The best metamorphosis books 📚

This book offers a response to a deep longing to be in the world with childlike curiosity. It encourages our direct perception of life through the energetic heart field. Although it is meant as a knowledgeable guide for listening to and communicating with plants, it elicits a poignant call during a time of profound alienation. Encouraging the letting go of top-down linear thinking, Buhner offers a step-by-step somatic path for decolonizing the soul. I discovered by exchanging the word “psoas” for “plant” the book easily becomes a personal guide for increasing our core awareness as it inspires opening the… show more.

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking from troubling dreams, he discovered he had been changed into a monstrous verminous insect."

What an opening sentence! In my teens I was captivated by the strangeness, the absurdity, the sense of sacrifice, and the surreal, deeply unsettling nature of this tale, and re-reading it again now, I still am.
Gregor loathes his dull job – something so many of us can relate to – but is bound to support his debt-ridden family. Transformed into something monstrous, he is freed of family obligations but has now become a burden.

Despite his… show more.

Werner Herzog demands that his film students read this book, and it's easy to see why: it's an act of pure seeing that makes a humdrum English landscape blaze with vivid life. Baker, who seems diffident about humanity at best ("we reek of death," he grumbles) embarks on a quest to know the peregrine falcons who live in—and pass through—the place where he lives, and in describing their lives he finds a luminous and heroic world hidden in the muddy fields and clouded skies of Essex. Ours "is a dying world, like Mars," he writes, "but glowing still."