A gorgeous and inspiring book box 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? How can we come to know ourselves, to trust our own secret knowledge? Maria Popova was navigating a challenging season of being, longing for guidance, when this improbable project arrived one morning as a fully formed idea fusing her love of birds and her love of language, her skepticism about tarot and her compassion for the basic human yearning to be shown the way through, and her faith in constraint as a powerful catalyst of creativity.
Originally intended as a gift to her friends for her fortieth birthday, Maria set out to create a sort of avian alternative to tarot - a deck of cards less for telling the future than for making sense of the present, for finding grace in the complexities and confusions of our human lives.
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 savor and shuffle into relevance to their own lives, offering consolation, inspiration, and assurance for the daily perplexity of living.
