The Curious Child
Mysterious Curiosities, The Soul Nudges of the Curious Child within
I dedicate this story to the feral wild flower children who still look for their omens in the colors of stones, in the faces of cats, in the fall of feathers, in the dancing of fire, in the curve of old bones. To the awe-eyed dreamer, the keeper of wonder, the curious child still breathing within you—I offer you this wisdom thread of the Curious Child. A thread of Creative Currency, released on my bEarthday, like a message in a bottle cast into the tides of your own remembering. May it help you to remember to not be afraid to courageously return to the sacred art of curiosity. May the Fourth be with you.
Before the world told you who to be, before you learned how to perform, produce, compare, or protect yourself—Who were you at eight years old?
What made your eyes widen with wonder? What strange little obsessions pulled you by the hand toward creeks, clouds, colors, bugs, stories, rocks, mysteries, and impossible dreams?
Somewhere beneath the layers of adulthood lives the child who knew how to follow fascination without needing to justify it. I believe that child is not gone. I believe they are holding a map back to your original creative intelligence, waiting for you to ask the right questions and remember the way home.
Eight years old, this is a key stage in your youth because of your personal development where you may still hold most of your innocence of the world and have grown into your unique nature of who you are. You may know and understand a little of who you are in the world.
For my wild, adventurous eight-year-old self, I was eager for adventure. She loved to go on expeditions down the neighborhood creek for miles and miles. The childhood creek was my favorite place to dig out the richly oxidized red rusty Georgia clay and shape this clay in all the ways my hands could hold. My father built us a bridge across the creek out of a broken sailboat bows and scraps of wood from his woodworking shop. I played and crafted on top of this sailboat bridge for hours until the street lights and the home lights came on. I was born in the generation of kids who had half of my childhood without much thought of a digital world until the world wide web was introduced to us as dial-up internet.
Our mother would only allow us to do educational activities on the computer, on the internet, until I discovered this Clue finders mystery exploration video game of mathematics where I’m navigating markets in ancient Egypt looking for clues to solve complex mathematical equations, at least complex for a fourth grader. Oftentimes when I was traveling abroad, I felt like I was back in that Clue finders video game and I start to see life kind of like the hunt for clues, the curiosities living under sparkly rocks in the creek of our awareness, the stream of consciousness of our child self. Our curious child is so pure, so un-jaded, pure of limitless potential and millions of questions of why and how. I believe each of us still has that inner child, that curious one who is worth believing in, worth dropping in with our presence if we could slow down enough to listen to the small twinkles of curiosities, small soul nudges that call in our attention.
Look at this shiny, brilliant, tiny little thing of fascination and imagination. Children’s imagination run wild with what adults call “make believe”. But if you truly believe the mundane transforms into the magical hands of magi, wizards, unicorns and dragons, where there’s cosmic duels for a pillow flights at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday and children blur the lines of reality and surreality in a really delicious auspicious ways. The Curious Child trust in the enchantment over logic. Their mind remains open to dance and play in the curiosity of the present.
This is the part of you that does not need a five-year plan, does not need to ask permission, does not need to optimize. Before productivity, before strategy, before making sense, the curious child follows the instincts that are alive, looking at something glimmering and says, hmm, what is that? That, my dear, is a quiet pull towards color, shape, sound, mystery. And it arrives as a pull in the body before it’s rationalized by the mind. Most of us were taught to gently or violently abandon our inner curious child. How strange and sad our world is to teach us to abandon and bury the beauty of our innocence.
Over and over, when I was a child, I wrote a story about a little girl named Heidi who lived in Germany who had the most beautiful seven porcelain dolls. When war broke out in her country, she was scared to lose her precious possessions and was not allowed to bring the dolls with her as their family refuged. So her father took her out to the Black Forest (Schwarzwald)1 to help her bury the dolls so that one day when the war was over, she could return to them when it was safe to do so. I think of those seven dolls of my child self and how the world and our guardians, the fathers, the mothers, the protectors, encourage us to bury these precious gifts of our childhood because it’s not safe. The truth is our world is not safe. Security is an illusion. And yet we still have to believe that we are divinely guided and divinely protected.
Attempting to protect our innocence is burying the gifts of the curious child. In my childhood, I was obsessed with Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, inspired by an old Grimms brother’s German folk fairy tale Schneewittchen, where the queen poisons the daughter three times, representing the death of the maiden, the death of purity, the death of innocence. The Black Forest becomes the unconscious liminal space—an initiation myth of young feminine consciousness surviving envy, control, comparison, narcissism, and returning from the underworld intact. The queen is the unintegrated shadow; the dwarves are the instincts, the crafts, the inner helpers. They guard what is pure until it can be reclaimed.
I think of another old teaching: the Cherokee story of why the evergreen trees keep their coats. In the beginning, the Creator asked all the trees to remain awake through seven nights of darkness. One by one they fell asleep, but a few remained steadfast—pine, fir, cedar, hemlock. Because they endured, they were blessed to stay green through every season. Even in winter, when all else appears barren, they stand clothed in life. The Black Forest of my imagination is not only a place of burial, but of endurance. The evergreens are witnesses that something essential survives even through the darkest and coldest of seasons.
So what does it mean for a girl in my story to bury the seven dolls of her childhood and what do they represent? The seven dwarves, the seven dolls are like the pre-ego aspect of the psyche. The original OG unpolished instincts we were born with before shame, performance, or social conditioning. They live in the darkness of black forest of evergreens, thus the unconscious. The dwarves, they mine jewels, inner treasures. They are small and humble, childlike, unguarded, and together they represent the inner ecology that protects innocence when the outer world becomes dangerous.
So what do the seven dolls represent? Hiding away the innocent parts of yourself that are vulnerable when safety is compromised. These doll symbols, seven sigils, like seven dwarves go underground to find a future where it’s safe to retrieve them.
What if you could dig up those diamonds like the midnight gardening of your soul revival?
What if you could go retrieve them now and unearth what was most precious gold and diamonds underground in the dark black evergreen forest of your psyche? I hear the forest is thick with spruce, fir, and pine trees. So thick that not even a sliver of light can penetrate the dense canopy of trees. The evergreen trees are so green it appears almost black as midnight. Beneath the forest floor, unseen by the casual eye, runs another kind of intelligence: the mycelium network. Fine threads of fungi weaving through root systems, carrying nutrients, warning signals, memory, and exchange from tree to tree. It is a living circuitry of reciprocity, a subterranean web where nothing truly thrives alone. I think the soul has networks like this too—currents of intelligence moving beneath conscious thought, connecting old wounds to future wisdom, instinct to intuition, grief to regeneration. What appears silent on the surface is often alive with communication underneath. The psyche, like the forest, is not barren when it is dark. It is busy transmitting, reorganizing, nourishing, and preparing new life in ways the eye cannot yet perceive.
I’m obsessed with finding hidden things, excavating the hidden gifts from the soil of the soul from the thread of wisdom. Why are we as curious children so obsessed with hide and seek? Because the uncanny lesson in the curiosity is we must hide it when it’s deemed socially unacceptable or inappropriate, and go and seek it later once we have decided to radically own all the parts of ourselves, even the forgotten parts of ourselves hiding in the black evergreen forest. Excavating the curious child treasures we can tap back into the gifts of our youth, our curious children who is the great magi of our imagination.
A visionary does not dream in the world someone else created,
but they dream in the world they create.
Who plays in the realms of the visionary? Who believes in magic? Who pays attention to the mysterious curiosities right under your nose, right in your own backyard?
Ahh, It’s the curious child. It’s already in the field of your awareness. Just a subtle, soft, yearning voice inside of you to come back home to discover and find it.
The discovery of the buried dolls is like discovering how to turn on a light switch to your seven chakras, the seven energy centers in your body that are constantly in tune to instinct, gut feelings, sensations, emotions, bubbling up to the surface, making your creativity flow, your curiosity sparked, making it fun, make it pleasurable, make it light, luminous, make it magical, make it real.
A fully realized Curious Child is the Visionary.
What if we could pick up the instrument of our creativity without shame, without judgment, without needing to be perfect or polished or serious and just express and play this instrument of our creative currency? One of the biggest shadows of the curious child is the myth of inadequacy, where we learn we aren’t good enough. We hold shame that we will never be good enough.
We’ll never be refined enough. There’s something inherently wrong with us. We have guardians who instill this myth of shame, this myth of inadequacy, that we aren’t good enough, and it dampens our ability to play.
Where do these patterns come from?
Childhood trauma. We grow up believing we’ll never be refined enough, that there is something inherently wrong with us. The guardians meant to guide us often pass down a myth of shame — a quiet narrative of inadequacy that tells us we are not enough. Over time, that story dulls our ability to play, to imagine, to exist freely in our own light. Experiences of trauma, control, or manipulation fracture that original sense of safety. The child within us learns to shrink, to compare, to doubt. And those whispers of comparison follow us into adulthood, burdening the pure, playful self that once moved through the world without fear.
I’ve heard heartbreaking stories of custody battles between families where power and money distort justice — where professionals entrusted to protect children instead become entangled in systems that fail them. Emotional and psychological harm can leave no visible bruise, yet its imprint can last a lifetime. Too often, only physical evidence is recognized, while invisible wounds go unacknowledged.
“Children are the closest thing to God. Their light is so pure that it is the most attractive thing to feed off by that which has fallen from Source. The children of this world offer us a reflection of the roadmap back to the Kingdom of Heaven. That is why there are so many attempts to hijack their purity.” — Eyes In
From the very beginning of life, children enter systems that shape them — medical institutions, schools, media, cultural structures. While many of these systems are meant to support and educate, they can also standardize, condition, and sometimes suppress individuality. And in the darkest corners of society, exploitation and trafficking remain devastating realities that demand vigilance and protection.
You were once one of those children.
We owe it to that little one within us — and to all children — to protect innocence, curiosity, and the sacred instinct to play. To question narratives of shame. To refuse comparison. To guard the pure light that was never meant to be extinguished. Protecting the innocence of our creative gifts as child is a revolutionary act, because in a world where organizations, government, people profit off war, making art isn’t a passive but a radical declaration against the systems of oppression. Don’t worry Sacred Rebels, we will go deeper with your archetype later in this book.
The first step: We are on a hunt to rediscover our sparkle that was buried long ago.
But protection is only the beginning. There is also recovery.
This requires courage — a willingness to trace the conditioning back to its roots, to examine the stories we were handed, to descend into the inner underworld where forgotten parts of ourselves wait.
So get your detective gloves out. We are going inward. We are going into the dark evergreen forest. The subterranean sanctuary of your soul.
The dark forest of the imagination is not as frightening as it first appears. At the edge, it looks dense and mysterious with shadows stretching between trees, unfamiliar sounds rustling in the distance. But once inside, the darkness softens. Your eyesight will adjust. What seemed ominous begins to shimmer with possibility. The forest is not a place of danger but of depth; a landscape where forgotten parts of the self wander freely, where symbols speak in riddles, where creativity grows wild and untamed. It is a world of magic precisely because it is not over-lit or over-controlled. In the dimness, intuition sharpens. In the mystery, wonder returns. The dark forest is simply the imagination decolonized — alive, fertile, and waiting to be explored.
My inner feral eight-year-old had been yearning for this for a long time — to walk back into the dark forest and retrieve the dolls she had buried there. But for years, I was afraid of the dark. Afraid of what I might find. Afraid of being alone in it.
At thirty-one, I decided I no longer wanted to live with that fear. I chose to walk into the woods alone at night. That decision marked the beginning of my unschooling — a re-education of the most primal kind. I committed to ten months at the Holistic Survival School, immersing myself in wilderness survival and primitive skills: making cordage, starting friction fires, weaving baskets, tanning hides, flint-knapping, foraging, identifying indigenous plants, building debris shelters — the foundational skills for surviving in what I began to call Earth School.
Part of me wanted practical resilience. If the grid went down, if the systems failed, I wanted to know how to sustain myself from the land. But beneath that practical motivation was something deeper. It felt necessary for my evolution to relearn what truly matters: how to be in right relationship with the wild world.
One thing surprised me. In the midst of learning these rugged, ancestral skills, the facilitators carved out generous space for play. We would reset by playing games together. At first, I resisted. Some of the games felt childish — even pointless. But when I softened and leaned in, I realized I had been missing the whole point.
The curious child understands something adults often forget: the purpose of life is not merely survival, but aliveness. Play is not a distraction from learning — it is the doorway to it. When the playful spirit remains intact, everything shifts. Our approach to challenge softens. Our perspective widens. Wonder returns. Curiosity leads again. And in that spirit of play, the dark forest no longer felt so dark. It feels alive.
One of the warrior challenges of that program was to walk through the woods alone without a flashlight.
One night on a new moon evening I decided I would walk through the dark forest alone. I followed the trail along where the creek whispers its little trickles across leaves. The sound orientated me to the ridge of the land on the darkest of nights. My feet tiptoed in a slow fox-walk rattling leaves on the forest floor to wake up the sprites, fae and dryads of the land. The deeper I walked I began to notice a faint bioluminescence blue glow of faeries on the ground lighting up the path towards my little yellow tent deep in the woods, where I finally curled up to dream to the sound of the stream floating me across the abyss from the conscious into the subconscious. Dreaming with the stream of where consciousness pours out into the subconscious—merging back into source.
The next morning I woke up in the sacred hidden valley with a whole new awareness of the inner landscape of my soul. I had activated my sacred navigation, my intuition in the dark. Activating your intuition requires deep listening, like allowing your feet to be the tuning fork as you slowly slowly tiptoe mindfully back to the golden Tao. In Punjabi there’s a word for deep listening:
Suniai ਸੁਣਿਐ ; It comes from the verb ਸੁਣਨਾ (suṇnā) — to hear / to listen.
