A gorgeous and inspiring book of cards: one hundred 'divinations' for daily living, partway between poem and koan yet neither, collaged from the texts and illustrations of 19th-century ornithological books.
How do we live with uncertainty? Maria Popova was navigating a challenging season, longing for guidance, when she conceived of this project fusing her love of birds and her love of language, her scepticism about tarot and her compassion for the basic human yearning to be shown the way through.
Originally intended as a gift to her friends, she set out to create an avian alternative to tarot - a deck of cards for making sense of the present, for finding grace in the complexities and confusions of our human lives. Each night before sleep, she chose a single bird from a favourite 19th-century ornithological book - from John James Audubon's Birds of America to John and Elizabeth Gould's Birds of Europe - letting her wakeful mind seize a handful of words and phrases from the page, then handing them over to her unconscious to wrestle with in the land of dreams. Each morning, she would read over the text and compose a message - not a poem, not a prescription, but eavesdropping on the conversation between logic and intuition, between knowledge and mystery, between the part of us that already knows how to live through any perplexity and the part that forgets in the overwhelming act of living.
Presented as a deck of cards tucked into book-safe in the style of a 19th-century ornithology tome, An Almanac of Birds gathers one hundred of these poetic collages for readers to savour and shuffle into relevance to their own lives, offering consolation, inspiration and assurance for the daily perplexity of living.
