By Maria Popova
Biking again to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn night, having descended into the underworld of matter for a go to to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up quick on the shore of Lake Geneva: Within the orange sky over the orange water, one million particles had been swarming in unison with out colliding. Besides they weren’t particles — they had been birds. Tens of millions of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a dwelling reminder that the universe is “nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”
The majesty and thriller of murmurations come alive with unusual magnificence in We Are Starlings: Inside the Mesmerizing Magic of a Murmuration (public library) by writers Donna Jo Napoli and Robert Furrow, illustrated by artist Marc Martin, who additionally introduced us the wondrous A Stone Is a Story.
As a murmuration of starlings takes flight in opposition to a panoramic watercolor sky, the story is instructed from the attitude of the birds — an antidote to our anthropocentric view of the pure world, which Rachel Carson pioneered practically a century in the past together with her revolutionary writings about the sea.
Gentle but hanging, the illustrations play masterfully with our sense of scale — we zoom out and out from closeups of the flock to the complete sweep of the murmuration, then again to the dimensions of the feathered particle that’s the particular person chook.
A four-page gatefold wings the ebook with a way of the astonishing grandeur of those small, fragile creatures constellating one thing immense and highly effective, better than the sum of its components — one of many dwelling wonders of this Earth.
Couple We Are Starlings with the stunning animated poem “Murmuration,” then revisit different kindred illustrated celebrations of the pure world: The Forest, Dawn, What Is a River, and The Blue Hour.
