Within me dwell conflicting impulses. I am torn inexorably in twain by two seemingly opposing forces, the city and the country, and wherever I currently am always seems like the answer.
There is an undeniable life that pulses in and around and through the edifices of the world’s metropolises, those queer, wild places where anything can happen: chance encounters at packed pubs; spontaneous streetside jam sessions; windows glittering with the cozy glow of communion. I love the faces, tones, sights, smells, and sounds of the urban landscape, accurately reflecting the heterogeneity of human life; the safety of shared perspectives; common symbols and proper pronouns. And I love the creativity that springs forth in these places, from the audio and visual to the culinary; the ideas exchanged rapidly and repeatedly, propelling societies forward.
But all this speed can get dizzying, and there are times when the towering structures feel like they’re closing in; when the cacophony of traffic and energetic din drowns out that still-small voice. I often wander aimlessly for hours inside these urban labyrinths, and sometimes this is purposeful and even valuable—but other times, I’m lost in the noise, struggling to separate the voice of spirit and soul from culturally programmed impulses. If you surrender to the momentum, it will drive you relentlessly forward, careening through vaulted corridors of metal and glass on an unstoppable trajectory of material brinksmanship.
There’s a profound loneliness that washes over me in places like Oxford Circus or Times Square, the way they insist upon themselves, screaming neon and walls of noise; thousands of people having individual experiences in proximity. The emptiness of artifice seeking solace in perpetual dopaminergic pursuit, each contactless tap a dream unfulfilled; a child left crying in their crib.
But art can connect us through all of this, uniting us in isolation; the salve to our collective saudade. It calls out hypocrisy and systemic injustice, diffusing the pain of alienation in chord, word, bite, and brush stroke—and illuminating interrelationship, bridging worlds that might not be so separate after all.
As a child, I read Aesop’s fable of the city mouse and the country mouse, and revisiting it now is revelatory. In the story, the city mouse visits the country mouse, who serves them a simple, Earth-based meal. The country mouse happily satiates herself, but the city mouse picks gingerly at her victuals, extolling the superiority of her decadent urban feasts. That night, they go to bed, and each mouse dreams they have the other’s life.
The next day, they travel to the city, where the city mouse leads the country mouse to a lavish spread. But just as they’re about to dig in, a cat comes meowing, and the mice abandon the meal in terror. By the time they emerge, the humans have cleared the table, and the food is gone.
In the country, the mice harvest the abundance of what’s naturally there. In the city, one must take from another to survive in a cycle of endless striving, danger always at the door. The country mouse returns to her rural abode, saying she prefers simplicity and security over hardscrabble luxury, and this, ostensibly, is the story’s moral.
Of course, glaring issues go unaddressed in this tale, ones not discussed in polite, 6th-century-B.C. society. What if one mouse in that bucolic place is queer, bears darker fur, or has different neurology than the others? What if the pleasures of the feast are sometimes worth facing a formidable feline for? What if the contents of the table were equitably redistributed? And what if those mice who play it safe are never fully alive, denying themselves the richness of rodential experience?
The dualism of country and city, noble self-sufficiency versus cutthroat competition, a simple life devoid of pleasure or scraping your way to the top, all of these are false dichotomies and artificial spheres—created by capitalism to turn urban and rural not only into different geographies, but ideological divides that perpetuate power structures and reinforce the myth of separation.
As it often does, reality lies beyond the binary. Creative ecology examines the intersection of culture and environment through artistic modalities, exploring our relationships with the planet, each other, and all life. It tells stories about other places, creatures, and ecosystems, calling attention to environmental threats and invoking sensory mediums to explore, communicate, and embody solutions.
Fundamentally, it’s about the interactions between people and place, and creative ecology also tells the real stories of urban spaces and their citizens: those threatened by gentrification, passed over by society, and displaced from ancestral lands. In places like Manchester’s rainbow-bedecked Gay Village and queer bookstores throughout the U.K.; Seattle’s Central District, where murals honor the neighborhood’s history of Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists and leaders; and Nibble Kitchen in Somerville’s Bow Market, a restaurant funded by the city arts council, art buoys the othered as new development washes in.
Encompassing not only audio, visual, and culinary art but urban gardens, community-supported agriculture, and farm and food cooperatives; sustainably focused restaurants and producers led by the underrepresented; and artist’s residencies, farm stays, and cultural exchanges, creative ecology has the power to make our cities more equitable epicenters of the beauty, expression, and ingenuity of which humans are capable. But it requires dissolving the perceived urban/rural divide, bringing nature to our urban cores and untold stories to agrarian areas.
We need both the city and the country to usher us into the next age, and through art, food, and direct experience, perhaps we can dismantle these artificial barriers. The artists who defined movements found each other in places like Paris, London, and New York, but many were their most prolific on rural retreats, from Van Gogh’s yellow house to Monet’s gardens and 19th-century artists’ colonies. With enough oxygen, creativity bubbles to the surface. The truth makes itself heard, felt, and known, ready to be artistically rendered and carried back to the masses.
Sometimes I dream about bulldozing the buildings and letting the Earth run wild over the rubble, but there’s too much about this mess I’d miss. And besides, it never ends, none of it does: death and rebirth, destruction and creation, the movement of celestial bodies through space; the cycle endlessly repeats itself, revolving from the center, and maybe we don’t need to tear it all down to build a better world.
You can find meditative space anywhere, from rural silence to downtown streets, by simply getting quiet, listening to nothing but the sounds of the environment and letting things drop in. The deafening symphony of cicadas like out-of-tune cellos, rising in volume and becoming a dirge; the insect-like cry and drone of a train, sqEEEE kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK. The chatter of early-morning avian life; the dull hum of thousands of conversations being had at once. Paws scattering litter across forest floors; hundreds of transmissions idling, stopping, and starting again. It’s all the same thing in the end, and it’s about the intention you bring.
There are days I need to get lost in a massive downtown, discovering constant surprises and feeling the vibration of thousands of souls. But other times, I need to retreat to the stillness of solitude, sitting in the wide-awake space of a wild pre-dawn. In my story, the mice don’t have to choose between luxury and simplicity, and they don’t have to stay in one place. They find richness to feast on wherever they are, and when they leave, they can come back again.