🌒 Monday Meditation: The Art of Curiosity as Contemplation
Arriving on Tuesday, with apologies
🌒 Monday Meditation: The Art of Curiosity as Contemplation
Dear Becoming Ones:
Last night, as I drifted toward sleep, my Hatch meditation offered a reflection on curiosity. The sound bath hummed softly beneath the voice, like water moving over stones, and somewhere between waking and dreaming, I felt myself loosening. Opening. Becoming porous again.
I have been sitting with that word ever since: curiosity.
Not curiosity as consumption.
Not curiosity as surveillance.
Not curiosity as mastery.
But curiosity as contemplation.
✨
🌿 Curiosity as a Sacred Slowing
I am becoming a more curious person. Sometimes that curiosity has gotten me into trouble. Sometimes it has carried me into breathtaking encounters I could not have planned for if I tried.
Curiosity has led me onto trains across the country.
Into conversations with strangers.
Into kitchens and libraries and living rooms.
Into silence.
Into grief.
Into joy.
Sometimes my curiosity gets ahead of me. I rush toward answers instead of savoring the questions. I move too quickly toward meaning instead of lingering long enough to behold what is emerging.
And perhaps contemplation is precisely this:
learning how to stay with the question long enough for it to soften us.
🕯️
🍵 Turning Toward One Another
As many of you know, I have spent this past year eating with strangers as a practice of turning toward one another.
What I am learning is that social trust has eroded deeply. Even when trust is present, even just a little, there is still hesitation. Trepidation lives in the body now, and in our social body more broadly.
People want connection.
And they are afraid of it.
I understand this intimately.
People want to trust and cannot trust. It’s been devastating to watch and hear.
We have inherited a world that teaches us suspicion before tenderness. Extraction before relationship. Speed before presence.
And yet, every shared meal reminds me that curiosity can become a bridge.
“What is your story?”
“What brought you here?”
“What keeps you going?”
Simple questions.
Holy questions.
Questions that crack open the hardened places inside us.
🥄
🌎 Curious About Another Possible World
Perhaps Sartre was right: humanity is damned to be free.
And in that terrifying freedom, perhaps we might become curious about what is still possible.
Not certain.
Not guaranteed.
But possible.
Curiosity invites us beyond the already-known world. It reminds us that imagination is still alive beneath the rubble of empire, beneath despair, beneath exhaustion.
When we contemplate from a place of curiosity, we begin to change psychically, emotionally, spiritually. The nervous system softens. The imagination stretches. The soul becomes more spacious.
And maybe another possible world does not arrive all at once.
Maybe it arrives the way sound baths do.
Softly.
Slowly.
Through vibration.
Through resonance.
Through our willingness to listen differently.
🌊
🌱 A Practice for This Week
This week, I invite you to slow down enough to notice your curiosities.
What are you drawn toward lately?
What questions keep tugging at your spirit?
What conversations linger in your body after they end?
Do not rush to answer them.
Sit beside them awhile.
Drink tea with them.
Walk with them.
Let curiosity become contemplation.
Because sometimes the question itself is already opening the door toward becoming.
✨
May we remain curious enough to imagine otherwise.
May we remain tender enough to turn toward one another.
May we remain contemplative enough to notice what is emerging.
Paz y ternura,
-RCE+