Prompts

What does the word “pastoral” mean to you?

How does it land on your ears?

How does it feel in your mouth? in your hands?

An “urban pastoral” might be:

• Movement-based, embodied, and sensory practices in city spaces
• Dance, theatre and performance scores
• Recorded and imagined soundscapes of the city
• Poetry, prose, and journal entries
• Visual and story maps of historical and futural relations to place, land, and bioregion
• Walking, rolling, wheeling, biking the city
• Monitoring and creating awareness about urban wildlife
• Salons, readings, workshops, and podcasts
• Desire paths
• Community forums
• Community and heritage gardens, or a stand of goldenrod in a vacant lot
• Standing out, standing up for intragenerational, intergenerational, and interspecies justice
• And many other forms of human reciprocity with other human and nonhuman beings.

Here are some invitations (added 14 September 2026).

Ask of a place:

• What do I touch (see, smell, taste, hear, intuit) here?
• How do I experience this place?
• Who else is in this space? What other living beings, and what do they need to thrive?
• Does this small space of the city feel like home, feel like belonging, feel safe, feel like joy? Or not? 
• What does this small space of the city ask of me in turn?
• What do I want to tell others about this small place in Somerville, the small slice of our natural and built environment?

Ask of yourself and others:

• What do I/we want in and for Somerville? What sort of future? What sort of community? 
• How do I/we want to be in relationship with the built and natural environments of the city?
• Ask one another: What do you care about?
• Tell its story.
• How is this your story too? Where do our stories touch each other? This can be pretty or pretty troubling. But it’s the story, not our possibilities together in time.

Ask of the relationship:

• What small act of attention, care, reciprocity, and/or gratitude can I/we perform in relationship to this place? 
• How can I/we invite others into such acts of care and kinship? 
• What template or choreography can I/we create for others to use in their practices of care and kinship?
• What might I/we design to mark my/our relationality to a particular place? What sort of marker would be meaningful?
• Tell a story from 50 years in the future about what happened next. A letter of gratitude for what you did. 
• Consider: What do we need to do to get there?

Somerville has been a sanctuary city since 1987. What does sanctuary mean to you? Look or sound like to you? Does it have a memorable taste or smell? Where do you find sanctuary in the city?

Ground your reflections in the place where you are, here and now.

Begin with a potted plant on a windowsill or a container of native milkweed on a deck. A blade of grass growing in the crack of the pavement. A tree trunk caught in a chainlink fence.


Breathe and listen, as you are able. To what? Breathe and look, as you are able. At what? Breathe and touch. Smell. Taste. Feel . . .  what?  What do you notice? What – and who—is calling you into relation? Where do you feel this relationality most in your body?


Begin to breathe into that place. Begin to move from that place. What gesture, what walk, what dance are you doing with that container on your deck or potted plant on your windowsill? With that blade of grass growing in the pavement? Who is leading and who is following? Who or what is choreographing the dance you are dancing?


Open a journal and write your thoughts. Doodle. Record a voice memo. Open your camera app and film your dance.Make a pattern with your toes in the dirt, with your fingers in the mud. 

Then, reflect some more. Sit or walk as you are able. What form does this moment of engagement need to take next? What is needed to make it sharable?

A daily practice (added 14 September 2026):

• Spend the next five minutes noticing one entity in the place you’re occupying (because every thing lives and breathes in some way).
• Then describe that entity with the care you use to trace your lover’s (lovers’) spine(s) and the curve of thigh and buttock.
• Ask questions. Ask them if you’re saying their name correctly. Ask them, Is this how you are called, how you want to be named?
• Revise as necessary until you’ve got it right.
• Be curious. Ask them the story of their life. How they got here and where they will go. How much energy, how much pain has been extracted from them.
• Research as necessary.
• Then whisper to them your anger, your grief, your desire, your thanks. Use your hands and lips.
• What form would you like to give to your experience of these five minutes?A form, a container, doesn’t restrict your expression. A container takes the shape of your anger, your grief, your desire.
• Consider: What is your way of moving through the world? Do you move from your hips or your hands? Your shoulder or your head? What shape do you make when you walk through life?

Check back for additional prompts and practices.