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Tea Oracle

$55.00 USD

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Options Tea Oracle Deck and Guidebook Oracle Reading: 90 min. on zoom Combo: Tea Oracle Deck and Guidebook with a Reading Distressed Box: Tea Oracle Deck and Guidebook

Tea Oracle

A contemplative companion you can hold in your hands.

The Tea Oracle is a companion for imaginative reflection. Fifty-five tea-kin—animal and elemental figures—invite playful, intuitive encounters with contemplative life. Rather than offering fixed answers, the cards open doors, trusting meaning to emerge through noticing, conversation, and time.

Hand-Painted Edition

A new edition of the Tea Oracle is currently being hand-painted by artist Trinley Busby.

Expected Fall 2027.

Follow the Hand-Painted Edition Journey →

The Work

The Tea Oracle emphasizes elemental connection and the wisdom inherent to the natural world. Storytelling rather than fortune-telling, the Adventure Guidebook is layered with meanings and possibilities, allowing fresh resonance to emerge each time it is called into council.

The Adventure Guidebook’s introduction includes a section on how to incorporate tea ritual into your reading, and a number of spreads for inquiry, collective storytelling, and spontaneous contemplative sojourns.

The Story

Four years ago (2022), I was looking for guidance. My partner Trinley and I had lost our home and our dearest belongings in a wildfire in the Sierra foothills. We were scrambling, discernment confounded; ritual, divination, and meaning-making were front of mind. I was experimenting with morning tea rituals that dealt with orienting, inquiry, and vision. I was reading about Tarot, and tried my hand with a Marseilles deck. But, when I looked for guidance in the Knight of Swords, I couldn’t help feeling that I was led astray. There was a basic disconnect between myself and the imagery. At the same time, I was starting to hear about AI generated images.

I made two images for my tea labels using Dall-E 2, and then wondered if I could make an oracle deck that would communicate to me more directly. The images that emerged spoke to my heart: a tortoise departing from a tower, a radiant frog in a garden, a panda taking one sure-footed step, a slumbering bear. Using the deck alone and with friends encouraged me to return to decades of engagement with contemplative and wisdom traditions, clarifying, revising, and deepening my understanding of them. Looking back, I realize that I was making an oracle deck because I needed a language of relationship with the world.

Writing the guidebook was a sharing of this new language, both a synthesis and an unforeseen emergence. Themes of Daoism and inoperative philosophy interweave with popular culture and historical references, not as packaged doctrines—but as ways of opening up the space of possibility and supportive reflection.

The Images

The first edition of the Tea Oracle was created using images generated with DALL·E 2 between 2022 and 2024. Rather than illustrating predetermined meanings, the images became companions in discovery. Over time, they revealed their own relationships, symbols, and stories.

A hand-painted edition is now underway with artist Trinley Busby, continuing the Oracle's collaborative unfolding.

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