I walked quickly by a chatty neighbor’s house but he popped out his door at the last moment- “hey Mary Ann!”
I was caught and thought argh, no, not now, I’m busy.
I stopped, backtracked, turned around to face him and noticed he had bruises and stitches on his face. He remembers nothing but being at the hospital with a doctor leaning down asking him what happened (he was found flat on the sidewalk).
Someone called an ambulance- was it me? No it wasn’t. And so I listened for a good 15 minutes in the cold, windy shade to hear his story, which ended with “I’m a lucky sonofabitch!”
He had two black eyes, stitches on his forehead, and a concussion, but he felt lucky.
I said, yes you are!
I returned to my very important walk and bird watching event which would have been less meaningful had I not submitted to listening to his story.
Poet Kim Stafford recently said that we need to “make communities more emotionally curious.”
What is being emotionally curious? It might mean showing up open, without all the answers or opinions. It could mean being open to emotional experience, and that there are others besides yours.
“Where is your horse?”
Two people I don’t know asked its whereabouts within the 30 minutes I dug and weeded in my front yard. Both men stopped, leaned on my fence and lifted their voices to ask about the horse.
The plastic grazing palomino has been out to pasture in my yard for years. People are really interested in where it is in the yard on different days of the week.
It’s been on its side, out of site for weeks.
“It has a broken leg,” I told them, which was true.
“Oh”, one said, “he didn’t seem that active.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“I am not going to shoot him, I will glue the leg together again. It’s a bad break, this is the third time.”
One of them said I was a good veterinarian.
I was going to fix the leg at some point, but with this community outcry of concern, I had it done and out in the grass on the same day.
I’m still thinking about emotional curiosity, how to cultivate and grow it in our neighborhoods and lives.