An Almanac of Birds by Maria Popova

An Almanac of Birds by Maria Popova

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.

Maria's Divinations are her radically beautiful, wise and breathless prayers -- NICK CAVE
What mysterious magic Maria Popova has conjured with these Divinations: image and text co-summoning each other into strangeness and wonderThe ancients used birds to foretell the future - the haruspex, the scryer, the seer - but Maria's bird-cards seem instead to peer into the spirit and fathom the heart in sharp, surprising ways. Here is a box of beauty to catch the breath; a wunderkammer to be opened, studied and shared -- ROBERT MACFARLANE
I have always loved the graceful compositions of John James Audubon's birds; and I love and rely on the brilliant curation of Maria Popova's wild-winged mind. Imagine an alchemical collaboration between these two artists! At a time, when despair and disorientation is commonplace, here is a deck of bird divination cards to illuminate, soothe and guide our souls. Maria has lovingly created poetic oracles that inspire trust. I will be consulting these elegant cards as a daily practice with a bow toward their beauty and wisdom -- TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
A field guide to the heart, where avian and human nature entwine in a plumage of wise, iridescently beautiful meditations, and nature's lexicon is remixed into sublime flights of wonder -- DIANE ACKERMAN

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning - sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse - a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry - has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.

@mariapopova | themarginalian.org

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EAN	9781837265411
Titel	An Almanac of Birds
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