Book Review: “Animal-Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small” By

Title: Listening to Mother Earth’s voice

When I first encountered this book, I thought that it looked like a bible, it was so big!

I spent one and a half years reading it thoroughly and taking notes in order to help myself integrate its information better (this I always do with all my spiritual and metaphysical books).

Writing notes, underlining sentences and paragraphs, using colors, making annotations on the margins of my books … goes against what I was told at school: “you must not write on your books”.

But since I study and not read my spiritual literature, I must admit that my books become unfit to be borrowed (basically, they look disgusting inside! Well, maybe I am exaggerating) but they become working documents. Normally I embed my life with the information that appears in these books and so they become part of the tapestry of what I am experiencing at the time. I wouldn’t do it any other way.

And yes, it does take much longer to read a book in this way, but I find that not only I slow down my ever thirsty-for-knowledge brain but also, I own the book, its information, its message, its spirit. The book becomes part of my life and my life becomes part of the universal mind as I feel that my vibrations become powerful and clear.

More than anything else, my reading becomes a meditation. I disappear in the book. I live it and I am in the book.

When I started to go through its pages and I came across the notion of bird energy: birds are so light and they breathe about 500 times per second when they fly. Ted says that rather than breathing the air they seem to fly into the air.

And then he says that in the same fashion, we don’t need to be everywhere doing all the work: we can send our energy to do our work for us in advance.

I was so excited about this concept that I remember writing a massive letter to my today’s husband, at the time a boyfriend of just one month! (How didn’t he realize that I was totally mad at the time and stuck with me is beyond my grasp).

This concept resonated with me so much that it actually shifted me on the spot and allowed me to abandon the path of struggle and start in the path of effortlessness. I was able to start surrendering to the energetic currents of my life and of the wider universe and I was able to start visualizing my future, clearly and powerfully. I started to back off (or was my ego the one which started to back off?) and started to become a conscious co-creator of my life.

I became a bird. I became light.

And this was only a tiny-winy learning that I got from this book. Many more lessons came afterwards… And then I realized that indeed, this book was a bible! A bible of the natural world and its living creatures interacting with us in order to help us grow in balance and harmony with mother earth.

And it was at that time, at the beginning of my spiritual work, when I remember vividly having a very short conversation with the Earth.

Just like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind stood up on the top of the hill and, with her fist raised to the wind, she made a solemn promise: I promise that from this moment forwards, nor me or anyone of my family will ever be hungry again, I told the Earth Spirit, with all the passion and emotion I could gather: I know that many of us are stripping and killing you but I make you a promise today: as per today, whenever you talk to me, I will listen.

And that has been a promise that I have never broken, and neither do I ever intend to.

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