Cut the Deck

So I have a fun exercise for you. Do you ever get the feeling that your life doesn’t have any direction? You have lots of ideas about things you’d like to do but never seem to get around to doing any of them. You’re just working and doing all the things that everyone else does. I know that my life is often this way. Even making lists, which I do obsessively just leaves you with a pile of lists that starts to look incredibly daunting.

Well my solution was to take a lesson from George W. Bush and pick up a deck of cards.

Do you remember the invasion of Iraq? I remember marching with a few million other people in London, England against the prospect of war. Then it happened anyway. But one of the fun aspects of the war (the only one and the one experienced by those not being bombed like me) was the creativity of the opposition to the war.

To distinguish between all the various, evil moustached Iraqis in the Baath Party, Bush (though I know he didn’t think of it) released a deck of cards featuring the hierarchy of evil, right up to the Ace of Spades himself, Saddam Hussein. But they were all there from Chemical Ali to that crazy Ministry of Information guy. What fun! Now the American soldiers knew who to shoot though they clearly didn’t always get it right.

So someone, creatively, thought that if a deck was good enough for one evil regime that it should work for another: the West. So George Bush, Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Tommy Franks all found themselves under spades, diamonds, clubs and hearts. Turn about is fair play as they say.


On my way to Cape Breton I started putting together my own deck of cards. I brainstormed all the things that I wanted to learn and do out here. It was a wonderful activity actually and has helped me to focus on some things. I even rated them in terms of their degree of difficulty (or what I presumed was their degree of difficulty—cutting down a tree with a chainsaw, it turns out, isn’t that hard). I made the different decks stand for different things: 1) Spades was building things, 2) Hearts were community and personal growth, 3) Clubs were making clothes and other crafts, and 4) Diamonds were food.


I won’t give away the whole deck now but I’m on my way actually with a lot of the cards. I did cut down a tree for firewood (don’t worry it was dead-standing though I’ll likely cut down a few live hardwood trees this year). I am making beer. I’m almost done tanning a hide and shortly thereafter I plan to make moccasins. Dan and I plan to build a greenhouse out of windows this week (if it will stop snowing). And there’s a lot more there. Some of them, I’ll probably never get around to doing for a lack of funds such as building a wind turbine or an earthship but you have to have dream right.

I should probably explain how I did it just in case. Just take any old deck. Make the proper sized labels to cover your card (not the numbers and symbols in the corners) and print them. Then just draw pictures on each of them. The best part of all this is that I don’t consider myself much of an artist but I just drew each and every card and didn’t start over once. That’s probably a sign that it was the right thing to do.

So write down your dreams and make them happen!