I’ve been reading Tarot for a little over 25 years and have owned more tarot decks than I care to acknowledge publicly. Despite all of that, I’ve still somehow failed to find the one that I feel is reflective of my ideal tarot deck, namely because my ideal tarot deck is an accumulation of all of the knowledge and wisdom that I’ve built from almost 30 years of reading. This is part of why I decided to start embarking on the journey of making my own tarot deck that not only reflects how I’ve learned to understand each card’s meaning, but also a reflection of the philosophy that I’ve built around tarot reading.

The tarot deck is called the Trailblazer and at it’s core, it works as a tool to better encourage more conscious decisions when it comes to how you engage in your life to help you move forward into new chapters that you may otherwise not consider pursuing and to move through life with clearer intent.

The first card I decided to tackle is the 6 of Wands for a number of reasons. For one, when I first started developing this deck, it was actually a card that I couldn’t help but find myself constantly striving for. It made me realize just how much I felt like I was failing due to the lack of 6 of Wands moments in my life. No matter how hard I worked or how much I tried to do literally anything, I just constantly kept falling up short in a way that made me just feel like a straight up loser.

This forced me to start unpacking my relationship to the idea of success in reality. Does it always come with a sense of pomp and circumstances? Does it always have to be defined by fanfare? Or can it be something that’s perceived and experienced differently than how our society as it stands expects it to be?

Even though at that time, I didn’t feel like I was succeeding but looking back now, I was. I was in an abusive relationship with no way out and at that time, I was starting to develop the courage to see it for what it was and to better understand what it meant for me to move forward.

Breaking free from my circumstances wouldn’t come with loud horns blaring. The only thing that it would come with was a strong understanding that I made the right call for my life, my future and for me.

The deck itself is built with each suit and the Major Arcana following a clear narrative. The 6 of Wands in this deck follows the 5 of Wands and precedes the 7 of Wands – two cards that are incredibly active and leave no room for pause as they denote high pressure situations in which competition or strong defenses are necessary, so I began to explore the prospect of 6 of Wands being a card more to do with reflection than something that is inherently meant to be any kind of declaration of succeeding since if you look at the wands suit, the battle is far from over until the suit is complete at 10.

In fact, the 6s in the deck overall point to moments of reflection and transition so relying on any imagery that shows success here when the story is so far from over felt premature and – ironically – incredibly arrogant in a way that 6 of Wands can be when placed negatively.

This is when the card as it is came to be:

While I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% going to be the card’s description for the deck since I’m still working that out, this is the meditative reflection that I ended up writing to be associated with the core of this card’s meaning:

What greater victory is there than the one you experience when you’ve returned home to yourself? After fighting with the world and battling through a sea of competition, the 6 of Wands heralds a time of resignation and retreat in order to provide space for celebration. When there is no one else to compare yourself to, there is only you. And when there is only you, you are able to more clearly see yourself in all the ways you’ve been wanting to.

It’s funny because I’ve been wanting to make a tarot deck for an incredibly long time. The first cards I always started with were The Empress (a card I used to strive to reflect for a lot of my life which I now have developed a rather contentious relationship with as my understanding around how it can be shown and expressed in the real world has developed), or the Queen of Pentacles (a card that used to reflect me in readings that while I still have a great deal of affection for, is another card that I’ve started to develop a complex relationship with).

Out of all the cards in the deck that I’ve found myself called to over the years, 6 of Wands is probably the last card that I would have assumed I’d begin with but maybe – similar to the underlying drive of this deck – it’s the best card to start with as it’s the card that’s forced me to change how I see everything.

This is an incredibly long form project so I can’t promise the next time you’ll see another card but to give you an idea of what’s next on my to-do list, they are:

• 3 of Swords
• Queen of Pentacles
• Queen of Wands
• 8 of Chalices
• The Tower (which I’ve learned to love seeing)
• The Moon
• And… Death

What does that mean? IDK. If I were doing a tarot reading and these cards all came up in a draw, I’d say that this deck is turning out to be a bit more intense than likely intended but is likely necessary to get to the outcome that it needs to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Until next time.

~ Dre