Song Of The Birds
by David G. Haskell
[Listen to Audio!]
 For millennia, the language of birds has called us to cross divides. In the Qur’an, Solomon received a bounty and blessing when he was given the language of birds. Job exhorts us to hear the wisdom of the fowls of the air. News of the human world was carried into the divine ear by the speech of Norse Odin’s ravens and the bluebirds of the Taoist Queen of the West. In the voices of birds, we hear augury, portent, prophesy. We are drawn across boundaries into other places, other times.
Listen: an invitation. But it is hard to discern what is meant in this speech of our winged cousins. Birds inhabit flesh profoundly different from our own. Our inattention further muffles their language. We wall them out with bricks that keep us indoors, inside self-made worlds, and with presuppositions, closely guarded vaults of the mind. We’ve made ourselves a lonely place, so quiet.
Let in the sound. […]
When we understand the meanings of a sound made by a bird, nerves in two different brains touch and signal. The link between nerve cells is made from vibrating air, a connection as strong and real as the chemical links among nerves in a single brain. Bird sounds, then, are sonic neurotransmitters that leap across species boundaries.
This leap is creative. When bird and human minds connect, a new language is born. This expansive language weaves many species into a communicative whole, a web of listening and speech. Language-learning is indeed for everyone. It unites us. And so we return to the invitation offered to us by the birds around our homes. In their voices we hear the many rhythms of the seasons and the varied physicality of habitats. We learn the individual stories of each bird. We understand how our community is changing and what we should remember from this present moment. We hear and create Earth’s universal grammar.
Let’s answer the birds’ invitation, stepping outside to give them the simple gift of our attention. Listen. Wonder. Belong.
About the Author: David George Haskell is author of various books, including The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. The excerpt above from this podcast.
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Song Of The Birds
How do you relate to the notion of a new language being born when the minds of two different species connect? Can you share a personal story of a time you heard and created earth’s universal grammar by linking into the mind of another species? What helps you listen for wisdom in a language different from yours? |
| Jagdish P Dave wrote: Let’s listen to what David George Haskell states in the last short paragraph of his podcast Song Of the Birds: "Let’s answer the birds’ invitation, stepping outside to give them the s… |
| david doane wrote: I believe that all of creation, living and not living, is interconnected. I believe we don’t create earth’s universal grammar and don’t create the connection or language between different … |
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