Curiosity as a root to the way we move through the world

An underpinning to the day-to-day, to observation, to work, to knowledge, to magic; and to the act of asking questions and disrupting the status quo

Dec 14, 2022

Image is a photo of a light bulb with bright filaments lit up in the dark. — Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

What is curiosity, what do we mean when we talk about the state of being curious?

The root of the word curiosity is cura, a verb that denotes care, concern, and trouble. So it stands to reason that in order to be curious about anything, we have to care about it. When we’re interested, we take the time to determine what we already know, and what we have yet to learn. We express an interest mostly through a sense of concern; we don’t take it for granted. So in this sense, to care about something means to trouble it, trouble ourselves; to inquire.

Inquiry—to ask a question—is the cornerstone of our search for knowledge. But what makes a good question? One that gets beneath the skin and between the ribs to pry open that which encloses the hidden realm; one that leads to the questions that unsettle, disrupt, and deconstruct? To find the questions that do this, I think we need to be lit up with a dynamic curiosity; curiosity that is insatiable. I know some would say a tendency towards inquiry is pathological, but I don’t believe this. To me, curiosity is essential. The desire, the drive, is to always be searching—not necessarily for the terminus of an answer, but for the sake of hot pursuit. Over the years, I’ve advised young and emerging artists to find that sense of pursuit, because it’s not enough to just be passively interested. We have to have a desire to dig further beneath the surface. How do we find satisfaction without satiation? To be curious is to be restless.

I believe when we’re restless, we’re more actively engaged in our environments, which also means we’re more closely observing them. Over the course of the last few topics, we’ve seen the way various frameworks impact us and show up in our lives, and that who we are is composed of the way our life experiences and the world around us has shaped us. Curiosity is one such framework. We must have curiosity in order to look closer at anything. Observing any and all of these ways of thinking, being, living, and observing ourselves throughout should lead us to ask questions—especially of the things that didn’t make sense once held up against what we may now feel, think, or see. Over time we change, our values change, and the way we move through the world changes. But also, the world changes around us, sometimes in subtle ways that catch us by surprise in really adverse ways with negative impacts. This is especially relevant in the context of politics, culture, and society as well as all systems which affect us and our communities. Because curiosity is inherently disruptive it’s dangerous to the status quo, as it ultimately reveals the discrepancies of its systems. Once these discrepancies are identified and known, the systems are questioned, potentially upending the power they hold over those most adversely impacted by them. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.

But how is knowledge gained? The desire to learn and build on the knowledge we have begins with curiosity itself. We can even look to the methods humans have used to create knowledge and systems throughout the world, across millennia. We tend to begin building our knowledge through observation which then allows us to think about what we’ve looked at and noticed, to examine it in detail and analyze it further, perhaps even put it to the test, and after some evaluations make some classifications. Beyond that, we add context—situational, social, cultural, spiritual—to understand them better. All of this is essentially information that we’ll then use to apply it to our lives in some meaningful way. This could be called science. It could just be the way humans have moved through the world since our very beginnings. Observation is a tool that we use to continually glean information that we add to what we already know, to revise our knowledge and update it to its context and location, today.

What is a question?

What is an answer?

As we enjoy the tilt and turn of solsticetime, I'm thinking about the occurrence of the solstice as a site of curiosity for our ancestors. Observing the movement of the sun across the sky, and in some latitudes the way it seemed to pause in place before turning and heading back the other way, our forebears were likely to have been very curious about this strange behavior of the sun and its relationship to the land and turn of the seasons. Folklore from around the world reflects the wisdom of this time of year that we gained from engaging our curiosity. We observed the behavior of the land, skies, stars, and waters, as well as plant and animal life. These observations also led to many practical actions to our own cyclical patterns of behavior that we still employ today, including spiritual protocols or even the use of magic on winter’s longest night. So I think it’s relevant to talk about the appearance, and the utility, of curiosity in the context of questions and answers in spirituality and magic.

I feel the need to talk about what I mean when I talk about “magic”. I regard magic as a spiritual technology and tool used throughout time, across all cultures of the world, by all peoples, regardless of whether or not they see themselves as a practitioner. I think of this as something outside of, but certainly related to, the context of witchcraft. But folk magic and magical technologies exist all over the world by people of all religions, even Christianity. To that end I also want to point out that in the same way the word “witch” is contentious and not universally appropriate or accepted by all people, the word “magic” is also not universally appropriate or accepted across all spiritual traditions throughout the world. Most cultures have their own language and ways of referring to spiritual technologies and tools appropriate to their cultures, traditions, and place. But in contemporary secular Western society, magic is often framed (by materialists and atheists) as “wishful” or “magical thinking”, through which a person believes they can “wish” something into existence (you know, like “manifesting” in New Age circles). Of course it doesn’t work that way nor should it—there is no magical technology in use by any experienced practitioner who says this is possible. You can’t create something from nothing. The use of magical technologies takes a lot of actual work, both in the process of cultivating spiritual skills to support the practice; but also in taking concrete actionable steps in the everyday material world towards whatever’s needed.

So I’d like to frame magic in this conversation the way I see it, as something rooted in the observation of the surrounding world, that is useful when used to effect change in ourselves and our lives. The use of magic acknowledges what is unseen but still felt, to harness that in ways that impact us to our benefit. The word “energies” can pull up some problems as a catchall term but we will use it for now to say that magic is an opportunistic technique that captures the momentum of an energy or energetic event, and the skilled practitioner knows how and when to do this in ways that maximize its effect. I know a lot of folks will balk at my use of the word “technologies” but my use of the term comes from observing how technology is more than what is digital or electronic or mechanized—those who are not human implement several different inherent and devised technologies to their benefit. Like them, humans do precisely the same.

To bring this around to the topic of curiosity and why it’s relevant in this context, curiosity is critically important to our spiritual practices, and the practice of magic. The very nature of magic is a step forward through what we hope to know or do, from what we don’t know or haven’t been able to do. Curiosity is a between-place that situates us in our humanity as being both knowledgeable and also still on the path to learning; of both knowing and not knowing; of existing in and as a question. The existence of life and living is itself a question (see also, queerness; and past references to the inherent nature of magic and witchcraft as queer). To be curious is to be present with ourselves, people, spirits, places, things, ideas, states, or circumstances we want to know more about. A question is a method of disruption—it destabilizes assumptions, presumptions, constructions, conditions, systems, and states. But it also opens up a path into the previously unseen—hidden possibilities, declarations, information, wisdom, natures, histories, and futures.

One clear example of this opening is the practice of divination, which usually begins with a query. We divine, because we want to know. The word “divination” is rooted in the Latin, divinare, "to foresee, to be inspired by a god". In its most basic definition, divination is the art of interpretation. More specifically, the interpretation of information through observing patterns, signs, and symbols to understand the events, circumstances, or relationships in one’s life. In the contemporary Western imagination, divination is associated with mysticism and the occult, but it is actually one of our oldest methods of understanding and interacting with the seen and unseen world around us. It has always required an ability to observe, analyze, test, evaluate, classify, and document information. Though scientists would likely dispute an association of magic with (Eurocolonial-based methods of) science because these systems are unquantifiable (that is to say, immeasurable and untestable), I disagree and consider them to be directly related. Additionally these methods are often rooted in traditional knowledge systems which derive their information from the land and each of these have their own set of systems for observation. We figured this out early, to turn to the natural world for answers—dreams, stars, planets, clouds, fire, smoke, stones, water, animal behavior and animal parts, just to name a few—in order to learn not just who we are and where we come from, but what our lives mean in the greater context of it all. We long to know our place and our purpose in the world. We also want to know how to move through it, and survive. Whatever the practice or tradition, divination does require, to a certain extent, a knowledge of the inherent meaning of relevant symbolism; and skills in observation and intuition. This includes a deep understanding of how to ask a question.

There is a sort of trickery in asking questions, because there is a sort of trickery in the way they can be answered—or not—depending on how the information is derived. Querents in divination, and divinatory practitioners, must be vigilant in specificity to acquire the necessary answers that help them move forward with the next steps they must take. Passive, mild, or uncertain interest leads only to the broadest of questions which yields the vaguest of replies and solutions. A sharp sense of the spaces between what one knows, and an awareness of what one doesn’t, requires not just insight but I would say, absolute curiosity. What action needs to be taken, what solution is necessary and what outcomes are desired? How can we get the most information out of the questions we ask? Often it takes more than one, and that in itself is an exercise in avoiding redundancies. Questions are hard. They are absolutely difficult, if not seemingly impossible to form sometimes. So the curiosity that drives them leads us to find multiple frameworks through which we form our inquiry. And that is an exercise in art, philosophy, spirituality, and magic worth cultivating.

So, I suppose what I am talking about over the course of this exploration on curiosity is an innate insatiability, a hunger that leads to motivate our understanding, our knowledge, our will, our connections, and our movement through the world. I truly believe that this is the root of all our endeavors—no wisdom or any creative thing ever came about without the presence of curiosity, even sciences which we perceive as being devoid of life and passion. What would happen if…? and Where does x come from? or Why/how does/do we/they/this/that/the world/the universe …? But in particular any activism, art, philosophy, religion, and/or spiritual practice must inherently come from a place of questioning. To be curious is to be present with the person, place, thing, idea, state, or circumstance we want to know more about. To question is a way to disrupt—assumptions, uncertainties, presumptions, dogmas, systems, and the status quo.

To me this indicates that curiosity is an important and critical function for all of us moving forward. For our ancestors, curiosity was critical to survival. Maybe in some ways, it is for us, too. We know curiosity is a function that motivates us to acquire knowledge, and even to know something we’re already familiar with, better. What is "better" or "enough" could become reductive in contemporary society and digital platforms that contain information. Thinking the first three hits Google scrapes up are satisfactory, or the leading authority, is an obvious example of a problem we face. These spots are untrustworthy because they can be purchased, or they’re algorithmically driven by your internet habits and patterns; or manipulated by SEO to bump them up to the top of the queue. Since this essay was first written and published in 2022, AI summaries have begun to dominate the prime real estate at the top of search engine results, which can trick unobservant users. So those hits don’t necessarily equate an answer to a question, let alone the correct one. So to unsettle the reductive nature of received information, which is really speaking to supposed efficiency in a capitalist system, we must identify and expand what we need to know, how we research, and actively vet what we find. A one word or first page answer isn’t always enough. Our pursuits of information must be—and result in—something more thorough, holistic, and complete. To satiate curiosity then is to find resolution with something or someone more deeply—even intimately. To know more about people, places, and things than their name or their function or their location; but also the why and how of their name and their function; who and what they are. These are contexts and relations. This is something beyond mere knowledge. This is about tethering, tying-in, connecting to; not just to points of relevance or interest but the context that information has in our lives every day. Including what we choose to do with it, how we share it, and how it grows with us in meaningful ways.

What does that look like in daily life? That’s something that you will have to explore but hopefully, it’ll be something you can make into a sort of game of chase that's interesting and exciting for you. For me, it may or may not look fun to anyone else but I end up losing a lot of time falling down rabbit holes about things that have either critical relevance or no relevance at all to my day-to-day life. An example is this last night’s rabbit hole: the structure of architectural foundation footings. Useful in that I have a much better understanding of how my house is secured in a clay, earthquake-prone, drenched-earth landscape. Not useful in that my research time really should be more focused and dedicated towards my work or my community. The ways that I channel my curiosity though, are more apt in my work and my life, in that I don’t read one article about an issue, I do a search to find other points of view on said issue. I’m constantly digging into the search engine, my home away from home. I have five different news apps on my phone—I don’t think that’s very many, but it’s helpful and one of them, AllSides, actually leads to many more. I seek out news from sources other than mainstream media platforms, including first-hand reports from people on the ground. If I’m curious about someone whose work I’ve just become acquainted with, I go beyond social media and dive deep into the internet to learn more about them and what they do because I’m curious about where they’ve been and where they’re going, and what their work looks like. I have questions about the weather, cloud formations, celestial events, geology, geography, political history, and cultural histories. I want to know more about these plants or those new birds in the yard or the restoration work being done in urban forests in my neighborhood or the history of that food’s path across the continents or the overlap of this folklore in Europe with that folklore on Turtle Island … and it goes on, and on, and on. The questions never stop. My work is to whittle things down to spend time on the questions that need to be answered, most, if at all. Maybe for me it’s as simple as asking which questions will support my work, and which of my strengths are best suited to the questions at hand?

I’ll come back to this essay—at least the latter third of it, having punched more than a few holes in it because this is an extremely rough take—but given the point of this is in part to reveal some of my own works-in-/thoughts-in-progress, it seems worthwhile to share right now! And I would *love* to hear how curiosity shows up for you in your life, so let's talk about it in the Discord!

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