Hello World(s),

Today we want to introduce you to TCI Transmissions. Each Transmission will be an experimental soundscape of collected ideas, voices, and other snippets to help you think, create, and expand. We will publish them here, or you can find us on your preferred podcatching service. For our very first Transmission, our friend Jon Leland has created and voiced a snail meditation for us.

The snail meditation is part of Jon’s ongoing project, Animal Meditations—guided meditations that invite the listener to momentarily embody an animal. They are brief exercises in imagining the quality of the imagined creature’s form and existence, whether that’s as a Laysan albatross flying above the sea, or as a Roman Snail moving across the ground. Of course, there is no way to really understand what it is to experience life as any one of these animals. The value of imagining yourself as an “other,” particularly one so different from us, is to deepen our empathy for all beings and dampen the primacy of self. Also, it’s just fun to imagine what it would be like to be a snail sometimes.