My husband has been studying Chinese for many years now and back when I made this drawing, he told me a story about the meaning of ‘curiosity’ in Chinese based on the characters that make up the word: 
Hao Qi Xin

where 

Hao translates to good

Qi translates to strange & wonderful and 

Xin  translates to heart

This definition - good, strange & wonderful heart - delighted me in so many ways, especially that the second character translates to STRANGE and wonderful.  

I am naturally curious (like a cat!) and have always felt that curiosity is a foundational attribute needed to live a heart-based life. It has taken me my entire lifetime to fully embrace my own strange and wonderful heart.  And isn’t this plant a bit strange and wonderful too?  This was the other plant in the card deck that was inspired by photos from a friend’s garden outside of Tokyo.

I think of curiosity as a powerful practice in part because I have grown to see it as an antidote to fear which is what inspired the prompt for this card:

Try being curious about something that feels uncomfortable to you. How can curiosity shed a light of understanding on something you fear?

It’s amazing how you can sometimes neutralize a visceral feeling of fear using curiosity. And conquering fears (in small steps) feels almost like the secret to breaking the spell that prevents us from living the life we truly hope to live.