Reverent Curiosity
How are you keeping your reverent curiosity alive in these grief-soaked times?
Reverent curiosity. If there was a belief I hold central to the way I live my life, it resides here in this practice of reverent curiosity. After years of growing up inside classrooms where the boxes and straight lines nearly choked the life out of my love for learning, thankfully, I found a way to keep this innate curiosity alive against all odds. Thank goodness there were people I found in unlikely places who helped me tend this little ember of curiosity in the flat and repetitive landscape of American public schools. There was Mrs. Brown, who awakened my love for the interdependence of life as they showed up in wetland ecology...there was Mr. Elms, who opened up doorways to visionary futures in the sci-fi paperback fiction novels he had us read....there were countless times I hiked up into mountains to sit beside rivers to listen to what they had to say.
Now as I find myself a mother of teenagers during a time of great uncertainty, I must continue to try and model a practice of moving towards life and possibility of new worlds emerging, for what we practice at the small scale set the pattern for the whole. So today I made myself small and quiet, crawling inside the tangle of blooming manzanita. Finding the headwaters of my breath again and tuning my senses to notice the tiny million miracles of expressions of life all around me.
There are countless ways she sings her song: tracks in the dry red clay dust, tiny little nascent bell-shaped blossoms, the sensuous way the nectar sweet aroma floats in the air at dusk, fine little scrolls of bark on each limb-like stem, the cool exhale of plant stomata breathing, and hummingbirds making funny little clicking noises as they buzz from flower to flower.
Allowing myself to move at the pace that soothes and resets my nervous system, remembering I live inside this Earth and not simply on it. This is my practice today, this reverent curiosity. May it continue to awaken dormant memories, and may it enliven my tongue to sing countless praise songs to this most exquisite Earth family that is always right here, all around us.
I sing a whisper of a song to give courage to all the future revolutions and epiphanies that will sprout from moments like these.
Reverent curiosity is a superpower.
My radical response to my multilayered grief has been to lean in with all my senses to the reverent curiosity of my aliveness.
I am alive. That is a miracle.
Today, I leaned into the medicine of this ephemeral moment underneath the brushy flowering manzanita in an act of cleansing my senses: my eyes, my ears, my nose and lungs, my touch, and my intuition. My capacity to love this wild and magnificent world grows despite the million ways it simultaneously breaks my heart.
That is a radical act.
How are you keeping your reverent curiosity alive in these grief-soaked times?
I am collaborating with Writing the Wild to offer a two part class on writing into our Reverent Curiosity. We are offering this in April, with more opportunities to come in the future!
Ahhhhhh.... Just reading this helps me to appreciate and revive my own reverent curiosity. Thank you, Rowen. The other way I kept that sense of wonder alive was a drive up to the Pajarito Plateau this afternoon, the Tewa homelands, San Ildefonso Pueblo. From the high ridge there, the view down to the Rio Grande is spectacular. The ravens play in the canyon wind. The warmth of spring is unseating the cold grip of winter. I am grateful.