Tending to Curiosity

Making space for growth

In the garden the wintered stalks of alliums stand like skeletons. The turbid sky carries the scent of burning ash, and the smoke from the old oil drum bellows south. I turn my palms to the open flame.

Beyond our plot of unkempt cottage plants and knobbly budding trees, the gardens lay empty. Too cold for cutting back, my neighbours say, wait a couple more weeks, they suggest. Yet, with sodden gloves and ghoulishly white fingers, I dig, prune, and cut. I am making space for the roots of the oaks and the woodland seeds; I am sowing new life among the wild garlic and wood anemone.

It was mid-February, mid-murk, mid-depression before I understood this need to till and clear, to create the metaphorical space for my academic life to give way to something more organic. Assignments and projects that occupied the weekend hours and summer nights now stretched like a blank canvas, leaving time and headspace ripe for growth and plans.

It took six months for my list of curiosities to raise their heads through the composted remains of last year's learnings. As winter arrived, I felt no rush to answer what was next. I felt no urgency to fill the gap that finishing my master's left. Instead, I waited for the flood waters to wash back into the rivers and for the ground to feel firm enough to hold new foundations. It took longer still to see that what I was building, a series of seemingly unconnected ideas that were neither set in stone nor whimsical, could be cast together to form the shape of my future.

My list of explorations is a dive into what I may already know, at least at surface level, yet it feels more complex and fluent than the expression of everything that came before. The thoughts arrived like a whisper carried on the winds that blew over dormant January fields, turning my head just long enough for me to feel their possibility.

I have always been a connector of things and a solver of problems. I love to surround myself with the words and wisdom of others and thrive when my world feels varied. This spring, I want to understand native plants and behavioural finance, to know the truth about AI and the resurgence of pastoralism. I want to understand how citizen science can change travel and how to write for the mountains. I want to swim in tarns I don’t yet know and run ridgeline routes that make me hold my breath. I want to explore ways to show how adventure can heal. And I want to leave room to not know.

This year, I will plant these questions like seeds and nurture them with exploration. Instead of structured study, I will return to being patient in tending to knowledge and choose varied ways of learning. Some questions may transform and others will lead to dead ends, but new questions will always come and ideas will be cultivated. Curiosity is kind like that.

I consider my garden, this little space of earth I have dressed with trees and flowers. The hellebores do not depend on the daffodils nor the rowen or the oak. We are often told that we must find the whole, that everything must build to something. That we should know where we are going before we start. But curiosity is fragmented and what it can show us may be more important than finding ways to neatly bind a life.

The fire cackles through the oily remains of yew. Aside from the birds that move in squads across the bleak afternoon sky, I am alone. I don't need to imagine the richness of summer or to know when the first buds will show. I am not tempted to return inside to the cosiness of the cottage or rest on the seat beside the pond. Instead, I stand ankle-deep in clag and clay, wearing earth streaked across my face like war paint. Today I am making space. Today, I am laying foundations.