When the Harbour Turns Blue
On light, places, and the world from which Moss Universe grows
I am beginning to understand that Moss Universe does not exist only when I sit down to create a new Tarot, Lenormand, or Oracle deck.
It begins much earlier.
Sometimes on the road.
Sometimes in a forest.
By the sea.
Inside an old house.
In a hotel room.
At a table with a glass in my hand.
Or simply in the moment when the light suddenly changes and I stop because I know, instinctively, that I want to remember how this felt.
Moss Universe is not only a collection of decks.
It is the way I look at the world.
I collect colours, places, textures, light, silence, fragments of conversations, small details, and feelings I cannot always explain.
Often, I have no idea what they will become.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful part.
Not every piece of inspiration needs to know its destination.
This harbour was one of those moments.
At first, it was simply a place
When we arrived, it was still daylight.
The harbour was simply a harbour.
Boats resting on the water.
Masts cutting thin lines into the sky.
Wild grasses moving along the shore.
Stones.
Wind.
Buildings in the distance.
Nothing dramatic happened.
There was no revelation.
And still, I reached for my camera.
I do this often.
I do not always photograph something because I see a perfect composition.
Sometimes I photograph because something has caught me before I have even understood what it is.
A colour combination.
A particular quality of light.
The contrast between something wild and something built.
I have always been drawn to these edges.
Nature and architecture.
Order and wildness.
Old and new.
Light and darkness.
Perhaps that is why transitions appear so often in my decks.
Doors.
Roads.
Gardens.
Houses.
Water.
Forests.
Windows.
Figures disappearing down paths.
Places where something has just ended, or something else is about to begin.
I do not invent these symbols in isolation.
I keep finding them in real life.
Moss Universe begins with noticing
I think almost everything I create begins with one very simple act:
noticing.
Noticing how the sky turns almost grey-green before rain.
How evening sunlight enters an old window.
How one path through a forest suddenly feels more important than all the others.
How the sea changes colour.
How a room inside an old house can make you feel that a story has been left behind there.
How flowers on a table, an open book, or the movement of someone’s hand can contain the beginning of an entire world.
The same thing happens when I create cards.
I do not always begin by asking:
What should the next card look like?
More often, the real question is:
What feeling do I want to keep?
A feeling can become a colour palette.
The palette can become a place.
The place can become a figure.
The figure can become a symbol.
And eventually, that symbol may become a card, a deck, or an entire story.
This is why my life and my creative work feel less and less separate.
It is all part of the same Moss Universe.
The pause is part of the story
At some point, we sat down.
A drink on the table.
The harbour close by.
The evening had not arrived yet, but the day had already softened.
There was nowhere else we needed to be.
For a long time, I used to think of moments like this as the space between the “real” events.
Now I see them differently.
Very often, they are the event.
We spend so much of our lives waiting for the grand moments.
The big journey.
The big decision.
The dramatic transformation.
But so much of what we remember later is incredibly small.
A glass on a table.
The feeling of wind.
One conversation.
A particular kind of evening light.
The knowledge that, in that moment, you did not need to be anywhere else.
And in my decks, I am not only interested in dramatic events either.
I am interested in the moment before the choice.
The silence after the loss.
The pause before the return.
The state in which you do not yet know what happens next.
The space between one thing and another.
That is often where the story lives.
When the world begins to change colour
Evening does not arrive all at once.
It enters slowly.
The light becomes cooler.
The shadows become softer.
Warm colours begin to retreat.
The water reflects less of the harbour and more of the sky.
These are the moments that fascinate me most.
The same place — and yet no longer the same place.
I think this is one of the central threads running through much of my work.
Transformation does not always mean that the old world collapses and a completely new one appears.
Sometimes nothing changes on the outside.
Only the light changes.
Or the perspective.
Or perhaps we have finally become ready to see something differently.
And suddenly, the same place carries an entirely different meaning.
The harbour turns blue
There is a brief moment between day and night when the world becomes blue.
In photography, we call it the blue hour.
But that evening, it did not feel like a technical term.
It felt like a threshold.
The day had not completely disappeared.
The night had not fully arrived.
We were somewhere between the two.
Pink still lingered along the horizon.
White boats became pale shapes against the darker water.
Masts turned into graphic lines against the sky.
There were fewer details.
And somehow, more feeling.
Suddenly, this was no longer the harbour we had arrived at.
Although nothing had actually changed.
The same boats.
The same piers.
The same water.
The same horizon.
Only the light was different.
And because of that, everything was different.
I think this is how a great deal of Moss Universe begins.
Not from trying to construct something “mystical”.
But from very real moments when the ordinary world becomes mysterious all by itself.
I do not need to escape reality to find magic.
I only need to look at reality long enough.
From life into the cards
I never know where an experience will return later.
Perhaps the blue of this harbour will one day become the evening sky in a deck.
Perhaps the pier will become a path in a Tarot card.
Perhaps the vertical rhythm of the masts will return in a composition.
Perhaps the water will become a boundary between two worlds.
Or perhaps none of it will ever appear literally.
That is not really the point.
Inspiration is not an archive from which I simply remove ready-made objects when I need them.
It slowly becomes part of the way I see.
So when I later begin creating a Tarot, Lenormand, or Oracle deck, I am never working in an empty room.
Everything I have already seen is there with me.
The roads I have travelled.
Forests.
The sea.
Cities.
Old façades.
Gardens.
Hotels.
Evenings.
Tables.
Flowers.
Houses.
People.
Conversations.
Silence.
And light.
It all stays somewhere.
And eventually, it returns in another form.
The path
When we finally began to leave, the pier looked completely different from how it had in daylight.
In the darkness, it had almost become a symbol.
A straight line leading forward.
Water on either side.
The whole path invisible.
Only the next few metres clearly seen.
Perhaps that is why roads and paths appear so often in art — and in Tarot.
We recognise ourselves in them.
We almost never see the whole road ahead.
We see the next few steps.
The next choice.
The next turning.
And we continue.
In my world, an image like this can be a travel photograph, a visual note, and the beginning of a future card all at once.
I do not need to choose only one meaning.
That is why it is a Universe — everything is allowed to connect.
I no longer separate my life from what I create
It is easy to think that creativity requires a special moment.
A studio.
A desk.
A project.
A defined period of time in which we are officially “creating”.
I feel almost the opposite now.
I do not leave Moss Universe when I close my computer.
And I do not enter it only when I begin designing a new deck.
I am building it when I travel.
When I photograph.
When I walk through a forest.
When I choose flowers for a table.
When I notice a beautiful building.
When I taste something new.
When I watch people.
When I change the light inside a room.
When I stop beside the water because the sky looks different tonight.
My life is the material from which Moss Universe grows.
And the cards are one of the ways that world takes physical form.
They are not separate from life.
They are fragments of life transformed into images, symbols, and stories.
Perhaps this is also why Tarot, Lenormand, and Oracle have always fascinated me.
They do something very similar.
They take ordinary human experiences — love, fear, choice, loss, home, movement, hope, desire, transformation — and turn them into a language of symbols.
When a harbour becomes part of Moss Universe
By the time we left, the day was almost gone.
The harbour had become quiet.
The colours were cool.
The sky was darkening.
And a few hours that had begun as nothing more than a stop along the way had become something I wanted to carry with me.
In photographs.
In memory.
And perhaps, someday, in the cards.
I do not need to know yet.
That is enough.
Because Moss Universe is not only the finished deck.
It is everything that happens before the deck exists.
All the places.
All the photographs.
All the notes.
All the feelings.
All those small moments when I see something and think:
I want to keep this.
Sometimes all it takes is staying somewhere a little longer.
Long enough for the noise of the day to disappear.
Long enough for the light to change.
Long enough for an ordinary place to become a feeling.
And for that feeling to become part of the world I am creating.
Long enough for the harbour to turn blue.
Moss Note
Moss Universe is not a place I go to create.
It is a world I collect while I live.
Travel. Nature. Photography. Food. Houses. Light. People. Silence. Movement.
It all finds its way back into my stories and my cards — sometimes directly, sometimes only as a feeling.
Life becomes inspiration.
Inspiration becomes story.
Story becomes symbol.
And sometimes, the symbol becomes a card.
