Card No 4: It's All About Timing

Some cards arrive with a clear intention. Others reveal themselves slowly.

Card No. 4 — Raising the Light — began as a painting of the beach I swim at almost every day. At the time, it wasn’t a “card.” It was simply a scene. The heron. The shoreline. The quiet rhythm of water.

I didn’t yet know there would be messages. I didn’t even know there would be a deck.

About a year later, when I finally sat down to write the text for each card, this one began speaking about timing — about the delicate balance between patience and readiness.

The heron waits in stillness.The sun rises every morning.The turtles return once a year, guided by ancient instinct.

The image had always contained cycles. I just hadn’t named them yet.

When I painted the card, I included two small sea turtles emerging from the water. I had never seen them in real life — only heard about the turtle sanctuary nearby, where hatchlings are protected and released into the sea. I placed them there because they belonged to the landscape, even though I had never witnessed it myself.

When I later shared the message of the card on Instagram, I wrote about these cycles — about knowing when to wait and when to move. At the end of a long series of stories, I added a playful image of a turtle hatchling with an eggshell still resting on its head. “If you’re still here,” I wrote,

“here’s a little turtle for you.”

Then I left for the beach.

It was too crowded that day, so I walked further south to a place I don’t usually go. A small group of people had gathered, watching something near the sand.

It was turtles. Hatchlings. Making their way toward the sea.

I stood there for half an hour, filming them, laughing, completely absorbed. Only later — as I was about to post the video — did I remember the turtle image I had shared just before leaving home.

The last thing I had posted was a tiny turtle with an eggshell on its head.And now here they were, alive and real, emerging at exactly the right moment.

I sat down in the sand and laughed. It felt less like coincidence and more like conversation.

Raising the Light carries the line: “Some mornings we are the ones who raise the sun.”

That day, it felt as though something had been gently raised for me.