Happy Tuesday, dear friends. Here’s what I want to tell you today:
A few months ago, Steve returned from a hunting trip with this wild peace in his eyes, as if he had just seen the other side of things and had come back to tell me how beautiful it is in paradise.
He had only gone to New Mexico. But, the truth was, New Mexico looked good on him.
He told me how he spent hours just walking through the desert, alone, in silence.
“What was so good about that,” I ask.
“Being out there is all about unlearning.” He says.
This weekend, I attended an incredible art workshop called the “Story Box Workshop.”* Our facilitator led us in a guided meditation that informed the direction of our story boxes. In my meditation, I saw Luke and Lane on the swings in our backyard. That was the clear image God gave me. I think, in part, because every time I think of Luke and Lane, deep, primal feelings are conjured. Feelings about them, for sure. But even moreso, feelings about myself. And God keeps inviting me back to that space.
Reluctantly, fearfully, scalded, I go. To his classroom of holy unlearning. Unlearning all the things I’ve picked up and put on, none of which are serving me.
I wandered around the room, scanning all the tiny found objects and the compelling images and the scraps of metal and bits of anything and everything you could possibly imagine.
I kept feeling drawn toward pictures of women who were underwater: mermaids and even a woman who looked like she had fallen back into the water and was motionless. I grabbed the mermaid and the motionless woman, too, even though the motionless woman scared me.
Then I found an image of a woman who had fluorescent green eye shadow and a bold hot pink lip and a crazy yarn hat and she was dancing. Across the page was a reflection of this same woman. You could see her face and her hat but it was just a whisper of an image of her. It wasn’t the saturated, wild colors of the true image. It was muted.
As I worked on my box with paint and metal and these images, I was drawn to some gold wire. When I snipped the small piece holding the wire in its perfect circular coil, the entire roll of it just sprung up and out and into the most impossible tangle. I sat for some time trying to work the gold wire free from itself so that I could cut a piece long enough to wrap around my box the way I had it pictured in my mind.
All of a sudden the tangle resonated with me, and I stopped trying to work it out, work it out, work it out, and I just hot glued the entire tangle to the front of my box. It was the most honest thing I could say, and it looked really beautiful actually.
I’m working with and wrestling with that tangle, I realize. The tangle of who I see when I see myself.
I wonder if grace is actually in the reduction of things, a gentle or not-so-gentle returning to the bottom line. Who we are. Who God is. How we are loved. An uncovered nakedness.
At first, I thought my story box would be about Luke and Lane, me as their mother, what we’ve been through together. As I let the process unfold, let go and just let it happen, I realized that what I was really working on and working through was the holy unlearning of releasing the muted, distorted reflections and embracing/accepting the real deal.
Bound up in the tangle are some accusations, some mantras, some fear, some deep belief. A tangle of the best ideals and the worst lies. I wrote the word “brazen”—a word that has been meaning so much to me lately—on a scrap and clipped it into the tangle.
Because, no matter what else, we can be brazen. I actually really believe that.
I looked my box over and I thought of that line Steve said, “it’s all about unlearning.”
Our God-image is in us today. We know it, and we don’t know it. We believe in it and long for it, and we let it get bullied and buried, too.
The workshop was a time of both learning and unlearning, an intuitive journey toward what I want to believe about myself, what I DO believe about myself, and then the reflections and versions I choose to believe instead.
Maybe heaven is an eternal unlearning, a time and space of being reunited with the truth—about ourselves, about God, and about each other. A truth we have always known, intuitively, but have let ourselves forget or, even, reject.
I don’t want an image, an identity, a version, or a reflection of myself. I don’t want the spun stories. I want to be reunited with the fully saturated truth that has always been true. So here I am God, opening the door to your unlearning. Amen.
