Emberlight 2026–2027 Values Series: Curiosity & Embracing the Unknown

We turn now toward a new season and a new value: Curiosity. If Respect for All Beings was the soil, Curiosity is the reaching; the willingness to grow toward something we cannot yet see the shape of. Over these coming months, we will explore Curiosity as it lives in our work: Embracing the Unknown, Adaptability and Resourcefulness, and Creativity. We begin at the root of it all.

Embracing the Unknown is the practice of staying open where certainty runs out. There is a moment, standing at the threshold of the Sanctuary Suites, when none of us know exactly what the hours or days ahead will hold. We do not know how a dying season will unfold, what a family will need before they know it themselves, or what a resident's final words might be. And still, we stay. We show up without the answers, trusting that presence itself is enough of a compass.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young correspondent to be patient toward all that is unsolved in the heart, to try to love the questions themselves. That is Curiosity, in its truest form: “not the hunger to explain the mystery, but the willingness to live inside it, unresolved, and find it beautiful anyway.”

At Emberlight, we live this value every time we walk someone through a threshold we have never crossed with them before. Every death is its own country. Every family grieves in a shape we have not seen exactly this way before. Every volunteer arrives carrying a curiosity of their own: What will this teach me about how to live? We do not pretend to have mapped the unknown. We simply keep walking into it, together, with open hands instead of closed answers.

This is also true of the land itself. The labyrinth does not reveal its center until you are already walking it. The Grandmother Oak does not explain her age; she simply stands, having outlived certainty many times over, still growing.

This month, we invite you to sit with this question: Where in your life are you being asked to embrace the unknown rather than resolve it? What might change if you approached that place with curiosity instead of control?

If you are a volunteer, ask yourself: "What is one moment this month when I didn't know what to do or say, and stayed anyway?"

Emberlight's values series is brought to you by the BE= belonging + equity team and this month’s offering was written by Courtney Smith.