Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity series. In the next month, we’ll be exploring the generative— and essential— power of staying connected to all parts of ourselves. Even in the dark of winter.
Wishing you a fulfilling and nurturing new year!
Since the beginning of Sense Writing, I’ve often used botany and gardening metaphors. For me, they accurately convey both the simplicity and complexity of the creative process.
When I created the 12-week Sense Writing course, I organized it around four parts: the Ground, Shoots + Roots, The Tree, and The Ecosystem—a framework or terrain— an ecology— that can support people’s growing writing practice.
But even when we talk about ecology— about the idea of wholeness, of complementary processes and parts— many of us tend to overlook the darker or more difficult parts, both within ourselves and outside of us.
Forgetting that the darker parts of an ecosystem, winter and nighttime, decay and the layers of earth, are an equal foundation of everything that grows out of them.
Instead, we want to skip to the end.
In our creative lives, we want to be in the whole picture, the big story, enjoying the fruits of completion, not feeling around in the dark. We picture ourselves frolicking in meadows, in entire worlds that we’ve imagined and created. Not lying down on dried leaves on the forest floor.
But when we get curious— even in the dark— we discover an entire supportive creative ecosystem awaiting us.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
When we talk about darkness, it’s easy to fall into the habitual interpretation of the word as something grim, bad, opaque.
But when I talk about the dark parts of the creative landscape, I mean something less defined: the unknown, the periphery, the invisible. Not the opposite of light or good, but what’s hidden, less obvious.
From a cursory glance, it seems like nothing, but get closer and meet the creatures of soil, the piles of silt, the endless decay. Darkness as in layers of earth, darkness inside the bark of a tree full of microbes and fungi.
The darkness of wading in the expanse of a calm sea under the night sky.
In darkness is where the richness of the unknown lives— not just our fear of it. What we’re yearning for as writers often lives there too, not in the obvious surface of things but in the understories we might hesitate to venture into.
The question is: how do we connect to that unknown instead of avoiding it?
How do we enrich and embolden our curiosity when the world can feel so uncertain?
To see what lives in the unknown, we must know how to listen— and grow capacity for what we find.
Invisible Worlds Emerge
As we expand our skills of awareness, we see more. An invisible world emerges bit by bit, full of seeds sprouting, roots entwining, insects molting. More profoundly, our sense of ourselves grows more dimensional. We feel ourselves to be part of what we perceive, able to hold it and even describe it.
As writers, we discover access to worlds we never could have imagined.
In this series of blogs, we’ll delve into curiosity that doesn’t just exist during daylight.
And in a few weeks, you’ll receive a Sense Writing gift sequence that will explore our capacity to be with the dark and unknown, to expand the edges of our curiosity on a foundational level and discover the ecosystem it’s part of.
And the best part is that, just like lying in the grass listening to unfamiliar birds or walking through the mud after the sun has set, there’s nothing you need to fix or try to remedy. Everything you need is already here.
