I don’t typically do this, but I’m interrupting my current two-parter to share a little something. One of the differences between writing on Substack and keeping a blog, for me at least, is that I’ve focused more on longer form content here. I tend to be a lot less ephemeral in my approach—in other words, when I blogged, I was much more likely to share stuff that just caught my eye.
I’ve been a paying subscriber to Maria Popova’s The Marginalian for a long, long time. Back when it was Brain Pickings, and before I think most of us had figured out what newsletters could actually be, Maria was sending out, as she puts it, “mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality.” The Marginalian, in all sorts of ways, is the very best of what the internet can and should do, in my opinion.
Anyway, yesterday I read her recent piece about her current side-project, An Almanac of Birds. I won’t spoil the narrative for you, because it’s worth reading. But the TLDR is that Popova “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.” She shares a number of the cards at the link above, but I thought I’d include one of my favorites here:
There are a bunch of them, and if she does indeed ever turn them into a book or a deck, you can sign me right up. In the meantime, though, I’ve linked in the caption to her Society6 page, where she’s made them all available as cards and prints.
Perhaps more than any of the individual “divinations,” though, I really found myself taken with a parenthetical comment that Popova made, partway through:
Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.
That struck me as simultaneously beautiful and profound. I’m pretty sure that it’ll find its way into my book as an epigraph. It felt so resonant that, rather than wait to fold it into other pieces of ideas, I thought I’d just share it on its own. Happy Sunday.
"Anything you polish..." is a couple notches richer than "Man ist was man isst" (You are what you eat).