How watching the wild world became an invitation to look closer.

When I first began watching the animals around my mountain home, I wasn’t looking for an oracle deck inspiration.

I was simply looking.

Our house was built into a mountainside, with two levels connected by a long set of exterior stairs. When we bought the property, those stairs were in terrible condition. I occasionally saw animals attempt to use them, only to abandon the route and veer around because the steps were simply too difficult to navigate.

Eventually, we replaced them. Almost immediately, something unexpected happened. The animals began using the new staircase constantly.

Raccoons climbed it. Opossums traveled along it. Black bears incorporated it into their routes through the property. The increase was so noticeable that we began joking that perhaps we had spent all that money rebuilding the stairs for the wildlife rather than for ourselves.

Somewhere inside that joke, something shifted for me. The animals were no longer simply creatures I happened to observe.

We were sharing a place.

The Bears on the Staircase

Of all our wild neighbors, the black bears became the most noticeable—and frequently the most entertaining.

Our house sat near a stream between a deep wilderness area and a neighborhood containing a number of vacation rentals. Visitors did not always understand the importance of securing their trash in bear country.

The bears understood perfectly well.

A regular route developed between the wilderness and the possibility of an easy meal, and our newly renovated staircase happened to lie conveniently along the way.

We had apparently constructed a bear highway.

Adult bears negotiated the stairs easily, but things became especially delightful when mothers began bringing their cubs. Very small bear cubs and human-sized stairs are not particularly compatible.

The cubs had to work at it.

Watching them scramble after their mothers was often funny, but it also changed the way I saw them.

They were no longer simply the bears. I was watching families.

Mothers moved through familiar territory with their young. Cubs learned how to negotiate obstacles by following them. Individual animals remembered routes, solved problems, investigated changes, and adapted to a landscape that overlapped with ours.

They remained completely wild.

That mattered.

I did not need them to become tame, dependent, or somehow mine in order to feel connected to them. I began thinking of them instead as a kind of animal kin. Not kin because we were the same.

Kin because we shared a place.

When the Cameras Stayed Awake

That sense of a shared landscape became even stronger when I began regularly watching footage from cameras around our property.

Before moving to the mountains, I had spent twenty-five years living in Dallas, Texas. I grew up in rural south Mississippi though, so wildlife itself was certainly nothing new to me.

But growing up, I did not have a camera quietly recording everything happening outside twenty-four hours a day.

The sheer volume of animal activity surrounding our home surprised me.

While we slept, worked, ate dinner, or simply happened to look in another direction, an entire community continued moving around us. The cameras captured raccoons, opossums, black bears, bobcats, and countless other creatures passing through.

Sometimes their interactions were wonderfully comic. I watched opossums chase raccoons with such confidence that I began reconsidering everything I thought I knew about backyard hierarchy.

Other encounters were harder. Bobcats caught squirrels. Predator and prey occupied the same landscape, reminding me that nature is not arranged according to human ideas of fairness or sentiment.

The cameras showed tenderness and comedy. They also showed hunger, competition, and death. They did not show me an idealized version of nature.

They showed me life.

I posted hundreds of these videos online, and people frequently told me that living at our home must have felt like living in a zoo. I always disagreed.

I was the zoo.

The animals were the ones watching me.

They had routes that existed long before I noticed them. They followed the stream, crossed the stairs, hunted, argued, rested, raised young, disappeared into the woods, and returned again.

My house had not placed me outside nature looking in. It had placed me inside a landscape already occupied by countless other lives.

The cameras simply allowed me to notice.

The Animals Were There First

That realization eventually became one of the foundations of the Wild Companion Oracle. The animals were not waiting to become metaphors. They already had lives. Meaning came later.

First came observation.

That distinction became increasingly important as the project developed.

It would have been easy to begin with a human concept—strength, transformation, boundaries, resilience—and simply assign an animal to it. Instead, I wanted the symbolism to emerge from the animal itself.

What does this creature actually do?

How does it survive?

How does it respond to danger?

How does it interact with its environment?

The eastern spotted skunk, for example, does not immediately resort to its famous chemical defense. It warns first. It stamps its feet, arches its body, and may even perform a remarkable handstand before escalating the encounter.

There was the lesson.

Boundaries do not have to begin with aggression.

The chipmunk spends enormous energy gathering and storing food. Its behavior speaks beautifully about preparation and foresight—but it can also invite us to consider what we continue carrying long after it has ceased to nourish us.

A luna moth undergoes one of the forest’s most remarkable transformations, yet its adult life is extraordinarily brief. Its story naturally opens questions about change, impermanence, and becoming.

And the blue ghost firefly can transform an Appalachian summer night into something that feels almost supernatural, reminding us how much extraordinary life remains invisible until conditions are exactly right for us to perceive it.

The animals did not need me to invent meaning for them.

I needed to pay closer attention.

From Night Creatures to Wild Companion

The project that eventually became The Wild Companion Oracle, a 22-card oracle that pairs the Major Arcana Tarot with the animals of Appalachia grew from my earlier Night Creatures work.

The animals appearing around the house after dark fascinated me: owls, raccoons, opossums, bats, moths, foxes, and other beings occupying the same landscape differently once human activity quieted.

Night changes the forest. It changes what becomes active. It changes what we can see.

And perhaps most importantly, it changes what we notice.

But eventually the project expanded beyond nighttime. The Appalachian landscape would not remain neatly contained within that boundary. Ovenbirds and hummingbirds appeared. Bears climbed the stairs.

The collection became something larger than a study of nocturnal wildlife.

These animals had become companions—not because we possessed them, but because we traveled through the same world together.

That is where the Wild Companion Oracle found its name.

What Can an Animal Oracle Ask of Us?

I don’t think an animal oracle needs to predict the future. Sometimes it can simply ask us to notice what is already happening.

A creature might invite us to think about boundaries, preparation, rest, adaptability, vulnerability, curiosity, transformation, or persistence.

But the animal remains an animal first.

The natural world does not exist merely to provide metaphors for human lives. A black bear is not walking through the forest because I need a lesson about strength. A spotted skunk did not evolve its remarkable warning behavior to teach me about boundaries.

These animals have their own purposes, histories, relationships, and places within an ecosystem. Meaning arises through observation.

We encounter another way of being alive, and sometimes that encounter gives us a new language for understanding our own lives.

Learning to Look Closer

Living among these animals gradually changed the way I saw the landscape itself. A forest stopped being simply a collection of trees. It became habitat. A stream became a corridor. A staircase became a route. The space beneath a fallen log became shelter. Tracks became evidence of a life that had passed through while I was somewhere else.

The more closely I looked, the more populated the world became.

And that may be the deeper purpose behind the Wild Companion Oracle. I want these animals to encourage people to rediscover wonder.

Not because nature needs to become mystical before it deserves our attention, but because the living world is already astonishing. We simply become accustomed to it.

The raccoon becomes ordinary. The opossum becomes overlooked. The moth becomes something fluttering around the porch light. The salamander disappears beneath a stone. The owl calls somewhere beyond the house, and eventually we stop listening.

Until one day, perhaps, we look again.

And really see them.

There is an ecological consequence to that kind of attention.

People are more likely to care for what they learn to notice.

Connection can grow from familiarity. Respect can grow from connection.

And perhaps stewardship begins much more quietly than we imagine—with learning the name of the creature crossing the road, noticing when the fireflies return, recognizing tracks in the mud, or discovering that a staircase we thought belonged to us has become part of someone else’s journey.

The animals around my home taught me that relationship does not require possession.

Sometimes relationship begins simply by paying attention.

That is the spirit I hope lives inside the Wild Companion Oracle.

May these woodland companions encourage you to walk a little slower, look a little closer, and remember that countless other lives are unfolding around us all the time. Whether we notice them or not.