I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown.

The busier a city, the greater my gratitude, so I have a love affair with the city of Montreal.

While living in Vermont, I would visit twice a year, often more.

The bus who up Montreal countered the loneliness born from seemingly endless bleak winter days.

The nearby presence of massive numbers of human beings just over the Canadian border

was a kind of antidote.

It was an easy fix, a way to manage that malaise and isolation which descend after so many

dark days in rural New England.

A recovery introvert, I have come to relish the close proximity of human bodies, of seeing

so many people at once and bumping alongside them in Montreal's famed underground city.

I love standing beside people while staring into a painting at Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts

or plotting next to people at a modern dance performance.

Old Montreal's cobblestone streets and baroque architecture connected me to bodies no longer present,

but whose history and spirits I felt.

This is how cities hold us, even through their facade of decay or luxuriant glass futurism.

I love the beauty of natural spaces and will never jettison the sense of sacred communion there,

but cities serve as staging grounds for my feelings of agape, the benevolence I feel from and extend

to fellow human beings. Today's poem is taken from a book set in my other favorite Canadian city,

Toronto. It makes a case for the nuanced ways cities conform us into unsuspecting communities,

for which compassion and love flow through, often at great speed.

From Thirsty by Dion Brand,

1. This city is beauty, unbreakable and amorous as eyelids in the streets pressed with fierce

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