The Red book of wisdom, scraps of paper, and bare bones lenormand

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On notebooks, scraps of paper, squirrel brains, mediumship, and the unexpected path that led to Bare Bones Lenormand.

I have always written things down.

Never in an organized, beautiful, color-coded kind of way. My mind simply does not work that way.
I have notebooks. I have sketchbooks. I have Post-it notes. I have printed pages tucked inside notebooks. I have scraps of paper shoved into other scraps of paper. Sometimes I print something out simply because I need to read it on paper to understand it. When I'm finished, I'll turn the page over and use the back to write something else.

It probably looks a little nuts.

Actually, it is nuts.

I've decided my mind works a little like a squirrel gathering nuts. Something catches my attention, and I store it away. A sentence. A thought. Something someone says in a class. Something I read. Something that makes me laugh. Something that makes me stop and think.

Nut. Nut. Nut.

But here's the thing about squirrels: they know where the important nuts are.

And so do I.

I have a little red sketchbook that I've had for more years than I can remember. Somewhere along the way, I started calling it my Red Book of Wisdom.
It's certainly not fancy. It's worn. It's written on. It's stuffed with things I've collected over the years: quotes, prayers, thoughts, little bits of wisdom, things I've heard and didn't want to forget.

"Every sinner has a future, every saint has a past."

"Our soul is not a religious object. We must attend to our souls."

And then there are the deeply profound bits of wisdom like:

"Get off your assets."

That one made the book too.

I've told my children for years that the Red Book of Wisdom may be one of the most important things I ever leave them. Not because I wrote all the wisdom that's in it. Much of it came from other people, classes, conversations, books, and experiences.

It is important to me because it is a collection of the things that made me stop.

Pay attention to this.

Remember this.

Keep this.

I don't journal. I doodle.

There is a difference.

Even when I work as a medium, I usually have a pen and paper in front of me. I doodle and jot things down. Keeping my hand moving helps me stay with the energy and the thread of what I'm receiving.

It's simply how my mind works.
And apparently, it's also how Bare Bones Lenormand came to be.

I never sat down years ago and thought, Someday I'm going to write a series of books about Lenormand.

I was trying to learn Lenormand.

And I couldn't find one book that gave me what I needed.

So I did what I've always done.

I gathered nuts.

I learned something here.

I found something useful there. I took classes. I read books. I made notes. I tried things. I read cards. I paid attention to what worked in actual readings and what didn't. I kept the pieces that made sense to me and left behind the ones that didn't.

And I wrote things down.

Lots and lots and lots of things.

Somewhere in all of that, I stopped simply collecting information about Lenormand and started developing the way I understood Lenormand.

I just didn't know I was writing a book yet.

I wasn't trying to invent a new system. I was trying to understand the cards in a way that made sense to me and held up in real readings.

Not long ago, I was looking through one of my notebooks and thinking about all of this when a song from Disney's The Little Mermaid started running through my head.

Except my brain changed the words.

I've got notebooks and sketchbooks aplenty.
I've got doodles and Post-its galore.
You want felt tips and colored pencils? I've got forty.
But who cares? I don't care.
Me. I just jot more....

I need to create a Lenormand book.

Yes.

This is how authorship happens in my house.
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I know this because I found the actual page where I wrote it.

It's a mess.

Words are crossed out. Other words are squeezed in. There are doodles and arrows and corrections everywhere. And somewhere in the middle of all of it appears:

I need to create a Lenormand book.

And directly underneath that?

BOILER CLEANING.

Underlined.

With arrows pointing at it.

Because apparently, at the exact moment I was contemplating creating what would eventually become the Bare Bones Lenormand series, another part of my brain was screaming:
Don't forget to get the damn boiler cleaned.

For the record, I got the boiler cleaned.

The system works.

And that's the funny thing about my notebooks. If you really look at them, they're not disorganized. The papers are tucked neatly inside. Things stay within the pages. Important things get underlined. Arrows point to things I need to remember.

I may be gathering information at squirrel speed, but there is a method to it.

I know where my nuts are.

Looking back now, I think that has a lot to do with why I eventually created something called Bare Bones.

After years of gathering information, there comes a point when you have to stop gathering and start asking:

What actually matters?
What does someone really need to know to read these cards?
What is the card doing here?
What belongs in the story?
What can we leave out?
How do I take all of these pieces I've collected and turn them into something another person can actually use?

That became Bare Bones Lenormand.

And maybe that's why writing these books felt strangely natural, even though becoming an author was never some grand plan of mine. I had been doing the first part of the job for years without ever calling it that—gathering the nuts, asking questions I didn't have answers to yet, trying things in real readings, watching what held up and what didn't, and writing it all down because that's what I do with anything that matters to me.

The books just gave all those pieces somewhere to finally go.

Now that the Bare Bones Lenormand series has been written, I understand all of this a little more clearly.

I don't journal. I doodle.

I write things down because that is how I hold on to what matters. A sentence, an idea, something I've learned, something I don't want to lose—I put it on paper.

Maybe that isn't so different from another part of who I am.

As a medium, I sit with people who are gone, and what comes through is often made of small things—a phrase they used to say, a memory only their family would recognize, a habit, a joke, a moment that means nothing to anyone except the person who needs to hear it.

I don't get to choose what comes through any more than I get to choose which sentence in a book catches my eye and ends up on a scrap of paper.

It shows up.

My job is to catch it, hold onto it long enough, and hand it back to the person who needs it.

Looking through all these notebooks and scraps of paper, I realize I've been doing something similar with my own life without ever knowing it—catching pieces, holding onto them, keeping them safe until they're needed.

Someday, my children will have my little Red Book of Wisdom.

There are now Bare Bones Lenormand books in the world, and hopefully soon there will be a deck. And perhaps all these notebooks, so neatly piled in my office, will someday hold pieces of me for the people I love—the things I learned, the things that made me laugh, the things I believed were worth remembering.

Maybe that's what I've been doing all along.

Keeping memories.

And I've learned enough through this process to know there will be more.
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I just haven't doodled it yet.

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