FilmOnDeepWater

St Helena, CA
8 May 2006

Why is it that I am continually surprised when the unexpected shows up in my life? It is a curious thing because most of what does show up in life is unexpected. More and more I am coming to believe that the only reason I do not move about through each moment completely astonished is that most of the time I am just not paying attention.

This is another inkling of an understanding of John Tarrant’s assertion that not knowing can be a terrific place to rest. I find that at times I actually can rest in this not knowing, in this astonishment. As I look back to a moment ago, or thirty years ago, it feels as if I am trying to know or experience a beetle caught in the sap that is now amber with age. I cannot know the beetle; I can only know the scarab. But I can still be curious about the beetle, about its past and present. It is just that I cannot know the beetle that was on that tree a moment before the sap engulfed it.

Curiosity can be an itch to be scratched, or a well to be dug. If I merely scratch an itch to alleviate some momentary discomfort with not knowing this, or not knowing that, then I am inviting the itch to return. If, however, I am digging a well with my curiosity, then I truly am in a state of not knowing. I may or may not find water down there. I may, or may not have the persistence, the stamina, or the passion to keep digging. I may, or may not, stay awake to the true joy that can be in each shovel full of dirt I lift from the ground, and not necessarily the spring that may, or may not, be beneath me.

Curiosity comes from the Latin, curiosis. Besides meaning “inquisitive”; it also means careful. Its deeper root is cura, meaning “care or solicitude”.

Becoming aware that care and being full of care is at the bottom of the curiosity well reinforces the restfulness of not knowing. Being curious, caring, sitting with the question, sitting with the experience of not knowing can have a settling quality to it that I had not noticed until now. Being deeply curious isn’t about “getting at” something, or even “getting” someone. This deeper kind of caring curiosity is astonishingly different.

If I were to use “care” instead of “want”, when I am truly curious, what might shift? I want to know becomes I care to know.

Holding curiosity this way creates new possibilities for inquisitiveness. The possibility of really knowing opens up new doors because it is hinged with care and compassion, rather than a wanting or a needing to know something. When I dig my wells with care, then I am inviting the wellspring to find me. I am creating space for the not known to become known, if it so chooses.

Being curious is one way to astonishment.

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St Helena, CA
6 May 2006

For some unfathomable reason, I am sitting with a sense of reluctance right now. Since the only way out is the way in, I have the urge to know this word more intimately. Reluctant comes to us from the Latin pretty much unchanged. As if it were reluctant to make the migration. It means to “struggle against”. The root, luctari, means “to struggle”.

In the past I held reluctant as a state of being – as in “I am reluctant to…” But its roots inform me otherwise. In a strange way, it might be more honest of me to say, “I reluct going deeper into my story in this moment.” Holding it this way I can feel its power. There is a doing here, rather than being in some rigid state of resistance, or posture of indifference.

Where else do I reluct? Do I reluct my commitments? My spirituality? My isolation? No wonder I am tired. So much struggling against without noticing.

If in the moment of my “reluctance”, I were able to reframe the experience, and ask myself a different question, what might then occur? Instead of asking: Why am I reluctant? I might ask: What am I struggling against?

Another word comes to mind for this kind of struggle – contend. How often do I contend with one thing or another? As it happens, contend comes from contendere meaning “to stretch”. Perhaps that is where the word tendon comes from.

So, the struggle itself, the contending, can also be an opportunity to stretch, and in time perhaps to become more resilient. Reluctance, then, need not be passive, and it need not be cowardly. It may well be that my reluctants – be they about commitment, or spirituality, or isolation, or whatever – may actually be stretching and strengthening me for what is to come. And I notice that, holding the word this way, frees me to move, to be less reluctant in the ordinary sense of the word.

I am more aware than ever of how much struggle composes my life. What would my life be like if I were now and then to let go of the struggling against ? What if I were to shift from reluctance to acceptance from time to time? What if?

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