🌿 Monday Meditation
The Wisdom of Wonder
“The willingness to be haunted by something that is not yet.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
— James Baldwin
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
— Rumi
Photo courtesy of Birch & Raven Farm, rural New Hampshire
✨ The Meditation
Certainty kills curiosity.
We’ve been taught to seek the safety of knowing, to grip the world tightly enough that it cannot surprise us. But certainty is a cage disguised as clarity. It promises protection while suffocating imagination.
Curiosity, on the other hand, is a form of surrender. It’s the willingness to breathe into the unknown and let the mystery move through us. It’s the capacity to stay soft where the world wants us hardened.
Philosophy begins in wonder, Plato said. But wonder is not an abstraction — it’s a practice of the body. It’s what happens when your shoulders drop, when your breath slows, when your gaze widens enough to take in the shimmering edges of reality. Wonder widens the aperture of the soul.
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa teaches that la facultad — this intuitive, borderland awareness — is how we sense what others overlook. To wonder is to be in touch with this deeper seeing, this capacity to feel the sacred in what appears ordinary.
Wonder is not naiveté; it’s radical humility. It refuses to collapse complexity into certainty. It reminds us that there is always more to learn, to love, to listen for.
In a world addicted to outrage and answers, wonder becomes resistance.
When we nurture the wisdom of wonder, we begin to move differently through the world. We speak slower. We listen longer. We approach one another with the curiosity of kinship rather than the certainty of correctness. We remember that not knowing is not a failure — it’s an invitation to intimacy with mystery itself.
So today, as you step into whatever the day brings, perhaps whisper this to yourself:
I do not need to know everything to belong here.
I only need to be present enough to wonder.
🌬️ Ritual Exhale
Place a hand over your heart.
Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.
On the inhale: I am open.
On the exhale: I am curious.
Do this three times.
Feel how curiosity makes space where certainty collapses it.
🌾 Field Note on Practicing Curiosity
Notice your contractions.
When you feel defensive, anxious, or certain you’re right — pause. That’s your cue to breathe. Curiosity begins in the exhale.
Ask one more question.
When conversation feels tense or polarized, ask one more question instead of making one more point. Curiosity keeps the circle open.
Practice sacred unknowing.
Take a daily walk without headphones. Let the world speak to you through sound, texture, and smell. Listen as if you were being taught a new language by the wind.
🌙 Reflection Questions
Where in your life have you confused certainty with safety?
What would it mean to trust the unknown as part of your becoming?
How might wonder become a daily spiritual practice of repair?
May we remember
that wisdom is not found in the answers we clutch,
but in the awe that lives between questions.
—
With care and curiosity,
RCE+
Our Collective Becoming