An oracle deck for metabolizing the here and now
39 illustrated cards + 52-page guidebook by artist Dani Bershan. For daily pulls, rituals and group readings.
For whom?
Artists and researchers drawn to ecology, metabolism and decolonial thinking.
Facilitators and collectives who dare to think diagonally: across categories, disciplines and certainties rather than inside them.
Somatic practitioners, therapists and bodyworkers who want to deepen their own inquiry and research, alone or with the people they accompany.
People moving through climate grief, burnout or reinvention who want company rather than answers.
People living with gut conditions who want to relate to their digestion as more than a symptom: as a teacher, an archive, a place of relation.
Anyone who wants a daily practice that doesn't pretend the world is fine.
Not for quick fixes or positive-vibes-only.
What’s inside?
39 cards named after organs, elements and processes: Vultures, Heartspace, Cravings & Addictions, Stomach, Water, Forgiveness, Venus for Dinner, and more.
Four ways in: every card has an image, a name, a guiding question, and one of four metabolic frames: building, breaking down, absorbing, releasing.
A 52-page guidebook with a reading for every card and different ways to practice.
Some examples…
VULTURES
framing: releasing
question: how can we offer with generosity what needs to die?
reading (excerpt): vultures arrive when cycles turn; they are sacred beings, patient guardians of thresholds, who metabolize what must be surrendered; to call on vultures is to accept the cyclical nature of all metabolisms (…)
HEARTSPACE
framing: breaking down
question: how can our hearts break open, not apart?
reading (excerpt): ruptures do not only destroy; they metabolize; collapse and opening are phases of the same pulse, like the heart’s rhythm of tightening and release; breaking is not an ending but the beginning of new circulations; this is not just metaphor (…)
CRAVINGS & ADDICTIONS
framing: absorbing
question: what pain is this trying to soothe?
reading (excerpt): when loneliness, distress, or inner imbalance stirs, the gut∞brain pathways reach for relief; cravings are not moral failings—they are signals, messages from within; beneath them often lies a rupture (…)
training relational muscles
This deck is a ritual technology for metabolizing what is happening in the world — and the world is burning, flooding, choking, grieving, starving, birthing, emerging.
Here, metabolism is not just digestion. It’s a political act. A refusal. A prayer. A practice of remembering that every breath, every bite, every boundary, every breakdown is a site of relation — and that relation is never neutral.
This deck does not offer escape. It offers entanglement. It offers deep compost. It offers the sacred mess of staying with the trouble in a world that teaches us to numb, sever, consume, and forget.
It asks: What are we absorbing? What are we excreting? What are we ready to transform — personally, collectively, cosmically?
Use it when you feel cracked open. Use it when you feel sealed shut. Use it as ceremony, as salve, as companion, as agitation. Draw a card. Let the questions move you. Let the images sit on your mucosa. Let the reflections metabolize slowly — in the gut, in the fascia, in the field.
Each card invites you to remember that your body is not separate from Earth’s body. That your breath is not yours alone. That healing is not a return to purity, but a layered, leaking, entangled becoming. There is no clean air. No clean grief. No clean soil and no clean politics. Only deeper sensing, slower noticing, more compassionate worlding and a thousand and one chances to recommit to aliveness — again and again.
Let rot what needs rotting. Let feed what needs feeding.
Welcome to the sacred mess, to the continuous labour of metabolizing the here and now,
welcome to the RELATIONAL GYM.
join the sacred mess of metabolising the here and now
In shops in
Brussels
@ *rile books
@ ZigZag Reading Room
@ Passa Porta
@ Librairie Tulitu
@ Librairie Météores
Gent
@Kunsthal Gent
Berlin
@ bbooks
Alghero
@ Libreria Il Manoscritto
Guwahati
@OITIJJO