For the love of curiosity

A resource worthy of our investment

Oct 02, 2023

Hi y’all,

I’m greeting you from the other side of an underworld journey that sucked me in through a quicksand vortex on Sunday, September 17th. Today, two weeks later, I finally feel fully returned to myself.

There are some bouts with the flu that drag you through what feels like an entheogenic experience in which you are inhabited by some other being whose consciousness alchemizes with your own to produce an alternate state of reality.

(I’ll pause to say I recognize it is a matter of perception and perspective to relate to illness in this way. I also acknowledge that undergoing any kind of immense bodily reckoning with pain/suffering is an emotional experience for obvious reasons. And yet, as you know from reading this substack, I’m a firm advocate of honoring the inherent intelligence in everything, including viruses.)

This tumble into alternate realms was particularly acute for me this time because I didn’t have the energy to read a book, watch a movie, listen to a podcast… I sent a few sparse texts that were either logistically or emotionally essential. I had so few distractions that I was supremely surrendered to being present with what this virus stirred up in me, and it was immense. Grief swelled from caverns thousands of feet deep within my being, from the most microscopic ancestral imprints in my DNA, from recesses of my mind that felt lightyears away, suddenly all laid out before me. Despair hovered so close, I told my mentor last Thursday that it felt like someone dear to me died. It was harrowing and strange.

The only other time I felt this way was when I contracted COVID, almost exactly one year ago. Though I heard countless innocuous to mildly uncomfortable COVID stories that reminded people of having a cold or spiked a little fever then moved on (of course, amidst devastating stories as well), COVID was an unprecedentedly overwhelming experience for me emotionally. The totality of the pandemic crashed in on me. My heart cracked into pieces. I was transported to a realm of supra-consciousness where I palpably felt a connection with everyone that had ever experienced COVID globally thus far. After years of evasion, my intimate encounter with the most famous entity on planet Earth had arrived – this being that had never been reckoned with in this precise permutation human history, this lifeforce that entered millions of other humans across the globe and radically transformed reality. For me, COVID acted exactly like a psychedelic — dissolving the illusion of separation, transcending the unbearable intoxication of this simulation. Awe and terror, death and rebirth coexisting in ways that initiated my soul through something massive and sacred.

I was so overtaken that numerous ideas erupted around transforming this journey of collective suffering into various artistic expressions that could wrap around the world. I was certain I would emerge with impassioned convictions to all of these creative projects. One idea was to scour through every article written about COVID and select excerpts and stories and stitch them into an epic exploration through word to memorialize this moment beyond a dizzying blur of breaking news. Another was to sew COVID masks from around the world into a quilt reminiscent of the AIDS quilt project. Every idea conjured through me was so vast I immediately discarded them all when I exited my time with COVID. This was not about to become my new identity, now that COVID was done influencing my consciousness.

One thing that did stick with me that feels very present now, on the other side of another reckoning, was a reawakening around the life-affirming force that is curiosity. Curiosity as an antidote to anxiety and fear, as antithetical to numbness and dissociation. Curiosity as one way to open the door to compassion. Curiosity as one of the most brilliant resources available to us as humans. I was traumatizingly terrified of COVID, until it made a home within me and I had no choice but to find a way to be with it. Curiosity arrived unexpectedly, graciously, and left breadcrumbs on a path that kept me diligently following its offerings into soft receptivity, even as ominous temptations lured me from the shadowed sidelines. Curiosity melts the rigid stubbornness of judgment*. Curiosity creates wholeness, whereas judgment exacerbates divisiveness.

There is so much more I want to say about all of this, but one point of this unwieldy intro is to say I’m still very tired so all the pieces writing themselves on this subject are tucked away for now. Instead, I’m going to tumble into sheer curiosity, indulging and playing and dancing lightly here on this page today, even turning it over to you and whatever is calling to come through you, as you’ll see below.

Please know that none of the following is rhetorical!! If you feel moved to share *anything* in the comments, it feels to me like seeing a fresh leaf unfurl or my puppy do something unimaginably cute. I adore hearing from you. You can also just send me a direct email.

Til next time, with prayers for deep, vitalizing health and wellbeing,

Rachel

Questions

How do you experience and perceive time and rhythm in your life?
If you could dream up your own calendar to live by (ie Gregorian, Lunar, Mayan, Hebrew, etc) what would that look like? How would you mark time?
What is sacred to you?
What do you wish people understood about you? In what ways do you feel most misunderstood?
What do you have in abundance to offer?
Who do you talk to that is not physically here?
What future do you seek and dream of? How is it part of your practice?
Where and how and who and why do you grieve?
When was the last time you were humbled, brought to your (metaphorical or literal) knees with reckoning? What did it feel like?
What are you watering?
What brought you to tears most recently?
What do you need to thrive?
What governs your life? What guides it? Are those the same, different?
What does integrity mean to you?
What feels like aliveness to you?
Who was the last more-than-human being you communed with? What did you learn?
What are you longing for that is already here? (This is a prompt to shift your awareness and attention from habituated lack to reawakened recognition. See what happens if you lean in…)
How is your breath right now? Why is that? Is it changing as you notice?
What does it feel like to belong?
Who are you loving up on?
Who is loving up on you?

Even more questions

Circling back to creative projects, it is a dream of mine to create an extraordinary question inventory. Questions that push you to the very edges of where you thought you could go (not in an unsafe way!). Questions that feel electric with their animacy. Questions that tingle your heart. Questions that amplify that insatiable feeling of connectedness to one another. Questions that could change the world.

I know there are lots of question card decks these days and those delight me. This idea isn’t new! And it is simultaneously super new because if we endeavored toward it together, we may reach places in our imaginations that we didn’t know we could reach. We could carry this into our days and approach the world with the pleasure of continuous fascination with the most glorious questions available. We could meet people in our lives with this little spark flickering in the backs of our eyes so when they meet our gaze they see something ineffable and mysterious and enlivening without even knowing what’s happening.

So with that, please consider this your wild and wide invitation to offer your questions into the center of this prayer circle and let’s see where this goes! (Aka, please share in the comments or in an email to me! No expiration date!).

Thank you for bringing your heart here. If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Or help widen the circle, by sharing WCC with someone in your life.

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hi•ne•ni

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