Some crossings
change everything
they touch.
Cancer does not end a life. Sometimes, it finally begins one. I write and speak about what it means to be transformed by something you never asked for — and I have crossed that threshold twice.
Initiated
twice over.
There are two ways to experience cancer. The first time, twenty-one years ago, I fought it the way I had been taught to fight everything: with discipline and determination, my head down and my jaw set, refusing to let it mean anything beyond what the oncology team told me it meant. I survived, declared myself grateful, and returned to my life as though the whole ordeal were a detour I could simply drive past.
Then it came back.
In December 2024, when triple negative breast cancer returned after two decades, I discovered something I had not allowed myself to learn the first time: that illness is not an interruption of a life. In the Celtic understanding of threshold and passage, any uninvited crossing that strips you down to your essential nature is an initiation — a transformative rite that, if entered with enough consciousness, does not destroy who you are. It reveals who you have always been meant to become.
I sat in the infusion chair with chemotherapy moving through my port, and instead of fighting my way through the crossing, I turned toward it. That turning is the subject of my memoir. It is the origin of the tarot deck I created card by card in the sleepless hours between treatments. And it is the heartbeat of the Substack community where I write each week about what it means to be changed by something you never chose.
I hold a doctorate in Instructional Technology and spent two decades teaching teachers. All of that work was real. But the credential that matters most for what I am doing now is this: I have been through the fire, and I know what it asks of a person.
A memoir, a deck,
and a community.
Initiated: A Cancer Memoir
By Dr. Mara Linaberger
A memoir of two cancer diagnoses, twenty-one years apart, and what the second one finally taught me about the first. Structured through the four Celtic seasonal festivals — Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh — this book follows one woman’s journey from fighting her way through illness to being transformed by it. Written for anyone navigating an uninvited passage: cancer, grief, loss, or any threshold that asks you to become someone new.
Follow the writing journey on SubstackThe Initiation Tarot
A Deck for Navigating Illness, Grief, and Transformation
A 78-card deck born in an infusion chair during chemotherapy. Following the traditional tarot structure — twenty-two Major Arcana tracing the soul’s journey through crisis, four suits mapping the full emotional and spiritual terrain of transformation — this is not a deck of comfort or affirmation. It is a companion for the moments when everything you knew about yourself has been stripped away, and something new is trying to emerge. The natural companion to Initiated: A Cancer Memoir.
Subscribe to receive the deck announcementWriting from
inside the crossing.
Three times a week, I write from inside the threshold — present tense, from wherever I actually am in the unfolding. The Substack community “Initiations” is where the memoir is taking shape in public, where the tarot deck comes alive card by card, and where I am building the community of people who have been waiting for this kind of inquiry without quite knowing it existed.
Subscribing is free. When you join, you receive every post directly in your inbox — no separate platform, no additional steps. Just a direct line from my writing to you, three times each week.
A personal essay written in present tense, from wherever I am in the ongoing transformation. No deck, no framework — just honest writing from inside the crossing.
Working through the Major Arcana in sequence, card by card, with full guidebook depth. An ongoing education in how to read your own life as sacred passage.
An artist whose life and vision illuminates the week’s card — a synthesis of personal essay, archetype, and aesthetic witness. Because transformation has always had a witness in art.
For the rooms that
hold this conversation.
I am available to speak about the cancer journey as initiation — not as inspiration or triumph narrative, but as a rigorous and tender inquiry into what it means to be changed by something you did not choose. My talks are designed for audiences who are themselves in the business of accompanying people through the hardest passages of their lives, as well as for those crossing a threshold of their own.
If you are looking for a keynote or workshop that honors the full complexity of surviving — one that goes where most illness narratives are afraid to go — I would welcome the conversation.
Twenty-five years of reimagining how we learn.
Before cancer became my curriculum, I spent decades inside classrooms and school communities asking the same question I ask now: how do human beings grow into the fullest version of who they came here to be?
Education
Help! My Child Hates School
A guide for families navigating a school system that doesn’t serve their child — restoring curiosity, creativity, and joy to learning.
Find on Amazon
Education
The Micro-School Builder’s Handbook
A step-by-step guide for educators and parents ready to create human-sized learning environments where children — and their teachers — actually thrive.
Find on Amazon