learning

I feel like I've gotten back a few pieces of myself that I've been mising these past few months while also picking up some new ones along the way.

When this week started, I was driving across I-25 on Woodman in a town I've been to before only as a child, visiting aged and distant and yet important relatives--this time being the first time I was there alone, visiting beloved friends whom I know quite well and are still quite young. I was searching for Delmonico and thinking. Solitary roadtrips are good for this sort of thing-- this we know.

It was good to be out and I was thinking about how you learn so much when you venture off the couch and into the world, uncomfortable and unknown as it may be. The night before I spent a lot of time in a small apartment with a large crowd of people I didn't know, but a few I love much. I felt a little overdressed, and as warm as everyone else considering the party required we all wear the most hideous sweaters we could find (courtesy of ARC and Goodwill and the like) and I chose to go the extra mile in a woven houndstooth skirt.

I felt a little out of practice when it came to being brave in environments full of strangers-- I do recall just a few months not too long ago where rooms full of the unknown were my regular dwelling. So, it was strange to be in such a familiar yet distant place. And sitting there, feeling a little self-conscious, I felt myself being carried back to those old days with a sense of comfort and relief.

As I drove the two hours of traffic from here to there, I couldn't help but think about what sort of choices love makes if it is actively paying attention. These thoughts compounded later that night (much later that night) when I was thanked for doing such a thing-- a genuine look of thankfulness from a friend who maybe felt a little forgotten or a little forgetful. My awareness of what love can do if allowed has been more accute these days.

So, there I was on Woodman, I-25 somewhere behind me and I was happy again to be driving my Little Car (a name which seems to have fallen like a default) in some place I didn't know, trying new things, learning yet again what love means, even despite my uncomfortable memories of the few hours prior. It was there, in that apartment I did a lot of learning about who Heidi is, a Heidi who loves to be with people and know them but fears that message will get lost in a crowd. I began to think about whether or not I would be okay with a self who may not be comfortable everywhere.

It is small experiences like these when something as simple as driving a few hours away in a traffic unfamiliar to meet people unknown to sleep in a bed unrecognized that one stretches in small, yet meaningful ways. And although the experience itself might be full of stupid things said or strange sensations about company or experiences, it is wrestling through these muddy spots that we come out being meaningful people who have a bit more understanding about love and the world we have been given to love.

And so there I was, at Woodman and Delmonico, feeling a renewed sense of adventure, a second wind for the learning I long for deep down. For the first time in a long time, the thought of wrestling through the unknown held an old familiar excitement that for a while I thought had been taken from me by too-long roadtrips and too-painful days of moving couches and beds and boxes. I felt my limbs loosening as I began to whisper again I will do whatever you ask of me.

If your longing is to grow, to learn, to expand then you must trudge through things that are unfamiliar, unknown, often painful. Maybe in the grand cases, you must walk though the forests that you think may take your life in the end. But the reality, I am seeing, is that you must hold yourself in a posture that leaves you open to the learning at the end of the darkness. It must be the longing for understanding that comes at the return home that leads you into the darkness, because the darkness itself will never lure.

A dear and wise friend and mentor said to me a few months ago, in the midst of all these unarticulable darknesses, that it is often in our times of greatest confusion that the Father is molding us and teaching us the greatest lessons. It is often only when we come out of the mist, she said, that we can begin to understand what he had been doing all along. And it seems that each day, I learn more and more that she must be right and I am so thankful.

I don't know what tomorrow holds for me, where I will be, who I will be, who will come into my life to love next, but I do know that I do not want to spend much more time on this couch, wondering, and fearing. It is in the risking that we discover all there is to love! May you go out and experience it for yourself!