This is one of the questions I find interesting:
What helped you find your spark as a child? What fascinated you? What made you come extra alive?
What did you want to do with your life after you had grown up?
For me, it was adventure and nature. I loved adventure stories and read voraciously – Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, comic books by Carl Barks and Franquin, and much more. All had to do with exploration and adventure.
When I grew up, I wanted to be involved with nature. I wanted to work as a biologist, although what I really wanted was to work as a zoologist or ecologist although I didn’t have those words then.
This is still what brings up the spark in me. It’s still what makes me come extra alive.
Fortunately, life itself is an exploration and adventure. Living, relationships, art, music, science, sustainability – all of it is an exploration and adventure. Life is exploration and adventure, and death is the same.
And nature is close by. It’s close by in a conventional sense and I have spent a lot of time in forests, deserts, and wilderness (at least, what goes for wilderness these days). In a more real sense, I am nature and everything I am and know is nature. It’s all expressions of natural process. I am the Earth – the dynamic living processes of Earth – taking this local form for a little while, walking around, feeling, talking, exploring, and so on.
I have explored nature through awakening, healing, being in nature, finding myself as nature, working in sustainability, and these days with the regeneration and food forest project here in the Andes.
The question is always: What made me come extra alive as a child? What fascinated me? How can I bring more of that into my life now? In what ways is it already here and I just need to notice?
Image by me and Midjourney