Just back from California to the snowy Northeast, I find a dozen books I recently ordered waiting for me. 

I open the largest, the handsome new Book of Symbols from the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. It falls open to a page with a gorgeous reproduction of a Persian illustration for The Language of the Birds, Farid al-Din Attar’s poetic account of birds, like souls, on a spiritual quest that will eventually take them to the heaven bird, the Simorgh, a mythic creature that has been part of my own dreaming for several decades (and maybe several lifetimes). The title of this marvelous spiritual allegory, the Mantiq al-Tayr, is more commonly rendered as “The Conference of the Birds” in English, but today “The Language of the Birds” feels just right, because as my eyes move from the full-color plate to the facing page, it seems the birds are definitely speaking.

On the left-hand page, these lines from James Applewhite’s “Prayer for My Son” give me my thought for the day:

Soul can flame like feathers of a bird
Grow into your own plumage, brightly,
So that any tree is a marvelous city.

I can’t recommend too highly making a little bibliomancy (divination by opening a book at random) or, more precisely, stichomancy (making a few lines your message) a morning practice.