Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

David George Haskell is the author of The Songs of Trees,

Stories from Nature's Great Connectors, which won the 2018 John Burroughs Medal.

He also wrote The Forest Unseen, a Year's watch in Nature, which was a finalist for the 2013

Pulitzer Prize.

In voices of birds in the language of belonging, David brings us into the intricate and generative

soundscape of the world of birds.

Though the evolutionary paths of humans and birds diverged long ago, leaving us with profoundly

different ways of communicating.

Shared experiences of sound, he says, can nonetheless be a bridge to kinship.

In a time when human and avian habitats are changing rapidly, by simply giving our attention

to the songs of birds, we are invited into a larger conversation and an embodied knowledge of place.

For millennia, the language of birds has called us to cross divides.

In the Quran, 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 prophecy. We are drawn across boundaries into other places, other times.

Listen an invitation. The 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.

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