The Language of Birds

Originally published 2026-08-07. By Stewart Kahn Lundy.

Birdsong and Biodynamics

“And Solomon inherited David. He said, ‘O people, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given from all things. Indeed, this is evident bounty.’” Sūrat al-Naml 27:161

When I think about the elemental world, its closest representatives are undeniably pollinators and birds, and of these, there is a special class of wild animals that choose to live near human beings and reveal a special kinship with us. They are not like many other wild animals, but have chosen to draw near to domesticated life themselves. For me, two birds stand out on our farm in this way: those swooping sky ninjas, barn swallows (Hirundo rustica), and those gregarious warbling purple martins (Progne subis).

In particular, that watery bubbling part of the purple martin song sounds to me like the chirping of huacos, water flutes originating in South America:

There is something special about movement in water, particularly the sound moving water makes, which is more than just a physical vibration; it is the air in water. If we transpose this image to another level, it becomes the communication of astrality into ethericity, or inner soul feeling mobilizing one’s own vitality. When we use a term like “astrality,” this is often left utterly undefined — or even characterized — but it has connotations of feeling, desire, willpower, and fundamentally mobility. If you desire to go from point A to point B, that is an astral quality.

In weather, the movement of air from a high-pressure zone to a low-pressure zone is also astrality, primarily carried by our nitrogenous atmosphere. You see how this pattern operates on many levels of existence? Steiner expands on this by saying, “delicate spider webs are actually spun out of the astral plane. The spiders are merely the instruments of astral activity.”2 Which is to say, it is as if spiderwebs are like nets cast into flowing currents of air: the movement of air in that location — the astral plane — allows the passive collection of their prey. A fisherman knows to cast a net into a current to catch fish easily, and a spider instinctually does much the same thing.

Shams Tabrizi says: “A thirsty man discovered a tank of water, but could not drink of it because it was surrounded by a high wall. He took some of the bricks off the top of the wall and cast them over it into the water. The water cried out, ‘What advantage do you gain by doing this?’ He made answer, ‘The first advantage is this, that I hear your voice; and the second, that the more bricks I pull off the wall, the nearer I approach to you.’”3

It is as if the very sound of a bubbling brook, even in the absence of water, is recognized as water and heightens the thirst of plants. If you are hungry you may hear bacon sizzling instead of rain, and your mouth may produce saliva in anticipation — and you may move towards the source of the sensation — the roots of plants also strive downwards in search of water in response to sounds resembling water.

What an animal voices is not just a sound — it is an expression of its entire inner life of feeling. “[W]hen we hear the cry of an animal, we can, besides our own feeling, detect through it the manifestation of an inward experience of the animal, whether of pleasure or pain.”4 If you were to sit with the sound of an animal quietly, and do so long enough that your mind quieted long enough that all you heard was that sound without your own subjective associations or prejudices, you would feel in yourself a way that transcends the subject-object division, the feeling that animal’s sound expresses. Though it may sound paradoxical, there is a sort of objective feeling that can be attained when interacting with the sounds of the soul world approached in the right way.

At our farm, we live in the densest corridor for migratory birds in all of North America. Countless birds visit us, and we’re always discovering new ones — a wonderful sign for the ecology of this small farm. But there are many places that become devoid of birds, and that chilling silence is not good for plants. Dan Carlson, creator of the product Sonic Bloom, was “[s]truck by the idea that certain sound frequencies might help a plant breathe better and absorb more nutrients, [so] he experimented with various frequencies until, with the help of an audio engineer, he found one range that was consonant with the early morning birds chirping that helps plants open wider their stomata, or mouth-like pores.”5 This “early morning chirping” or the “dawn chorus” is always around us when we foster healthy bird populations.

As Steiner says, “If these winged creatures are removed, the astral life will fail to accomplish its proper function, and this will be noticeable in the stunted condition of the vegetation. The two things are connected; the world of winged animals and all that grows out of the soil into the air.”6

Of course, what has not been tested is the benefit of early-morning birdsong for root development, but an opportunity presents itself here: Jochen Bockemühl-style rhizoboxes, in which one plant would be exposed to birdsong and another deprived of birdsong, one would likely find a dramatic improvement in the roots, even in drought conditions.

Water wizard Chris Tebbut shares in an interview that “Steiner said water is a corpse of light.” If we take “corpse” in the older traditional sense, we are all “wearing” a corpse, but it is enlivened. Remove vitality, remove spiritual light, and an inert corpse is left behind. Chris Tebbut’s articulation of consciousness as light in water. Light “wears” water while the water remains lively, and then departs when the water goes stagnant.

Flowforms, in spite of what some people may tell you, I have learned from Chris, do not have to be rigidly produced by exactingly precise geometrical patterns. In fact, the reason I long held off making any of my own was that I had been told — wrongly — that flowforms have to be so scientifically precise to have any benefit. I hesitantly asked Chris in person about whether he had done such calculations on his elaborate installation. He laughed and said, “Of course not!” He had rather more practically sought to make it fit, artistically, to his hillside.

In traditional alchemy, the “light ether” was the same thing as the “air ether.” If you look at a tree, consider its enormous surface area — that surface area is “air ether” where it is exposed to the air on so many sides, which also exposes it to the surrounding light. When we add compost, biochar, or even cultivate the soil, we are adding light ether due to the increased surface area introduced into the soil. This is something I prefer to call liminal space (limen, n., “threshold”): a place full of the possibility for worlds meeting, which is the possibility of incarnation and life itself. In some traditions, one might call such a locus a “thin place,” where the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds becomes porous, or rather, a place where the dead material world becomes specially enlivened by spiritual activity.

“Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world.”7

When we garden or farm, it is not a factory we’re working, but a divine symphony, participating in the performance of Nature herself, and catching a moment of that supernal song. It is all song — all song and dance. “The sun-orb sings, in emulation, ‘Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round.”8 It is this gospel that St. Francis preached to the little birds. When we eat, it is notes of Jupiter and Saturn and all the plants together. It is not a joke when Steiner says such a thing; it is a fact. But it is a fact, the way that a musical chord composed of multiple notes is a fact, and it nourishes us through the harmony of proportions, through the imbibing of the music of the spheres.