The Kiss of Curiosity

Posted on May 13th 2025

With the creative arts as my home all my life, and mindfulness (and mindfulness teaching) a relatively new abode, I am intrigued by the possibility that they are one and the same: creativity and mindfulness.

If I say that curiosity is creativity’s kiss, I am describing the moving toward, the embodied experience of inquiry, of a yearning to know *what this is*. I know how this feels, in making art and in meditation.

As with mindfulness, creativity is a curiosity of the body and the feelings. It’s a cliché to describe it as a superpower but what kind curiosity offers is a counter to the familiar, to entrenched resistance, to ‘I don’t want to feel this’. Like art. 'Let me feel it for you,' says the artist. 'Let's feel it together.'

How can we drive further into what is painful, what is troubling: into what sets the alarm bells pealing in our bellies and our pulses? Even more, to continue further towards with delight, with eyes agog, with wonder and intrigue at what it is to be human? How do we do that? What allows us to take that further step forward, always towards?

If art, if the creative impulse, is anything, it is what it shares in essence with mindfulness, namely:

the winged ability, the impulse that delivers, the grounding stone and scaffold frame, to keep us safe enough while we fly in and out of the fire.