, the rolling ocean before me. I’m not a hardy outdoors person trekking through the wilderness or scaling mountain peaks. But I’ve felt at home on sandy shores and forest trails since I was a kid.

There’s a way that a first time sticks in one’s memory: like my first date or my first visit to an old growth forest. They find a nice warm place in that tangled growth I call my memory. It is a familiar place to revisit. But the second, third, … or umpteenth time I experience something - those memories start blending together. The sharp outlines wear off.

After my first contact with the Sidhe, my piqued curiosity waned, receding to the unkempt parts of my brain. Occasionally this quiescent memory stirred. Perhaps, stimulated by a vague sensation now and again that someone was looking over my shoulder. Whatever was tickling my mind finally stirred me enough that in the fall, I wrote a friend wondering if he had any connections with these Sidhe.

In the winter of 2011, however, something unexpected happened that changed everything. Taking a break from writing, I was sitting on the sofa in my living room and just staring out the window at the trees and bushes beyond when I felt a presence in the room behind me. Turning around, I saw in my mind’s eye a swirling, shifting, radiant mist in the air near the fireplace. At the same time I felt another mind in touch with my own and heard it say, “I am one of the Sidhe, and I’ve come to help you with the card deck.” This being no sooner said this than there flashed into my mind a complete picture of what a Sidhe card deck would look like when laid out and the major components of what such a deck should contain. There were few details—they came later—but the basic pattern was very clear.

Inspiration comes at the next bend in the road. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the fall of 2010 I, along with a number of colleagues and friends, participated in a Lorian Association intensive program that led to our ordination in October of the following year. During that time, we met on several occasions. At those gatherings my friend, Jeremy Berg, displayed the watercolors he was painting to form the images for a card deck related to the Sidhe. The images radiated light and intensity. Each time we met he had new images to display. Though he had never painted before, his images were vivid and skillfully composed.