The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova BaileyД¬onfined to bed by a serious illness, Bailey was given a window into the living world by the presence of a snail in her room.

Perhaps the misplacement in bookshops carries a message: an eros for our beautiful planet.Дў. This is a call to joyful, awakened listening. Recently though, especially in the westernised world, we have too often cut ourselves out of this attentiveness. With graceful and insightful prose, Abram shows that listening connects us to the voices and stories of more-than-human beings. Sometimes misplaced in the erotica sections of bookshops, this is a book about opening all the senses to the animism of the living world. Along the way, the following books all helped me to hear better and to understand the stories behind the sounds I was hearing.ДЎ. The experience was a revelation, like plugging into a whole new way of knowing. I was in my 20s when I started to really open my ears and direct my attention outward. Listening is the original вЂњaugmented realityвЂќ, uniting our senses with hidden beings and the energies of the world. I ask: When did animals first start to sing? What can we learn about evolutionary creativity from the ever-changing drama of bird, frog and insect life outside the window? How might the glorious and troubling convergences of human and non-human sound in the city and the ocean guide us to a more just future? In my book, Sounds Wild and Broken, I listen both in the present moment and in deep time. How might we relearn to hear the non-human world, both as a source of joy and a way to ground ourselves in the realities of the living world? Yet we live in a world of acoustic overstimulation that often requires that we shut down our hearing in order to focus or block out unwanted noise. Sound also discloses the state of the non-animal world: the sonic textures of wind in trees, flowing water and geologic rumblings all unite attentive ears to the energies and stories unfolding around us. A song or call links one creature to another almost instantaneously, like a telepathic signal that passes through dense vegetation and the darkest night. S ound is a great connector among animals.

Listening to