An Almanac of Birds

Maria’s Divinations are her radically beautiful, wise and breathless prayers – NICK CAVEWhat mysterious magic Maria Popova has conjured with these Divinations: image and text co-summoning each other into strangeness and wonder. The 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 MACFARLANEI 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 WILLIAMSA 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.