Thread 009: Letters from Two Cities (For Now)
On finding creative rhythm between Toronto's pace and digital landscapes, while Barcelona and Mallorca whisper from across the ocean...
The morning light in Toronto has a particular quality in late spring—it arrives with conviction, streaming through the east-facing windows of my Queen East apartment with a directness that feels quintessentially North American. No gentle Mediterranean suggestion of daybreak, but rather an announcement: the day has begun, and there are worlds to build.
I've come to appreciate this light. The way it bounces off the brick walls across the street, creating copper-toned reflections that dance across my workspace. The way it illuminates the spines of books stacked beside my reading chair—a collection that has grown to include more volumes on community architecture and digital cartography alongside my usual art histories and Spanish novels. These days, my mornings begin with this light, a cortado from the café downstairs (not quite Barcelona's café con leche, but ritual matters more than perfection), and the rhythmic clatter of streetcars passing every seven minutes.
Toronto shapes my creative voice through its pleasant contradictions. There is something beautifully practical about a city that embraces both ambition and introspection, that allows for success without demanding spectacle. Between the industrial-turned-creative spaces of the Junction and the literary history woven through Kensington Market's narrow streets, I find a landscape that rewards both productivity and contemplation—a balance I've always sought in my work.
Last week, I spent an afternoon writing at the Gladstone House library, surrounded by century-old wood paneling and light filtered through stained glass. The space was filled with others deep in their own creative pursuits, the silence punctuated only by the occasional turning of pages or gentle tapping of keyboards. In moments like these, Toronto reveals itself as a city of quiet devotion to craft—whether that craft is writing, code, or communal spaces.
And it's this last element—the architecture of community—that has become my daily work in the digital realm.
If Toronto is my physical city, then Blaze is becoming my digital one, a metropolis I help shape each day through conversations, connections, and carefully considered pathways. I find myself drawing on unexpected inspirations as I build this world—not just community strategy frameworks or engagement metrics, but the principles of ancient city planning, the flow of guests through historic gathering spaces, the architecture of salons and coffeehouses where ideas once flourished.
Where physical cities have neighborhoods, our digital community has themed spaces. Where Toronto has its ravine system, connecting disparate parts of the city through natural corridors, our platform has pathways of discovery that lead members from initial welcome to deeper engagement. I've become something of an urban planner in pixels, considering how to create both grand boulevards for collective celebration and intimate corners for meaningful connection.
The parallels reveal themselves in unexpected ways. When moderating a recent webinar with two hundred attendees, I found myself thinking of Barcelona's public squares—how they manage to feel both expansive and intimate, how they accommodate both the observer and the participant. How do we create that same quality in digital space? How do we honor both the flâneur and the conversationalist?
These questions find their way into my work journal, alongside practical notes on engagement metrics and feature adoption. Because building community has never been merely technical—it's fundamentally about creating spaces where people feel both seen and free, both connected and autonomous. The same qualities that draw me to certain cities are what I strive to cultivate online.
And yet, Barcelona and Mallorca continue to whisper from across the ocean. Not as distractions from present work, but as ongoing conversations that inform and enrich it.
They arrive in small, daily rituals. The Mallorcan olive oil I drizzle over everything. The playlist of Catalan music that accompanies afternoon work sessions. The Spanish novels that have migrated to my nightstand. The correspondence with Rosa, whose tiny ceramic studio in Barcelona's El Born district I discovered last year, and whose philosophical emails about clay and patience arrive like small gifts in my inbox.
There's a concept in psychogeography that suggests places imprint themselves upon us, that our identities are shaped by the landscapes we inhabit. But what happens when we carry multiple geographies within us? When streets we've walked become internal maps we navigate by, even from thousands of miles away?
The writer Rebecca Solnit once described how the nineteenth-century literary salons of Paris created "islands of time" where different modes of being could coexist. I think of this when considering how these cities exist simultaneously in my creative practice—not as competing demands but as complementary influences. Toronto's pragmatic rhythm and Barcelona's artistic soul are not contradictions to resolve but voices in conversation.
This simultaneity finds historical precedent in the medieval trade networks where merchants maintained presence across vast distances through letters, representatives, and carefully maintained relationships. The Venetian trader who had never set foot in Constantinople nonetheless participated in its commercial life through these extended networks of connection. Our digital age simply accelerates this possibility of presence across distance.
I've begun to think of this current chapter not as a detour from the three-cities dream, but as necessary cartography. Before inhabiting multiple physical worlds, I'm learning to build bridges between them—to create systems of presence that don't depend solely on geography.
At Blaze, I'm developing skills in architecting spaces that foster belonging regardless of physical location. In my writing practice, I'm exploring how narrative can collapse distance, bringing disparate experiences into meaningful relationship. Even my daily rituals—the morning pages, the evening Spanish grammar exercises, the weekend explorations of Toronto's hidden corners—are forming patterns that will translate across geographies.
There's a patience to this work that feels essential. Like the Gaudà cathedral that continues its slow emergence over decades, some dreams require foundations before they require walls. The three-cities life isn't waiting to begin in some distant future—it's taking shape now, through the cultivation of creative practice that honors both presence and aspiration, both rootedness and reach.
For now, my world spans two cities—Toronto with its morning light and streetcar rhythms, and the digital landscapes I help cultivate daily. But Barcelona and Mallorca aren't merely waiting; they're participating in this becoming. Their influence shapes the spaces I create here, the communities I nurture, the stories I tell.
And perhaps that's what this journey is teaching me: that our golden threads don't lead in straight lines but in spirals that return to core truths while expanding outward. That the work of building a life between worlds begins with building a self that can inhabit multiplicities without fragmentation.
The writer Italo Calvino once suggested that each city contains within it invisible cities—the ones we remember, the ones we dream of, the ones we fear, the ones we desire. Perhaps my Toronto already contains elements of Barcelona and Mallorca, just as those cities hold spaces that will one day feel like home precisely because I've cultivated their qualities here.
For now, I follow the path illuminated by morning light through Queen West windows, knowing that it connects to the golden Mediterranean glow I'll one day wake to again—not as separate destinations but as points on the same continuing journey.
With golden threads weaving ever onward,
