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Winged words about our feathered friends
‘Avian language may well be the language of the psyche, of the soul and mind.’ Alan Powers
Connecting or reconnecting with nature, pausing and engaging with the sights and sounds around us when we’re outdoors, can help us find meaning and significance in the world and enable us to feel more relaxed, happier and more satisfied with life.
Alan Powers, in his Conversations with Birds: the metaphysics of bird and human communication (Bear & Company, Sacred Planet Books, February 2023) — an exploration of communication with birds and the important lessons we can learn from it and about ourselves — would launch us on just such a nooscopic quest to recommune with our natural environment.
First published in 2003 as BirdTalk: Conversations with Birds, Powers makes his original sub-title the title for his new edition despite the same title having been used by the Indian filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar for her collection of essays about her avian inspirations published as Conversations with Birds by Milkweed in November 2022.
And remarkably, in the space of only a few months, we now have three new books about profound relationships between humans and birds: Ben Gagnon’s revelatory Church of Birds: an eco-history of myth and religion is out this month (March 2023) from Moon Books.
