The Earth Of: Murmurations

This collaborative, interdisciplinary anthology of essays, poetry, photography and visual writing arose in response to a challenge: to put ideas into the world, through forms inspired by the murmurations of starlings. To speak in a murmur, the murmuring of waves, a mumbled or private expression of discontent, implies a thing both indistinct and continuous not unlike the movement of lips without articulation. It is a sound that awakens, coos softly as if calling a flock of starlings into motion—a few hundred birds moving as one suspended reality. How each starling in a flock is connected to every other bird. How physiological mechanisms happen simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds. It is not purely for defense. It is a striving for distance between the edge and the predator. An impulse to confront the perimeter. Not only a way to disguise, but also to inflict, to articulate, to confront, to expose a boundary.