**From writer Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, 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.**How do we live with ...

**From writer Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, 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.**How 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.

Originally 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* 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.