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30.1min

19m climbed

153.2avg bpm

When the wonder of birds entered my world, I came awake to the notation of starlings on the street wires, to the house wrens bathing in the dusty parking lot, to the robin serenading dawn in its clear and lovely voice, each trill as perfect as a Bach measure. One rainy afternoon, I watched two night herons sleep and wondered whether they were dreaming, went down a rabbit hole of research, wrote a The New York Times piece about how the evolution of REM in the avian brain shaped our human dreams.

Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, turned into the Milky Way, turned into music, turned into time itself. A magpie spoke to me in my mother’s voice.

Around the same time, I was discovering that multiple people I love and respect were fond of tarot — something I had always regarded as an embarrassing echo of medieval superstition, antiscientific and intellectually unsound, devised in a world where Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. But as I replaced contempt with curiosity, I came to see it simply as a coping mechanism for the difficulty of living with all this uncertainty, the difficulty of being so opaque to ourselves — a language for interpreting our intentions and experiences, the way the primary purpose of prayer is to clarify our hopes and fears.

I am not impervious to such practices myself — each year on my birthday, I perform a “Whitman divination”: I conjure up the most restless question on my mind, open Leaves of Grass with my eyes closed, and let my blind finger fall on a verse; without fail, Whitman opens some profound side door to my question that becomes its own answer, one inaccessible to the analytical mind.

In that strange combinatorial way the creative impulse has of collaging existing inspirations and passions into something entirely new, I awoke one day with the surprising idea of creating my own card deck of divinations from the birds — forty decks of forty cards each, to give away to forty people I love for my fortieth birthday.

I turned to my favorite nineteenth-century ornithological books, digitized by the wonderful Biodiversity Heritage Library — the many volumes of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, illustrated by Audubon himself, and John Gould’s Birds of Europe and Birds of Australia, illustrated by his gifted wife Elizabeth and by Edward Lear, who helped cultivate Elizabeth’s talent; a couple of volumes of Henry Leonard Meyer’s Colored Illustrations of British Birds and Their Eggs; and the ornithological portions of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, the specimens from which Elizabeth Gould illustrated.

Each night before going to sleep, I would let a painted bird call out to me from the yellowed pages, then read the ornithological description of the species, taking down a handful of words and phrases speaking to something on my mind that day. Then, with the slanted reckoning of REM, the unconscious would do its mysterious work in night. Upon waking, I would reread the ornithological text and a kind of message would come to enflesh the skeleton of the noted words — a divination from the bird, partway between koan and poem. I would spend the rest of the day cutting the words and rearranging them onto the illustration, correcting only lightly for the corruptions of the centuries, but mostly embracing the blurry and uneven scans, the stains and smudges, the faded colors — embracing the price of time.

The words of long dead writers rose from the yellowed pages to transform into the voice of my own unconscious, speaking its secret knowledge — about love and friendship, about uncertainty and possibility, about fear and resistance and the capacity for change. The divinations were telling me what I needed to hear. (A part of us always knows what we need to hear and can always tell us where we need to go. The great challenge of life is not to silence that voice with fear or with hope, with indifference or compulsion or the tyranny of should.)

I started with the great blue heron — the closest thing I have to a spirit animal.

Birds I already knew and loved called out to me first: the bowerbird, the nightingale, the osprey. Then I began discovering strange and wondrous creatures I had never seen: the fierce frigate, the tender linnet, the Dr. Seussian snake-bird.

I sorrowed for birds I would never see, like the extinct passenger pigeon and the ivory-billed woodpecker cusping on extinction.

I delighted in birds I had not seen since I left Bulgaria in my late teens, the same age Audubon was when he left his native France for America — birds like the white stork and the magpie.

Each bird surprised me with the divination it brought. I didn’t feel like I was writing these — they were writing me.

A kind of almanac was emerging — guidance for uncertain days.

I made a divination a day, in a state of what Octavia Butler called “a sweet and powerful positive obsession.” When I had forty, I sent them off to the printer to make the forty decks.

But I couldn’t stop.

The practice had become a metronome of my days.

The birds kept coming, kept speaking.

Then, at the eleventh hour of my thirties, life dealt a great difficulty.

The daily divinations became an unexpected consolation, helped compost the suffering into fertile ground for growth, held up mirrors I needed to look at. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.)

At the time of this writing, I have more than 80 divinations. Someday, they may become a public deck, or a book. For now, gathered here are some of my favorites, available as prints and stationery cards benefitting the Audubon Society in gratitude for their noble conservation work and for John James’s beautiful birds — but, even more so, for his beautiful words: While I find Elizabeth Gould the superior artist, her husband’s writing is spare and sterile — no more than a page per bird, sometimes just a paragraph, destitute of adjectives and imaginative words; Audubon, on the other hand, was a passionate and lyrical writer, despite the fact that English was not his native language.

John James Audubon was the 18-year-old illegitimate son of a French plantation owner when he arrived in America in the first years of the nineteenth century with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a difficult childhood now became his primary obsession. He set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person” — the first comprehensive guide to the continent’s birds, many of them never before described. He later recounted:

Prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring.

The minimal lessons in portraiture he had received as a boy in France had taught him nothing about drawing nature. So he decided to teach himself. “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples,” he winced at his first attempts. “So maimed were most of them that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle compared with the integrity of living men.” To improve his skills, he made an annual ritual of burning entire batches of drawings, resolving to redo those birds in the coming year. “After a few years of patience,” he wrote, “some of my attempts began almost to please me and I have continued the same style ever since.”

He fell in love with an American girl born in England who made him at home in the new language, so that he could describe the birds he was drawing. He become increasingly lyrical in his writing. He changed his name — he was born Jean-Jacques Rabin — to sound American. He would soon be naming American birds new to the ornithological literature. (When he came upon an unusually small three-toed woodpecker never before described, Audubon named it Maria’s Woodpecker, after his friend Maria Martin — the botanical artist who drew most of the trees, flowers, and reeds on which his birds perch.)

Over the next three decades of his life, Audubon went on to paint and write about 435 birds, including several now extinct. He lavishes each bird with multiple pages of detailed description and anecdotes from his personal encounters, using vocabulary so beautiful that working with it felt like a cheat. I savored his unselfconscious use of words like “astonishment” and “bewildered” in the middle of ornithological description, rued that such lovely words as “betake” and “depredation” have fallen out of fashion since his time, delighted in seeing “ossified” — one of my favorite words, which I learned from Emily Dickinson’s love letters to Sue — recur so frequently in the context of avian anatomy, delighted in using it in an entirely different context.

Beyond its spiritual rewards, beyond its quiet consolation, this daily practice became a tremendous source of creative vitality — a mighty antidote to the burnout I had started to feel nearly two decades into my primary writing practice. I know no greater catalyst of creativity — in art or in life — than constraint. It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives; it is within them that we become truly creative about the kind of life we want to live. Without the constraint of bones, there would be no wings.

And what of the very notion of divination?

I don’t believe in signs — I don’t believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust, that it is giving us personalized clues as to how to live our tiny transient lives. But I do believe in omens. Omens are the conversation between consciousness and reality, between the self and the unconscious. We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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