On a wind-tossed Sunday in Toronto, I arrived breathless at the STTA: space. Inside, I was immediately met by colour - not static, but alive. Birds of paradise shimmered across the wall in reds and cobalt blues, flashes of gold and iridescent green, their bodies like living brushstrokes. They danced, called, and constructed ephemeral architectures - stages of seduction.

The audience gathered slowly, like a flock finding formation. We settled into a shared stillness, and together we listened. Not passively, but with a kind of awakening attention. The bird calls, at first easily dismissed as instinct - mating, warning, survival - began to unfurl as something more. They seemed to be gestures, phrases, offerings. Already, the boundary between human and more-than-human felt thinner, more permeable.

When the projection faded, the room held a quiet expectancy. We were introduced to Lost Steps, a live, improvised collaboration by David Rothenberg, a listener, storyteller, and self-described “student of the music of other creatures.” His work, rooted in interspecies improvisation, invites us to hear natural sound not as backdrop, but as what he calls the “languages of life.” 

Coinciding with the rebirth of spring and the return of migratory birds to the city, David’s performance became a kind of seasonal threshold: a bridge between worlds. Each piece was preceded by a story. These small acts of storytelling drew us closer to lives we rarely notice. Drawing from many recordings of these more-than-human species, he entered into musical conversation with birds, insects, and whales, creatures he had once encountered within the world's breathing orchestra.

The lights had shifted to a deep, warm blue. David began to speak, not as a lecturer, but as a guide. He told stories of nightingales and lyrebirds; and of slowing their songs until hidden architectures revealed themselves as patterns within patterns - a complexity that resisted reduction. These were not merely signals of survival. They were expressions, improvisations, necessities. 

They sang. Then, he joined in.

What emerged was not accompaniment, but dialogue. Call and response dissolved into something inseparable. When I closed my eyes, I could no longer distinguish where the bird ended and the human began. There was only relation - a shared act of becoming sound.

In those moments, David’s philosophy became palpable: that there is no true duality between music and nature; that “natural sound is never separable from human sound.” Listening itself felt like an act of transformation. The room shifted so that it was no longer an intimate space in the middle of Toronto, but a submerged expanse. Blue gave way to green. Space gave way to immersion.

As David's instruments changed, so too did the worlds we entered. Cicadas shimmered in dense rhythmic fields. Whales opened vast, slow-moving corridors of sound. The whale song, especially, altered time itself - stretching it, dissolving it. With eyes closed, I felt suspended underwater, yet uncannily awake. The boundaries of my own listening dissolved, replaced by a heightened awareness, as though my ears had learned a new language.

The hour passed like a migration; felt, more than measured. When it ended, we were invited to write postcards to ourselves, to reflect on what had shifted. It was a gesture that extended the experience beyond the room, into memory and future listening.

In the conversation that followed, David spoke of hearing as an act of forgetting names - of releasing the impulse to categorize, and instead allowing sound to meet us as presence. He spoke of listening not as passive reception, but as participation - an invitation to respond, to play along, to become part of the living chorus that surrounds us. And he reminded us that listening deeply is a form of earthly survival.

I left altered, though subtly. The city air felt different, textured by what I had heard. In the mornings since, I wake with the birds, noticing their arrivals, their absences. When their songs are missing, the silence is no longer empty. It is a loss I can feel.

I have not yet joined in. But I no longer believe I would be afraid to.