I’ve floated drunkenly in the warm surf of the Gulf Coast, stalked the coastal estuaries for the flesh of Pacific salmon, and dug my fingers into the rich humus of the ancient remnant forests of the Midwest. I’ve written natural histories of animal lives.

I feel a spiritual hunger to connect with the non-human, and when I insert myself into the animal community it assuages a deep underlying loneliness.

For the majority of my life I have operated under the assumption of a random, mechanized, insentient world. Raised Catholic, I adopted a lazy agnosticism in my early teens and never looked back. I decided the divine was indemonstrable, unknowable and unimportant.

I married a brilliant woman who bore us three beautiful sons, worked a marketing job to pay off a mortgage and a minivan. It’s a great life. I am thankful.

And yet, I found myself in middle-age unmoored. Nearly every free moment I wrote about connecting my life with animals and nature, trying to find some order or intelligence in this world outside of our own maddening species, running through the woods with a notebook like an over-caffeinated rat. It struck me that I was seeking something spiritual. “Who made the fire and who made the shadow, the blood move and the flesh walk?” asked the poet John Haines.

So much of my life has been driven by chance.

One bleary morning on a layover at O’Hare airport in Chicago, my mind inexplicably leapt to Tarot. I’d never spent more than 30 seconds in my entire life considering occultism – and if you’d asked me to describe the nature of Tarot, I would likely have blurted some clichéd image from a 1980s horror movie. But something in my mind sparked me to wonder whether the images and ideas represented in the cards might match up to images and scenarios in the natural world.

I bought multiple tarot decks. I started reading Rachel Pollack’s books describing the origins and meanings of Tarot cards and cross referencing other authors, and noticed a pattern emerging. The cards seemed to represent archetypes – images illustrating some universal circumstance or experience. It hearkened to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, suggesting underlying mythic imagery and stories of a collective unconscious.

The concepts behind the cards were rich, and combinations became even more complex. It also seemed to match my developing thoughts on nature.

We trust our perception of the occurrences around us, but we have such a dim, and narrow view of the world. Life is infinitely more complex than we can imagine. Evolution has allowed us to make sense of the world by reducing our inputs, ordering chaos by omission. We have no ultraviolet or chemosensory perception. Most of life occurs on or in the ground – too small for us to even notice. Science allows us to perceive more, but the efforts are blind groping.

Nature selected for our species to be anthropocentric navel gazers, as social interactions with other humans had significant influence on our “evolutionary fitness” or survival. But this myopia comes at a price. Mysteries abound, and forces and intelligences outside of the human sphere flicker at the edges of our understanding – their presence intuited or felt, but poorly understood.

I found the Tarot to be an elegant scaffolding – a way to map and connect my human experience to the living environment. It reflects my subconscious in a way that feels coherent and rooted. Most importantly, Tarot illuminates blind spots in self-awareness. It forces us to confront the ideas and outcomes we avoid.

Each day, I mapped the cards to the environment surrounding forests and waters of the Rust Belt – applying the meanings ascribed to the cards to my knowledge of the animal and plant communities I had studied as a natural history writer. And then I pressed my body against that living world to test whether the meaning resonates and emerges from the landscape.

The results detailed in this book have been revelatory.