Listening with Land: On Parks, Patterns & Possibility
This is what happens when we treat the land as a co-author.
“Why do you forget me?”
This was the message a participant received during our opening prompt, when I invited them to listen for a whisper from the park.
They wrote it on a single sticky note—quiet, clear, devastating.
It wasn’t addressed to the park.
It was from the park.
And it held us all.
Yesterday, I facilitated What if the Park Dreamed Back: Futures Thinking in Public Space—an imagination lab hosted as part of the Our Parks × TEN Baltimore Symposium. This convening brought together West Baltimore residents, students, practitioners, and policymakers to explore community-centered approaches to connecting neighborhoods with their green spaces—particularly between Druid Hill Park and Carroll Park.
Participants arrived likely expecting a workshop on parks and preservation. What they received was a regenerative futures lab where the land itself became a co-author.
The Spiral as Invitation
We began not with strategy or maps, but with memory and mystery.
A simple prompt projected on the screen asked:
If the park could whisper one memory to you, what would it be?
This question opened the portal.
The session was grounded in Point A Studio’s Spiral Lab methodology—a nonlinear process for exploring time through the lenses of memory, grief, pattern, and possibility. We moved through three Spiral rings:
Past – Gifts & Grief
Present – Patterns to Release
Future – Conditions for Thriving (2075)
Participants reflected quietly, then moved in pairs and small tables. We played ambient sounds from a park: birdsong, footsteps, dogs, wind through trees. People leaned in. Arms widened. Eyes softened. The room began to spiral.
The experience was scaffolded by six core agreements:
Follow Curiosity – Let wondering guide you; no answer is final.
Be Porous – Allow sounds, sensations, and possibilities to seep in.
Play with Time – Speak from past, present, or future.
Hold Lightly – We’re gathering seeds, not conclusions.
Tend to the Collective – Notice how your voice/silence shapes the whole.
Be in Kinship – Attend to the more-than-human world as part of the circle.
These agreements helped shape not only what was said, but how we said it. The lab became a moment of kinship and co-creation.
What the Park Remembered
Participants named the gifts the park offers:
“The sky through the tree canopy.”
“Stillness. Wonder.”
“Rhythm. A place to breathe.”
They also voiced the grief the park carries:
“Why do you forget me?”
“Lack of safety and care at night.”
“Where are the Spanish-language signs?”
We invited the release of patterns that no longer serve:
“The belief that we need permission to care.”
“Erasing Black and Indigenous histories.”
“Not honoring the joy and struggle of marginalized people.”
From that release, participants dreamed conditions for thriving in 2075:
“The park should feel like your favorite aunt’s house.”
“Shared ownership and interfaith partnerships for clean water.”
“More trees. More dreaming.”
Each sticky note became a seed. A signal. A speculative memory.
Dialing the Future
Before we closed, I invited participants to step into the year 2075. With eyes closed, they imagined walking through the park. Then, we opened the Time Travel Line—a phone number where they could leave a voicemail from the future.
Hello.
You’ve reached the Futures Line, this line has pulled you through a portal to 2075, placing you in a thriving park. Describe what you see, hear, and feel. What’s present now that once felt impossible? After you leave your message, it will travel back to 2025 to inspire those working toward this future.
Laughter. Awe. Excitement.
Every table lit up with movement as participants picked up their phones and began calling in visions of a thriving future. One even began, “I am that future. I am what changed.”
What Shifted
We opened the lab with one word from each participant: curious, open, intrigued, not knowing.
We closed the lab with another: full, aligned, satiated, proud, grounded, held.
The lab was only one-hour but something deep took root.
Participants remembered their childhoods in parks. They wondered what birds might be singing to them. They noticed how dogs looked at them with wide, knowing eyes. The park was no longer a site. It was a speaker, a mirror, a guide.
Tending the Seeds
In a civic landscape often dominated by consultation and compliance, this lab offered something different: reciprocity.
It asked:
What if land is not inert, but alive?
What if parks aren’t amenities, but relationships?
What if memory, grief, and imagination belong in our design processes?
This is the heart of the Spiral Lab method—and it’s one I’m working to share more widely.
A toolkit is coming soon for facilitators, artists, designers, planners, and community leaders who want to bring this methodology into their own spaces. It will include the structure, prompts, templates, audio, and story-based guidance needed to hold a Spiral Lab with care and intention.
If you’re curious, stay close.
If the land is whispering to you, listen.
Let us know what it said!