Where the Ash Falls, Settles, and Lifts: The Heart of My Creative Journey

I never meant to create a trilogy, but everything I’ve made has ended up living inside the same long, unfolding story — a story of burning, a story of settling, and a story of rising. Looking back, each piece arrived in the order it needed to, as if they were always meant to be chapters of the same transformation.

Before the Ash Falls came first, written during a time when everything was breaking open. It carries the fire — the sharp clarity, the grief, the unravelling, the moments when the heat of truth is impossible to ignore. These poems sit in the heart of the burn. They name what hurts. They make space for the raw, human experience before anything has cooled or reorganized.

Later, After the Ash Settles appeared with a completely different rhythm. Not flames, but breath. Not collapse, but integration. This book holds the practices, the grounding, the meditations, the trauma-informed ways of gently putting yourself back together. It is the slow, steady settling of ash — the quiet phase after the destruction where healing happens inch by inch. It’s the “how do I live with what I’ve learned?” stage.

And then came The Heart of Matter: The Orion Gateway Oracle — the rising chapter. Not the fire or the ashes, but what lifts out of them. This deck is the “what now?” and the “where next?” It carries the phoenix energy of clarity, intuition, alignment, and cosmic guidance. The deck is the symbolic architecture of transformation after the healing, the spiritual perspective that becomes available only after you’ve felt deeply and rebuilt deliberately.

To visually and energetically bridge these phases, I created Ashen Bennu’s Rise (414). It isn’t a card in the deck — it’s a symbolic anchor. The Bennu, the ancient Egyptian phoenix, represents the moment ash becomes wings, and the angel number 414 echoes the call to rebuild with intention and step into a new, protected foundation. Together, they reflect the entire arc my work lives inside.

In the simplest terms:

The poetry helps you feel,

The practices help you heal,

And the oracle helps you rise.

A full-circle journey, told in flame, in quiet, and in flight.

If this trilogy speaks to you, feel free to visit me at my upcoming event (see the pinned banner on my home page for all the details). You can pick up your copies in person or explore the poetry, practices, and oracle work online whenever you feel called.