Starry Night (courtesy of Unsplash)
Coupling curiosity and gratitude offers an antidote the fear, angst, and confusion of our world. The energy of the two together leaves little room for such distractions. Indeed, it paves the way for love.
I woke early this morn with a grateful heart. Feeling a deep sense of gratitude in my whole being. Blissful peace. While I’ve long practiced breathing gratitude in and out, the deeper sense I experienced this day is one I want to cultivate further, to live in and with as I walk this earth.
I step outside long before dawn to be with the dark sky, the stars, the planets, galaxies beyond our own. Mars high in the sky directly overhead. The little dipper nearby. Awestruck by the peace and beauty. The quiet. Stillness. Gratitude more deeply anchored.
Gently a nudge from Muse stirs something inside. I think of curiosity, like gratitude, a ‘friendship’ that I’ve cultivated over the years.
Being reminded of the important role each play in my life, it occurs to me in a blinding flash of the obvious, that together the two make a powerful pair. Thanks to Muse, I am from time to time an ‘oracle of the obvious’.
I sense that coupling curiosity and gratitude offers an antidote to the fear, angst, and confusion in our world – individually and collectively. The energy of the two together leaves little room for such distractions. Indeed, it paves the way for love.
For a moment I wonder ‘what becomes possible in my world when I walk in both gratitude and curiosity rather than with one or the other’? In the next I recognize that I experienced just that yesterday while I was on the ground gathering pine nuts under a pinyon tree near the house.
While being deeply grateful for the abundance, I was likewise aware that I wasn’t in sync with the rhythm of the trees, particularly when the nuts would fall. I’d been placing sheets in areas where I thought nuts were ready to drop. Thinking that a particular tree was ‘done’, I’d moved the sheets to another tree a couple days before.
To my surprise the tree that I thought was complete had a dropped an abundance of nuts during the night.
“That’s what you get for thinking,” Muse chimes in with a chuckle. “Listen to the trees!”
As I sat beneath the tree, I expressed my gratitude. And I asked for guidance. How might I listen and hear your rhythm? As if in response I wondered about the indigenous peoples whose land I occupy. How did they harvest, prepare, use this bounty? How did they relate to this tree? To these woods? How might I cultivate their reverence and care for Mother Earth more deeply in me?
Gratitude it seemed had paved a path to curiosity. The sense of feeling both was palpable and reminded me of a community meeting that I attended recently where neither gratitude nor curiosity seemed to be present. Rather than being curious about what isn’t yet known, many people were demanding answers. There was little, if any, gratitude for the work that had gone into organizing and preparing for the meeting. It was a bit chaotic to the point that I too became a tad annoyed. Yet I remained grateful for the team’s efforts. I wondered ‘where has curiosity gone?’. How can we become more curious about possibilities rather than leaping to opposition grounded in fear?
Beyond my community and its challenges, I wonder the same for our world. How might we evoke gratitude and curiosity into our public conversations? For surely this dynamic duo in partnership with one another are powerful antidotes to the fear and anger so present in our culture today.
Will you join me in sprinkling more seeds of gratitude and curiosity in your conversations and your observations of our world? Of your world? Let’s pave this world with love!
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