An Almanac of Birds

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