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Unlearn

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

—Antisthenes

A few months ago, Steve returned from a hunting trip with this glimmering 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 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.

Recently I attended an 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 maybe even more so, feelings about myself. And God keeps inviting me back to that space.

Reluctantly, fearfully, scalded, I go. To his classroom of holy unlearning. Ridding my soul of all the things I’ve picked up and put on but are not 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 bold hot pink lips and a crazy yarn hat that was twirling and swirling around her face. She was dancing, or at least she had some kind of movement in her. 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 a package of 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 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. Grace is the reminder that the Creator and his creation are enough: our Created Center is gold.

At first, I thought my story box would be about Luke and Lane and motherhood. 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 I carry around of myself and accepting the real, saturated 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 on a torn scrap and clipped it into the tangle. Because, no matter what else, I want to live from a place truer than shame.

I looked my box over and I thought of that line Steve said: “It’s all about unlearning.” Your Created Center exists—beautifully, organically, wildly exists. God gave you a name and a place in this world and he is calling you back to his love each and every day. He is inviting us to unlearn the muted versions of ourselves that we put out into the world and to return to his fully saturated love, our fully saturated selves.

We know he stamped beauty on our souls, and we don’t know it. We believe in it and long for it, and we let it get bullied and buried too.

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.

Maybe heaven-on-earth is believing that what God has already given us is enough, and that he longs to show us the breadth and depth and height and width of this already.

Unapologetically. I don’t want an image, a version, or a reflection of myself. I don’t want the spun stories, the faded façade. I want to be reunited with the fully saturated truth that has always been true.

Reflection & Expression

I need to unlearn __________.

For Your Brazen Board

Find an image of a person that feels like a fully saturated You.