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.
