The Alchemy of Curiosity
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“It is curious, and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.”
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
A curious slight tightness in my chest has recently vanished. Perhaps that’s a key element of the magic of curiosity – it can make things disappear, like rabbits in a hat. I have been trying to follow this rather unnerving, disturbing, and a little irritating sensation of a White Rabbit for over a year – tumbling down all sorts of curious holes in my underground Wonderland – bumping into a whole host of great questions, characters, riddles, stories, symbols, and memories, in the gardens, games, and guests of some often maddening tea parties. (I’ve done a lot of humming too! - and of course, I am not advocating avoiding seeking proper medical advice in this post – I have recently completed my free NHS M.O.T this year, and get my moles checked and mapped in Essex.)
‘Curiouser and curiouser’, cried my inner Alice.
I must have had some sort of psychological cat trapped in my labyrinthine underworld, because curiosity killed something - or rather, dissolved it, mixed it up, and stirred it rather vigorously within the alchemy pot I sometimes call life. Who knows what really happened - it’s a curious business all this – it might have been the humming! I do a lot of humming these days.
Either way, I think a part of curiosity's power exists in its playful posturing. Curiosity positions us in an imaginative state of attuned awareness. It’s a balanced point-of-view somewhere between attachment and non-attachment. It’s an inquisitive kind of care that doesn’t care too much. Curiosity simultaneously takes everything very seriously, and not very seriously at all.
‘Curiouser and curiouser’, indeed.
I also believe that curiosity is a courageously compassionate form of natural medicine. When we dare to welcome the dark matters of our anxiety, anger, shame, regret, fear, folly, and melancholy, into the contemplative consciousness of curiosity, instead of shooing them away with deflections, demonisations, defences, definitions, and denials, our curiosity can kindly (albeit slowly) transmute such poisonous leads into precious pockets of golden breath: insight, beauty, growth, and surrender. Within the alchemy pot of curiosity, there is nothing to fear, only things to collect, cultivate, and communicate.
In my experience, curiosity is a strangely eccentric catalyst for change. Its very nature moves us into new ways of seeing, feeling, and being. Curiosities are questions, after all, and our questions coordinate the directions of our quests. Perhaps our lives reflect the questions we dared to ask, and the questions we were too scared to follow! Perhaps.
Maybe it is curiosity that can turn our concrete pavements, car parks, and patios, into yellow brick roads of holy pilgrimage: what am I really looking for in this place, project, plan, or person? Permission, love, acceptance, validation, power, freedom, absolution… will I find it here, there, or anywhere?
Curiously, when we embark on such playful odysseys, we are often pleasantly surprised, like a child who witnesses the white rabbit vanish from the magician’s top hat. Perhaps Christ was onto something:
“What I'm about to tell you is true. You need to change and become like little children. If you don't, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” - The Gospel of Matthew 18: 3
(‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ - The Gospel of Luke 17: 21)
It seems that the element of surprise is a fundamental force in the alchemy of curiosity. When we follow the dry throat, strange taste, light head, tight chest, sore back, and so on, through the rabbit holes of curious contemplation, imagination, and compassionate-meditation, instead of always Googling for black and white answers, we may discover a Wonderland of wisdom, nonsense, and strange goings on.
Perhaps, curiosity softens our certainties. It’s a strange alchemical process in our life’s mixing jars, which dares to dissolve the dogmatic, rigid, and oh-so-serious voices, stories, and labels that so often trigger our nervous systems into fight, flight, or freeze. Curiosity kills the chat! And the chat dictates our reality.
Curiosity can courageously tear down the curtains and castle-walls which protects our inner (and outer) wizards, witches, cats, and spells, from a transformative form of exposure, experience, and enquiry. And once back there, we may well find that there is nothing to fear, fuss, and fret about – just a load of dodgy wires, old megaphones, and tatty looking emperors’ clothes. We might discover that we are already home, already loved, and already free. It’s at least worth taking a cheeky peek. Maybe.
‘Curiouser and curiouser’
Amen