“A trove of wonders that made me glad to be alive and reminded me of all the unseen intelligences that have guided my own life. A catalog of mystery and the mystical that made me feel more in touch with the world.”
—Melissa Febos, best-selling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season
“Poetic and mysterious, The Magpie Spoke to Me is a peek under the fabric of the universe that reveals the fleeting and interconnected nature of things, giving reason to pause and recognize the gift of all experience.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Life
“Bonnie Nadzam has touched the pulse of life’s essential mystery. She and I share Zen practice, but her book dances beyond Zen into the boundaryless. A coyote spoke to me in my twenties, and fifty years later, during a meditation retreat, a bluejay punctuated his remarks. Bonnie’s book scatters such stories like starlight. What generosity! Don’t miss her gifts.”
—Peter Coyote, Zen teacher, author, and storyteller
“Nadzam shows how narratives are delivery systems for living knowledge, offering stories from wildly diverse voices to enter a pluriverse of human and nonhuman thought.”
—Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
“The Magpie Spoke to Me, a profoundly humane and quietly transformative read, is like water in the desert of an era dominated by the compulsive need to explain away mystery. In this beautiful book, Bonnie Nadzam offers something far more courageous and essential: reverent attention to the fullness of being alive. This book invites readers back into relationship with all that is: with grief, with the body, with the natural world, and with one another. Her stories are tender, unsettling, and deeply vital, inviting us to another way—a more aware way—of being in the world. Nadzam’s capacity for storytelling is unparalleled—the prose is spacious, compassionate, and wise. This is a beautiful, important, and deeply timely book. I am better for having read it.”
—Joanne Cacciatore, PhD, best-selling author of Bearing the Unbearable and Grieving Is Loving
“The Magpie Spoke to Me is a powerful reminder of the fundamental role of story in helping us shift from a ‘cosmovision’ of separation to one of wholeness that honors and respects the animacy of all beings. Through the stories she has collected and her potent reflections, Nadzam reveals how this story of wholeness is woven together by the numerous ways the spirit comes alive, in the mundane and the sublime, vulnerability and strength, the human and more-than-human. This book is a guide for participating in the story of our time.”
—Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Sufi teacher, founder of Emergence Magazine, and author of Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology
“The Magpie Spoke to Me is one of those rare books that seamlessly weave together sophisticated theory with an intimate knowledge of the human soul to explicate a seemingly simple proposition: that our naturalized stories about the human are killing the Earth, and us. An accomplished Buddhist practitioner and writer, Nadzam’s steadfast commitment to Life shines through the book’s enthralling prose, showing why, ultimately, at stake is nothing less than the re/construction of a relational ontology of the human as the foundation for novel ways of dwelling on the Earth.”
—Arturo Escobar, author of Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible and coauthor of Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human
“The Magpie Spoke to Me is a beautifully written book about storytelling—about how the narratives we tell ourselves and each other help us build and navigate our world. But, perhaps more profoundly, it’s also about what we might call storylistening, about how we can appreciate the richness, depth, and mystery of our relationships with the more-than-human world through an attitude of openness, receptivity, and wonder. Bonnie Nadzam combines scholarly research, philosophical reflection, and spiritual insight to engage with essential questions about the role we play within the cosmos, whoever ‘we’ might be.”
—Matthew Liebman, the Justice for Animals Endowed Chair and Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco School of Law
“In a dream you arrive naked in a new land with nothing but birdsong in your mouth. But somehow it is enough. Had you brought food, it would soon be eaten. Tools would rust. Money would be spent. But the song we humans call a story? Whole worlds have been made from less. The Magpie Spoke to Me is more than a collection of inspired, often uncanny personal epiphanies. Bonnie Nadzam has gifted us a pilgrim’s guide to the future.”
—Clark Strand, author of Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse
“Reading this book feels like sitting at a ring of stones around a small fire, listening to the deepest truths of the human spirit. Nadzam’s beautiful offering honors the uncapturable knowledges that modern life so often crowds out. It is a generous, life-affirming gift to anyone seeking a more relational way of being.”
—Bernie Rhie, Zen Teacher and Associate Professor of English at Williams College
“How do we tell—and how do we listen to—stories that do not fit our inherited maps of reality? The stories in this collection, together with Nadzam’s reflections, challenge dominant assumptions and frameworks that often constrain our thinking. They invite us to enlarge our sense of what is possible, to bear witness to a world that is more porous, stranger, and more intimate than our current maps allow.”
—William Edelglass, Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
“Bonnie Nadzam and her many storytelling companions tell of happenings that seem dramatic and uncanny to the critical scientific mind. A writer and Zen adept schooled in other kinds of mind, Nadzam wants us to understand that the normative view we have of the world we live in, and the world we see coming, is a view, one among many, and, like all views, is both true and false. If we want to see a bigger future, with bigger possibilities, she implies, maybe we better think twice about what we take to be real.”
—Norman Fischer, poet and Zen priest, author of When You Greet Me I Bow and Selected Poems: 1980–2013
