gifts for question-askers

A vintage cup for reading the tea leaves. (More here and here.)

A dictonary of symbols, for deciphering meanings, and a dreamlike Borges oracle by Catalina Kobelt for finding questions.

An obsidian mirror for peering into the dark.

Uusi's Supra deck for Jungian reflection.

An enamel "he loves me, he loves me not" spinning top pendant, for protecting unwary daisies from the lovelorn.

A fortune-telling pencil sourced from a mystical machine in Des Moines that will provide a yes, no, or maybe so answer. 

A Hades Wool sweater with the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" for cloudy realities.

Pat Perry's risograph-printed open call for guidance for anyone seeking to be "part of a collective search for perspective in confusing times." 

A 32-sided 1930s-era fortune-telling dice for more answers than you can get from a Magic-8 Ball.

Hysteric Glamour's "You Pay" keychain to end arguments over picking up the tab.

And for finding a fortune worth keeping, a bucket of cookies, plus a frame for the best one.

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I will add waaaaay down here, in an abashed moment of self-promotion, that I am the editor of a series of open-ended oracle decks written by Ellen Freeman and illustrated by Bethany van Rijswijk that are quite beautiful and interesting, if you happen to like mushrooms, flowers, seashells, fairy tales, rocks, cats, or space. Unlike tarot, these oracle decks do not offer traditional meanings, and they don't promise answers—instead, they are way to play with thoughts and ideas using imagery and scraps of myth, folklore, history, and science.

birthday gifts some 44-year-olds might enjoy

In a digression at the end of The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog trains his cameras on a group of albino crocodiles basking in pools of runoff from a nuclear power plant and muses on crocodiles staring into the abyss of time. For this reason, the image of mortality in my mind is a white crocodile, and the crocodile of time feels very near at my birthday, when I wonder if this is the year it eats me. And maybe because I have spent past few weeks thinking of ghost crocodiles, I misread a sign the other day as "ghost lobsters" and suddenly had a hilarious and terrifying vision of what it would be like to be visited by the ghosts of all the lobsters I have ever ate, hearing the ghost-rattle of their exoskeletons, their ghost eye-stalks observing me, an army of the crustacean dead trailing ghost butter and clouds of steam. And then I half-remembered hearing Edna O'Brien describe a bad experience with LSD, which seemed to involve years of seeing her phone as a lobster, and apparently Jean-Paul Sartre, too, was plagued with visions of lobsters. He kept seeing three or four at a time after a mescaline trip, knew they were not real, but saw them there just the same. So maybe the lobsters are waiting in my psyche with the crocodile.

Fortunately, I forgot all of this on my actual birthday and had an uncommonly nice time. 

Some gifts:

A tool for measuring the blue of the sky, based on blue skies in Ukraine.

Monogrammed rose-scented lip balm by Officine Universelle Buly. 

A matching Sayaka Davis scarf and sweater.

A book out of print: Sam Stephenson's Love and Work: Lyric Research on Jason Molina.

A Marcie McGoldrick ring that doubles as a family portrait.

A butterfly hair claw (or a cloud barrette).

Bright Himukashi wool socks.

A pleasingly wobbly hairbrush by Y.S. Park.

Ithell Colquhoun's Color as Taro.

Porcelain lady apples.

The complete Virago Modern Classic Collection and the most beautiful bookshelf to hold them, made by Sara Levitas Design Studio.

Perfect gold shoes by Avril Gau, just right for stepping into another year.

Money to send to women fighting to live life on their own terms in the U.S. and in Iran.

gifts empyrean and edenic

A comet-strewn tea towel celebrating Caroline Herschel, from a design by Judy Chicago.

Nested trees for desktop edens.

Paradisiacal apples (more specifically, the tree to grow your own).

A book of Leonora Carrington's otherworldly visions.

Tiny bottles of radiance-protecting potions. 

Heavenly tunes.

A jacket patterned with fiery objects.

Lithographs of fallen stars.

A ring of endless light.

A scarf dyed with the colors of the world.

Celestial objects, suspended in alignment. 

A tempting serpent (Sheila Metzner's Hand With Snake, 1994, available on 1stDibs).

the tower

W.B. Yeats, from "The Tower."

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Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers — W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R. M. Rilke, and C. G. Jung — moved into towers as their principal habitations ... in every case the tower served both literally and symbolically as a refuge from the urban modernism with whose values the four writers found themselves at odds. While the classic modernists (Eliot, Woolf, Hart Crane) often singled out the broken tower as the image of a crumbling past, these writers actualized their powerful visions: Yeats and Rilke moved into medieval towers in Ireland and Switzerland, while Jeffers and Jung built themselves towers at Carmel and Bollingen as secluded spaces in which to cultivate the traditions and values they cherished. Description of The View From the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image by Theodore Ziolkowski. Photo of Robinson Jeffers' Hawk Tower by Jessica Malikowski. Book and image discovered thanks to Stephen Sparks.

tarot

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Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

T.S. Eliot, from "The Waste Land"

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Beautiful storybook cards from Uusi's Pagan Otherworlds Tarot. Their goods are infinitely covetable: the BRuT Tarot + poker deck, Bohemia, gilded decks and Advent calendars ...