Middle-Pause Pump-Priming Prompt

Digging a Deeper Well: Following Curiosity Back to Joy

The deeper she dug, the more there was to find.

Photo by Amy Sullivan

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The Hole

There’s a hole in the woods that my niece has been digging for weeks now. At first she used gardening tools. A proper little excavation setup. Then at some point she abandoned all logic and switched to a spoon because apparently it “works better.” I stopped questioning the process somewhere around the cicada larvae layer. Now she says she’s building herself a burrow. Fair enough. When I was a kid, my sisters and I used to dig holes trying to reach China. Same energy. Different generation.

The funny thing is this whole undertaking started because of a fort. My husband and my niece had spent weeks building this amazing fort deep in the woods. Her little brother helped too. Every time we had them, we’d head back out there with snacks, supplies, and whatever random treasures had become important that week. It became part of our routine.

Every adventure seemed to include another improvement. A stronger wall. A better entrance. A new place to sit. A pile of branches that only made sense to the people who built it. We’d hike out there for entire adventure days — creek stomping, mud everywhere, fort construction, trail exploring, and letting the dog run around like an overexcited gazelle.

The Pink Moon came and the forest began waking up around us. Tiny green shoots pushed through the leaf litter. Birds returned. Insects emerged. The woods that had felt open and spacious all winter were preparing to explode with life. I knew what was coming. Soon the overgrowth would swallow parts of the trails. The mosquitoes would arrive with reinforcements. The bugs, vines, and underbrush would make our little clearing harder and harder to reach. I’d seen it happen every year.

She wasn’t buying it. As far as she was concerned, the fort was permanent, the trails would always be there, and I was being dramatic. In hindsight, she may have been right about that last part.

When the Fort Fell

One day we headed back for a full adventure day. We planned to play in the creek, get muddy, eat snacks in the fort, and finally put a roof on it using sheets of bark from trees that had come down during winter storms. We made the long trek to the clearing carrying our supplies, already talking about where the roof would go and how we were going to make it strong enough to survive the summer. We were excited. The kids were already planning improvements before we even got there.

And that’s when we saw it.

The fort was in shambles. The roof had collapsed. Poles were snapped. Beer bottles were scattered everywhere. Now, there had been storms, so some of it probably was nature. But some of it definitely wasn’t. That’s the hard thing about kids with huge hearts. They take destruction personally because they still believe people should care.

She just stood there staring at it. It’s one thing to explain that storms happen. Trees fall. Nature changes things. She can understand that. Nature isn’t being mean; it’s just being nature. But human carelessness hit differently. She kept looking around the clearing trying to make sense of it all.

“I would never do that,” she kept saying quietly.

That was the part that got me. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t dramatic. She was genuinely confused. She couldn’t understand why someone would walk into a place they didn’t build and destroy something that had made someone else happy. Honestly, it was one of those moments where you can almost see disappointment in humanity downloading in real time. It’s one of those childhood lessons none of us really want to teach, the moment when a kid realizes that not everyone values the same things they do.

The fort was just sticks and bark to someone else. To her, it was a place built with her uncle, a place filled with adventures, plans, and memories. Standing there looking at the wreckage, I realized she wasn’t mourning a fort. She was mourning the idea that everyone would treat it with the same care she would have.

Heavy Pants

We still tried to salvage the day. We played in the creek, got muddy, and explored anyway. She’ll stand waist deep in freezing creek water without a second thought if there’s something interesting enough to discover. Rocks. Minnows. Strange plants. Shells. The cold barely registers. She gets completely absorbed in whatever she’s doing, and for a while the rest of the world simply stops existing. The funny thing is she’ll almost never actually say she’s cold. Instead she’ll quietly come over and say something like, “My pants feel heavy.” Or she’ll ask, “Are you tired?” Which is usually her way of telling us she’s reached her limit without directly saying it.

I’ve learned to translate. Heavy pants means cold. Asking if I’m tired usually means she’s exhausted herself. I always bring extra clothes now. That’s the thing about wonder. It completely overrides comfort.

On the hike back that day, still upset and distracted by the fort, she walked straight into a branch we had ducked under a hundred times before. Suddenly there was screaming. Blood everywhere. Like an alarming amount of blood. At first I thought her eye had been punctured because it honestly looked like blood was shooting directly out of it. And weirdly, I was completely calm. Full crisis mode. Try to get her eyes open. Figure out where the blood is coming from. Assess the situation while we’re covered in mud with no clean water. Text my husband. Call 911. Get everybody moving. It’s funny how that works sometimes. A genuine emergency happens and something in your brain just clicks into place.

Meanwhile my seven-year-old nephew instantly transformed into a tiny sherpa. Without being asked, he grabbed the picnic blanket, backpack, shoes, and probably half the forest itself and started hauling everything down the trail while I half-carried his screaming sister through the woods talking to the 911 operator. My dog Brute paced beside us the entire time looking deeply concerned but unfortunately medically unqualified.

In the middle of all this chaos, some random hiker walked past us. He walks past a screaming, bleeding child, a woman on the phone with emergency services, a tiny exhausted kid carrying enough gear to summit Everest, and a frantic dog. The man said absolutely nothing. I clearly still think about that part.

Luckily, she had closed her eyes right before impact. It ended up being a deep skin laceration around the eye, not the eye itself. I also learned that faces bleed approximately one thousand gallons per minute. By the time we got help, the situation looked much less dramatic than it had in the woods, but it was enough to make me realize that maybe my woodland adventure preparedness needed some work.

For Mother’s Day this year, my husband asked what I wanted. I asked for tourniquets, emergency blankets, trauma supplies, and a first aid kit capable of handling woodland child catastrophes. Not flowers. Not jewelry. Wilderness extraction equipment. So naturally, the next week we went back into the woods with my new first aid kit.

That’s the thing about kids and wonder. It survives.

Digging

I tried warning her that after the Pink Moon the woods completely change. Spring wakes everything up. Trails disappear. Plants explode overnight. Cicadas emerge. Last year we could barely walk through parts of the forest because cicadas were literally falling onto our hats during hikes. I knew our little fort clearing was going to become harder and harder to reach, so instead of rebuilding the fort, we explored another section of the preserve where kids had carved dirt bike paths through the woods. It was hillier, muddier, and far less picturesque, but it was easier to navigate.

That’s where she started digging the hole.

At first I thought it was just another random kid project. Kids dig holes. That’s what they do. They dig holes, build forts, collect sticks, and become deeply invested in plans that make absolutely no sense to the adults around them. I figured she’d spend fifteen minutes digging, get bored, and move on to something else.

I was wrong.

Every week she dug a little deeper. First came the worms. Then the root systems. Then tiny underground tunnels. Different soil layers. Cicada larvae waiting underground for years before emerging into the world.

Every visit became another excavation. Another discovery. Another reason to stay just a little longer. We’d head out there planning to spend a few minutes checking on the hole, and before we knew it an hour had passed. She’d emerge covered in dirt, proudly holding up some new discovery while explaining exactly why this particular root, bug, tunnel, or chunk of soil was fascinating.

The deeper she dug, the more questions she had. Where do the roots go? How deep do cicadas live? Why is the dirt a different color down here? What made this tunnel? How far can I go?

Looking back, I wonder if that’s why it held her attention for so long. The fort had been about building something. The hole was about discovering something. Every layer revealed another layer underneath it. Every answer created three new questions. The deeper she dug, the more there was to find.

Digging Beneath the Surface

Maybe that’s part of getting older too.

Kids meet the world with curiosity first. Adults meet it with accumulated caution. We’ve been hurt. Disappointed. Exhausted. Responsible for too many things for too long. Somewhere along the way, many of us stop exploring the world with wonder and start managing it through survival mode.

The problem is that sometimes we accidentally avoid wonder too.

I don’t even fully know why my niece started building a burrow after the fort collapsed. I never really asked because honestly it didn’t matter. What mattered was that every week she returned with the same curiosity. The same excitement. The same belief that there was something worth discovering just beneath the surface.

The hole is still there. She still talks about it. She still digs. But the curiosity doesn’t stay in one place. One week it’s roots and cicada tunnels. Another week it’s a turtle, a strange plant, a squirrel with a crooked foot, or a creek full of minnows. The subject changes. The questions don’t.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been missing all along.

When she tells me her pants feel heavy instead of saying she’s cold, I have to dig a little deeper. Somewhere underneath the behavior is the real story. The same thing is true for adults. The same thing is true for life.

Maybe that’s why this prompt landed so hard for me, because while my niece thought she was digging a hole, I think she was teaching me something about wells.

A hole gets deeper.

A well brings something up.

[embed]On Jane Goodall Day, I Stopped Leading and Watched What Happened What Changes in the Days Around the Pink Moon If You Keep Going Backmedium.com

Prompt from Middle-Pause

[embed]Digging a Deeper Well to Bring Forth our Inner Treasures And refresh the waters of our soulsmedium.com

Marilyn Flower

This story was originally published: https://thoughtfultini.com/blogs/news/digging-a-deeper-well-following-curiosity-back-to-nbsp-joy