{"product_id":"an-almanac-of-birds-100-divinations-for-uncertain-days","title":"An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eFrom writer Maria Popova, creator of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Marginalian\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e, comes 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHow 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOriginally intended as a gift to her friends for her fortieth birthday, she 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. Each night before sleep, she chose a single bird to work with from a favorite 19th-century ornithological book—from John James Audubon’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eBirds of America\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e to John and Elizabeth Gould’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eBirds of Europe\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e—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 a kind of message would come to enflesh the skeleton of the noted words—not a poem, not a prescription, but a way of 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePresented as a deck of cards tucked into book-safe in the style of a 19th-century ornithology tome, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eAn Almanac of Birds\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Maria Popova","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42643069239394,"sku":null,"price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0615\/2575\/3954\/files\/AOB2.jpg?v=1774115580","url":"https:\/\/marketonmainsackets.com\/products\/an-almanac-of-birds-100-divinations-for-uncertain-days","provider":"Market on Main","version":"1.0","type":"link"}