In defense of not knowing

To truly know her, I had to unknow her. I had to be the child again, wide-eyed, and meet her as dancer, as giant, as friend.

Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.

-Krishnamurti

When our beloved hens became bobcat fuel this winter, I was first torn by grief. But from the ache emerged a questioning: How can I refuse the death of my girls while feeding their kin to my kitties twice a day? How can I look at Dave, love the storied animation of his being, without also acknowledging the dead that made him so? Why do I fret when a houseplant dies but exalt the great Sequoia in our yard, her heft and grandeur endlessly nurtured by leafy decay?

Why do I shrink from death when it sustains all I love?

These questions eddied around my head like tiny dust clouds—not landing, not settling, rather unsettling everything in me. They weren’t new revelations; as Barbara Kingsolver writes in The Poisonwood Bible, “The forest eats itself and lives forever.” But not until hen became cat before my eyes did it transform from conceptual to visceral. I am death. You are death. This life I love is made from death.

I keep saying it, but like a Sanskrit mantra, the message is indecipherable, incomprehensible. But I continue: if I say it enough, maybe the ears of my ears will hear it, transmitting the truth of our irreducible oneness and our fluid everythingness into the marrow of me, a cellular unknowing I mustn’t forget.

Our culture, however, resists this kind of unknowing. We exalt knowledge—facts, names, answers, differentiation—as the pinnacle of progress and intelligence, as though understanding alone will save us. We cling to the known like a life raft, clambering upon its bobbing platform only to be tossed again and again into a vastly unknowable existence. To admit what we know is partial, that it may even obscure more than it reveals, is to be untethered, adrift. As writer

Don Boivin

reminds us, “Just as life is constant change, we are constant change. With all this change going on, the second we think we know something, it is no longer there to be known, and we are no longer the same knower.”¹ Yet it is in that untethering, in that willingness to set aside what we think we understand, that we might drift into an entirely different, truer, kind of known.

One morning, while still spiraling in a gustnado of questioning and grief, a scenic messenger arrived in a dream: a clowder of bobcats—puddled together where the hens used to roam—having a glorious “dust bath.” For those unfamiliar, a dust bath is like a human canoodle-fest, but all sunlight and feather and coo. Luxuriating, overlapping, wings spread wide to catch currents of dirt, peat, and sand, while warm light casts their shapes into soft, Vermeer intimacy. And yes, they coo! A gentle trilling to calm even the most anxious heart. If sunlight could strum the calm surface of a lake, this is how it would sound.

So while watching the bobcats bathe through this dreamscape window—golden, dust-candy clouds lifting from fur—I remembered Monet’s words: “To see, we must forget the name of what we are looking at.” And in that moment, I unsaw and unfixed the cats as teeth and torn flesh, as predators, as memory of my own loss, and instead experienced my girls in shivering immediacy—transformed, extending their feathered pluck into muscular grace. Not gone but reborn, wing-spanned into multiples of four lithe limbs.

This past month, I’ve been exploring 30 Days of Drawing with

Wendy MacNaughton

. Each day, ten-minute exercises invite playful process with pencil, watercolor, or ink—a freeing step away from the computer and a return to one of our most ancient forms of expression. During the second week, Wendy introduced us to “Blind Contour”—a drawing technique with one rule: you can ONLY look at your subject and never at your paper. I was so tickled by the process (and hilariously fresh results) that I spent the next three days blind-contouring everything in sight (especially Dave, to his chagrin.) Wendy explains its importance like this:

Not only does blind contour drawing help connect our eyes and hands, which increases our drawing skill, but it teaches us to SEE again. Rarely in life do we slow down enough to truly SEE what—and who—is in front of us. When we do, we begin to question and undo biases and expectations. We connect with what we see from a place of curiosity, vulnerability, and authenticity. This, my friends, is called connecting. And that changes EVERYTHING.

Blind contour drawing is more than an artistic exercise, it’s an act of unknowing. To draw without looking at the page is to set aside control, to loosen the grip of expectation and allow the subject to reveal itself on its own terms. It’s an invitation to see without predetermination and to lean into the world’s arms with curious trust. In that unknowing, everything softens and opens wider, reminding us that connection—a dynamic kind of knowing and unknowing—is born not from mastery, but wonder.

So, on a warmer winter day, I ventured outside for a blind date with our Sequoia. Sitting beneath her sturdiness, I held the canvas in my hands and asked the eyes of my eyes to see. But there were so many layers to peel through—layers of her name, genus, species, her history, her attributes, her ecosystem. Everything I’ve ever known as tree stood between tree and me. I sat quietly. Listening. Observing. Asking, Who are you? My mind’s mausoleum exhuming the answers before her treeness even had a chance. My gaps of not-knowing are undisciplined, tiny, imperceptible, but curiosity kept her foot in the door, and with patience the opening widened. Francis Bacon called this expansive wonder “broken knowledge”—when the foundation of our understanding finally gasps, then yields. Maybe we feel it as a seismic tremble, but instead of falling down we fall out, and direct experience rushes in.

While looking up at her reaching heft, I lost my center in a cathedral of interdependent co-arising: her old-growth ancestors, their decay that fed her roots, the infinite origins of rain—ocean, lake, puddle, tear—the lives that nourished those waters, and the last exhale of stars that became her atmosphere. In this state of wonder, gazing into the eyes of the formless and fixed-less, I can no longer simply call her a tree. She is an elegant movement of awareness, meeting herself moment by moment, folding into grand height and relation. I want to greet her with sound, a generous, round-bellied-baritone that my own body can’t shape. But it feels good to try, as if we’re finally conversing in her language, not mine. To truly know her, I had to unknow her. I had to be a child again, wide-eyed, and meet her as singer, as dancer, as giant, as friend.

When we unknow, torn stitches in the universal fabric mend. In 1995, Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude threw this literal healing blanket—over 100,000 square meters of silvery fabric—over the Reichstag building, the seat of Germany’s long-ruined parliament. Like a cocoon, the landmark and its dark, divided history were obscured, eliciting curiosity about what lay within and suspending previous knowledge. As biographer David Bourdon put it, their work offered “revelation through concealment.” The wrapping softened the building’s sharp lines and stark associations, inviting Germany to not forget its past—marked by political turbulence, war, and division—but reimagine its future. Through concealment, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created space for a rebirth in perception, mirroring Germany’s own reunification.

But this unknowing is not only for botany, bobcat and building. It is also one of the most radical acts of kindness we can offer one another: to quiet what we think, to unknow what we know. To meet a fellow human not with labels or assumptions but with curiosity invites a more immediate, alchemical relating. As beloved Substack writer

rebecca hooper

suggests, “to be a little bit i-less…to let the world rust us open, to let it sing its song from our bones.” May we all know at least once, what it’s like to look into a beloved’s eyes and be rusted open, the warm earth tones of our truest nature revealed. It might be terrifying at first, boundaries blurring as the brain clings to itself, but as Rumi invites:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.

With mind emptied, fullness arises. We see not a tree, not a building, not a beloved, but life, ever-remaking itself with insatiable delight. Like a Zen köan, to unknow is to inject spaciousness, even great doubt, into our conditioning and open the eye of truth, Marie Kondo-ing our dusty attics and over-stuffed drawers of knowledge to ask, “Does this spark joy in me?” “Does this spark joy in you?” We might be surprised by all that no longer serves—trappings of identity, illusions of permanence—each sense perception, each reasoning, even the stories we construct to make sense of this world like tiny headlamps, illuminating only fragments of existence. Our truest nature doesn’t need a lamp to reveal itself. It is already the light—bright, whole and unbound.

I return to the dream image, a gift from somewhere beyond reason, and no longer know what I see. In the dust bath, bobcats blur—becoming ceremony, becoming celebration, always becoming. They are aliveness in continuous form. They are my hens. They are eddies of earth billowing around them. They are sunrise, sunset, sky fall. And they are me, and now you.

But I make no declaration. This is simply a clearing. An invitation to step into that unknowable field together, to lay down in the cosmic dust and have ourselves a good bath.

Cora Banesh, Palm Springs 2014

Visit the In Defense Of series table of contents:

1. Take a deeper dive into Don’s thoughtful exploration of meeting the unknown in his recent essay, Learning to Die so that we May Live.