when this is the mom I am

I am standing on my front porch staring at some random dead bugs on the concrete. Jack is pulling at my hands to go down the stairs into the sun. I don't know where the sunscreen is and I can feel a mosquito biting my ankle. I try to swat it. I slap myself hard on the ankle and the mosquito buzzes away. Jack laughs. We go down the stairs and he immediately runs toward the road. I run after him and he laughs as he sits down on the hot sidewalk to stare at something amazing I can't see, the sun beating down on his blond curls because I have lost the will to strap his head into a hat and I start to think to myself - if someone sees me right now with my kid's head uncovered in this sun what will they think of me? I think about dragging him back inside to find the sunscreen. I should. I really, really should. I should also buy him some sidewalk chalk and maybe a trampoline, because I think good moms have these things to encourage outdoor play. Or was it that I should move to a nearby creek and let him wade in and befriend a local turtle? Or was it that I should put him in a sun-resistant suit of armor before letting him outside? I can't remember. I tell myself that good moms, whoever they are, must be doing something different.--I have been lurking in the shadows of too many well-framed Instagram photos. I have clicked on the links and noted the hashtags. The start of this summer I found myself knee-deep in jealousy - how does she come up with all those games for her kids? How does she look like that every day? How does she have time to do everything? How does she remember to drink enough water and eat the right proteins?--Here is the truth. I forget to drink enough water. I can't come up with a fun game for an almost-2-year-old to save my life even though I spent years babysitting to earn enough money to waste on Tommy Hilfiger-esque purses and wishful-thinking American Eagle tank tops. I see how much fun other moms can make the summer for their kids and I think about things like going to get ice cream sandwiches from a food truck and I do it once and it's 95 with nowhere to sit and Jack protests being taken out of his carseat only to be put back in it because there is no shade and he won't wear a hat and so we go home with melted ice cream and I click on Instagram and somewhere in another part of the world someone's kids are grinning with their ice-cream smeared faces and I spill my ice cream on the only clean shirt I have left.--I became a mother because someone made me one. I became a mother to that someone and that someone looks at me, at the end of the day in between whatever chaos has been made, whatever has been said or not said or whatever games have or haven't been played - that someone looks at me and his face says safety. His face says joy. His face says love.God let me co-create. God let me in on the work of bones and blood and scraped knees and waiting rooms in day surgery. God let me in on the gutsy glory of my son. What else is more important? What food truck or sidewalk-chalk or photo can keep me from believing this?This is the mom I am. The mom who sometimes faints because she probably did forget to hydrate and standing in the sun can overwhelm the body. This is the mom I am. The mom that doesn't know what to play with her kid half the time and reads the same book over and over, and spills ice cream down her shirt and is pretty sure that Daniel Tiger songs will be the only ones she hangs onto by the time she is 90.And my kid's face still says safety and joy and love. He still crawls up in my lap at the end of the day, if I've been working or I've been with him, if I have managed to eat lunch on time or only at 3pm by standing in the kitchen stuffing my face with Goldfish while he listens to "Satisfied" from Hamilton for the 37th time. He still asks for the same song and the same Where do Diggers Sleep at Night? book and when I read it, my voice scratchy and tired, he still smiles at the same places and turns the pages himself.This is the someone who made me a mother. And this is me, his mom.Love,hilary

dear jackson: the work on the ground

Dear Jack,I have begun so many letters to you. Each one drifts away from me in the busyness of joy, this business you set me about, to be your mother, to become your mother. Day in and day out, you set me back on the ground, back at the beginning. You are learning to sit on your own, and you always turn back to me, grin widening to let me in on the secret - that all the work begins here on the ground. You turn back to your toys and you press the button one more time, the music comes back on, you clap your hands, we repeat.All the work begins here on the ground.This was the time, last year, of my first letter to you, named as you are, Jacks, Jackson, Jack. More often we call you buddy. Most often we call out to you with our laughter, and you call us with yours.Last year I told you that you might need a little help breathing and eating. That was true, but last year it was so new and we pricked our fingers trying to hold all the hard words at once, searching the damp and crinkly pages of the ultrasound for answers. It was rushed and we were trying to be unafraid for you. I want to reach back to me then, I want to reach back with you and your laughter, your smile that is wide enough for past and future, for a world good and difficult. I want to reach back through the folds and wrinkles of time to tell her that it is you, learning to sit on your own, who can make us unafraid. That it will be you teaching, not me.This time last year I wrote to you, afraid as I was that we wouldn't begin on the right foot with the right language with the right protections around you. This time last year I thought my skin and muscles and bones weren't enough to keep you safe in the world where most people have never examined a stoma in a neck, where most people don't know how a barium swallow study is performed, where to have only one eye or only one ear is to beg a question - "So someday, will he look normal?" This time last year I thought I was to stand in the gap, stretched far and wide like the thin coils of wire that hold up bridges. I would be the wire and the bridge, I would be the guard and the keeper, I would be safety, salt and light.I imagine someone might think I'm telling you too much about myself, the ways I thought, the things I feared. But transformation's not a work I want to hide from you, not anywhere, and I'm in a chrysalis too, little one, and you should know how much of me God keeps changing.I wrote you a letter May 9 last year, afraid to fail in giving you exactly whatever was right to give you. I was up high above the ground, whispering over and over, making rope and a bridge out of Jesus's words, take heart, it is I, do not be afraid. But here you are, calling me to the ground. All the work begins here on the ground, here where we take off our shoes. I wanted to build you a bridge to keep you from what I feared was a dangerous world, a dangerous life.Instead you have brought me to the ground of your life, you have set me to work unraveling the rope I wove so tightly, fear coiled inside it. You have set me here, among your favorite toys - Sophie the giraffe and the multicolored hedgehog, your zebra blanket, the orchestra turtle - and here I see how you haven't needed me to build you a bridge or carry you away, you've just wanted me here sitting with you, clapping and singing and making animal sounds, doing it all on repeat.It is impossible to write, Jack, what you've taught me, but the closest I can come is to tell you that I am here on the holy ground of your life unraveling a bridge I didn't need to build, neck deep in love with the self you're becoming. You lift up your arms to meet mine and we laugh. We reach back to a year ago, we pull that woman down to the ground with us, to pull her into the holy, into the good. You reach around for another toy to shake. You laugh again.All the work begins on the ground, buddy.Love,mom 

until every good gift is given

The shower is just a little too hot. I'm weak-kneed still from the work of bringing Jack into the world. I steady myself against the walls. I feel each minute pass. I feel the weight of the water, the easy way that I breathe. How I long for Jackson to know how easy it is to breathe. How I long for that miracle of breath, that gift, to have been given differently. How grateful I am, in the tangled way of things, that it is a gift God will not rest until He has given it.Jesus and I have never before had so much and so little to say. I keep entering the throne room, watching and waiting, and I can't see anything. And the throne room becomes the ocean and I am unsteady on my feet. My boat is gone, the night is thick and starless. And the ocean becomes the desert and I am the Israelites wandering their 40 years, every sky an impossible hope for manna. And the desert becomes the ark, and there is the steadiness of that water from the shower - the rain that falls, keeps falling.The throne room is the ocean.How many weeks did we walk on water, Jesus? How many hours did I lean late into the night, walk the space of Jackson's room, the kitchen, the living room, praying the prayers I had never known to be possible? How many nights did You come towards me, those words repeated? Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid. How long did we kneel together, Lord, the three of us somehow dwelling together in this feeble self of mine, in this feeble house? And it is here in the midst of the ocean that You declared Yourself King over the lights, the lives.The throne room is the ocean, and the ocean is the desert.The NICU measures the world in three hour increments. The lights do not tell time, and minute by minute, feeding by feeding, we watch the joy of our hearts grow, become more himself, reveal his personality: strong arms, strong legs. He sleeps like me, hands curled up by his face. I wonder every morning in the shower whether we might yet get a phone call, a miracle reported, whether we might walk in to discover everything changed. Morning by morning, no report comes back. I wake up each day desperate for manna. Jack grows, we rejoice. How many sets of three hours have I lived?The throne room is the ocean, and the ocean is the desert, and the desert is the ark.We have lived days and nights of rain, the seas swelling far higher than our small boat. We have lived inside the smallest perimeter - hallway and bed and bits of highway in between. We have lived, and are still living. We sent out a dove - we wait in the ark for the promise of dry land, the olive branch.The throne room the ocean the desert the ark. They are one. They are the places of God's unthinkable nearness. They are the places of encounter. They are the places where I walk out with my son, with our family now made more whole than we knew it could be, day by day, minute by minute. Your living is your prayer, my mother tells me. You are alive, you are still living. This is the prayer of the throne room, the ocean, the desert, the ark. God is unthinkably close. The world is difficult, beautiful, and new.He will not rest until every good gift has been given.Love,hilary

this can carry us

I learned to pray when I learned to drive. Those smooth, familiar backroads, at age 17 too hasty in hoping to be older. At the stoplights where even now I do not notice how I know where I am going, I just turn, left, then right, then right again. I learned to pray driving past the old white house covered with vines and lilacs that only bloom for a week, a glorious hidden week in May, the kind that sneaks up upon you and shatters your resignation with joy. I prayed the unconventional hours: early morning requests and questions, the late evening thanksgivings. Often, I repeated this: I love you, Jesus. When I slink into the driver's seat, even now when I go home to visit, I feel the pull of those hours, the richness hidden in rhythm and repetition: I love you, Jesus. I remember the drives, keeping those hours, the expectation, the simplicity. The lilacs bursting forth against the old white house.These hours keep me praying in the long summer of expecting my first son. These hours keep me, my younger self's prayers, ones about God's glory being revealed to me, or the fullness of God's wisdom being shown to me, or the love of Jesus, my younger love of Jesus. These hours keep me, praying somehow still over me from the week of bursting lilacs to the week of driving to Temple, of learning about Jackson, of new glories.I have wanted to write about praying for Jackson, but the truth is, it's really the old prayer I'm praying, that the Spirit is praying in me and for me: I love you, Jesus. I find you so beautiful. My son knows my voice. This overwhelms me, since so much of the day I am quiet. We talk in snatches, I tell him about what I've been reading, I tell him about his cousins, his grandparents, how much love is waiting for him. I tell him about his doctors, too. I tell him that he will love them, that they are helpers, people God gave special gifts to for helping kids heal and grow and be strong. I am telling myself all these things.He hears about this ordinary life all day, carried around inside me with his fierce, strong spirit: he hears Preston read One Hundred Years of Solitude, me proclaiming my craving for red velvet cake and ice cream sandwiches, my laughter with his dad, our plans for crepe myrtle trees and a backyard garden and a library of books just for him. And he hears me on the couch or the bathroom floor, some mornings getting dressed, how those are sometimes hard moments in my expectation. How I cry sometimes because I am new at this, new at even the very act of becoming a mom, becoming his mom.So the old prayer, the lifeline - I love you, Jesus.He hears that, too.May this be the forever thread running through our days together: I love you, Jesus. I love you with the first light slinking through the blinds, with long hours of reading, with appointments and ultrasounds and so many pictures of Jackson as you are forming him. I love you when I pray laughing or weeping, or both at the same time. I love you with the bursting lilacs all those years ago, the first hours set down, that resound now. I love you with everything in me that is unfinished - with the poem that that line comes from, Robert Bly, I think.I love you, Jesus. This is the well-worn prayer. This can carry us.Love,hilary

a story about learning

I was on my way out of the classroom on a Thursday when he handed back my paper. In it, he told me he had been honest, as I had asked. And then, as I kicked gravel under my Puma sneakers in the hazy fall sun, I read his comments.

He told me that I was a better writer than what I had produced. That I had, in my gleeful mistaken assumptions about the author, the text, the implications of the words on the page, taken offense to the author of the text. I could have done much better, he wrote. 

I cried about it hysterically on the car ride home, one of those few days when I was picked up alone by my Dad and we got donuts from Dunks on our way back to our old red house, the home of what I thought was my list of ceaseless triumphs. I am a good girl ever being re-formed back into a whole self, and in high school, I ran myself hard in marathons of expectations and disappointments, the weight of each heavy in my heart. 

There is something about being new to graduate school that, if you're new or old there, or new or old in any kind of work, big or small, apparent or hidden, that keeps making me think of that high school version of me. 

I was so unwilling to allow for wrong. I was so unwilling to believe that some things are learned by slow osmosis. By a silence that enters and changes us, by a year upon year returning to the same question the same text the same author the same gracious God who is over and through and in all. No, I would tell myself in the walk between buildings, you must learn immediately and remember forever. You must never make the same mistake twice. You must never relearn something you should have known or were already taught. 

It was true for me in French class, loathing my forgetfulness of the conditionnel passé. It was true in theater, forgetting a line or a gesture that was all-important in the scene that we had already rehearsed. It was true in friendship. It was true in faith. 

So by the time I was a senior hearing my favorite teacher tell me that I was, in fact, a better writer than what I had turned in, I cried hysterically on the way home because his words meant I had to relearn something. I had to go back. I had to try again. I had to revisit something I believed I should have already mastered. And that must mean, I thought, that I was never capable of knowing it at all. That I was never going to be smart enough. That I was never going to see the light or come to a good conclusion or write a better paper. If I couldn't do it perfectly now I could never do it. 

Eventually, I realized God was there. 

I don't mean footsteps, or whispers in fire or rain or wind. I mean the slow awakening, that itself is the result of practice, of grace received, of many mistakes. And ours is not a God who believes in instant mastery. 

There is no lesson that is not to be relearned. There is nothing to be either good at (and capable of) or bad at (and incapable of) in the most important works we do. There is natural gifting, yes, but how gracious and wild and freeing is it that even those with abundant gifts are given the same tasks to work at, again and again? 

That we are all taught to trust God over the whole of life - each season, each event, each uncertainty - and that such relearning is not for the faint of heart only but also for the strong? 

That we are tasked to revise, reimagine, recreate, relearn the most glorious things about God in the most mundane and everyday ways? 

Because there is nothing new under the sun and that makes everything new. 

I can't do it - faith, graduate school, philosophy, creating a family, learning to cook, teaching - any of it, perfectly, and I don't serve a God who sees me as a failed marathon runner in expectation and disappointment. 

I serve a God who retaught His disciples the same things about the kingdom of heaven in many parables. I serve a God who reteaches the people Israel the meaning of trust in Him, in manna, in the stories of Abraham and all the faithful, in the prophets. I serve a God who is unafraid to teach me again the things I couldn't understand, didn't do right or perfectly or well, the first time. 

Maybe in all of us there is a hidden high-school self that is asking us why we can't just wake up and not need to relearn all the things we keep needing to relearn. Maybe in the work you do, wherever you are, there is a self asking why you think you can do it at all since you couldn't the first time, the thirtieth time, the hundredth time. 

To that voice, in as much love as I can muster, I say: there, in the repetition, in the almost-giving-up, is the God who leaves us breathless with how He loves to teach us the same things for the thousandth time. 

We don't need to be afraid to re-learn. 

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: the solitary inch

Dear Hilary,I'm sorry. I say I'm sorry probably approximately 218 times per day. I say it to basically anyone about basically anything. It's my catchall, my secret weapon. Say I'm sorry and then the conflict can end, right? But lately I've started to hate the word sorry. I use it when I don't think I mean it. I use it when I'm just tired and want to not be having the conversation anymore, when the explanations for myself run dry or I don't know how to justify being sad or being angry or being any of the emotions I've spent my whole life putting in the, "THIS IS DANGEROUS LOCK IT IN A BOX" category of my heart. I don't know what to do. I am mad at myself for being mad at myself, or sorry about how often I say sorry. Help?Love,I'm sorry for even asking thisDear I'm Sorry,Hey love.Been a little while since you've let all that out, eh?Or maybe just a few days, if you're like me, and you sit in the counselor's office and say the same things week after week, that you don't know how to build a person who believes in herself as herself because the habits run deep, habits of denial and apology and habits of self-deprecation and self-doubt, habits of keeping those emotions at bay so that now they loom out at you in the night and  you really didn't feel like you had to apologize about that thing you said or worried about or over-thought, but you did and now you don't know how to take it back and you think you'll always be like that, always the one in the wrong, even though yes you know that it's supposed to be shared and aren't you just a failure for not sharing it better, eh?Sound familiar?It's an agonizing discernment, when we've done wrong. We avoid it, all of us. All. Of. Us. You included. Yes, I bet you didn't see that coming. I didn't either. I assumed for the longest time that I was the only person in the world who was able to be accurate about what was her fault - everything. Every fight. Every misunderstanding. Every agony.And in doing that, I built the safest protection of all: protection from the truth.Because here it is, the uglier truth: by apologizing for everything when you know perfectly well not everything is actually your fault, you've excused yourself from really owning your wrongs. You've allowed yourself to think that there isn't really anything wrong with you except the deliciously dramatic EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE and so by doing that, you're keeping the real work, the work of looking at a fight and saying, "that was ugly and fierce and mean" at bay. You try to take the whole thing into yourself and in doing so you sneakily get your fix of absolution. You get the control back. You get the safe feeling back.Let's be free of that, shall we?You will have done some things very wrong in this life. You will have done some things very right. Sometimes you will fight a good fight and at the end you will both cry and rage and not be sure how you made it through but you did. And sometimes you will stay in the same place and some times you will need to gather your courage like a fur coat around you and plunge into the winter of being risky and vulnerable and not say sorry as a way to escape the fight but only say it after you've fought longer and harder than you want to know the truth, to live the truth.Most days it will be only one single solitary inch of work. Most days it will seem like nothing, like you're still doing what you've always done, falling back into saying "sorry" as a way to make it all better or make it all go away (or make it all belong to you). Most days being in a fight will still terrify the living crap out of you and you will think, I am going to die. But you are not. You are going to live.You are going to live more gloriously, too. With every solitary inch of work. With every moment of saying, "Am I sorry? Is this mine?" you move. You move that inch and that inch is full of glory.I've long given up the ghost on becoming "perfect" at not being a perfectionist. I am one, and it moves and lives, and the solitary inch has to be full of glory because most of the time that is just what we can do. It is glory-full, even when it isn't done exactly right or you still apologize too much or you're still kind of controlling.Every solitary inch of work we do is glory-full.Love,hilary

for when love is desperate

I woke up in the haze of the night, that space where the sunrise is slowly bleeding into the day, where rain casts an enormous shadow, where there are things like jury duty and immediate deadlines and the last plane ride of the man back to Texas.Sitting in the eerie, half empty room with the other wanderers with their bleary-eyed coffee, their newspapers and knitting, their snuck-in granola bars eaten quietly, it struck me that this journey is almost over - well, perhaps, almost begun. Or both.I can't tell you why, but when they dismissed us - justice reached between the hallways and the bank of elevators - and I was driving back in to work, to meet that deadline, it hit me: this is the man I'm marrying.This is him.I started to laugh, but at the same time I started to cry. I was laughing and crying along a 10 mile stretch of road that I have never seen before, with small clumps of pansies blooming in the median boxes, the rain still hesitantly pounding the windshield, and two UPS trucks turning left and right and me in between them. I was laughing at myself, at this beautiful world, at the fact that in that moment I realized it:I'm marrying the person I always and never imagined.I had to tell myself that I was still driving, that this is the middle of the workday, that the world is racing past me and there are places to go and deadlines to meet, because in a moment, I am a heap of tears and shaky breathing and laughter, so much laughter it seemed to rebound off the walls and windows, carrying me.I think this must be what it is like to fall desperately in love.Not a hurricane, no, but the steady second, third, hundredth time falling into love. This is the we've been engaged for a long while now, the we know who does the dishes and sets the table, the ordinary missed words and not missed eye-rolls, who loves hummus and who loves sea urchin, where she always forgets her glasses and where he always puts down the car keys. This is the falling in love again with all the familiar, with all the still-surprising, with the way that love turns out to be eating leftovers on the floor or walking to the pond when the sun finally comes out and warms the earth.I always imagined that it would be as simple as that, the person as inevitable as breathing. I never imagined it would be so good, goodness essential as breathing.This isn't the post where I can say anything profound about love, other than I didn't realize how much you keep falling into it. How you fall into it, again and again, when you realize that this person still thinks you're the best thing that has ever happened when you oversleep and mess up plans and forget things. How the fact that he knows how much I love hummus and steak makes me cry. Or how he never lets a day go by where he says, "Hello, beautiful," and there I am, hopelessly falling into love.This is the post where I say that I spent that drive laughing and crying because I'm getting married to Preston. Because it's the hundredth time I've fallen in love with him, and love it wild, and sometimes I could cry with how extraordinary it is. And laugh.Love,hilary

to the girls in my zumba class

Dear girls in my Zumba class,Dear you who is willing to jump up and down to music we don't really know the words to, you who is willing to do the moves with more energy after 50 minutes than I think I have in my whole body, who laughs at our blurred reflections in the mirror,you are what makes me brave. I've been up and down the mountains and hills for a little while now, with this question about food and how to eat and the fact that sometimes I don't know how to finish a bagel in the morning, I'm so nervous that it will upend my life. I've been in the thicket of the thoughts about mirrors and beauty and whether the scars on my stomach from the time I had my gallbladder removed are moments of skin knit together, moments of pride that my body is always doing a healing work on itself, or if I should be embarrassed and try to hide the thin pink line that dances near my belly button.I've thought about writing and not writing, I've written and deleted, and in the end of every day I don't write a blog post about this journey up and down the mountains of that question - am I beautiful? -you are the people I see at the other end.You jumping up and down in the aerobic studio to Pitbull and Lil' Jon. You in old T-shirts and yoga pants and running shorts and neon sneakers and bare feet. You, afraid and unafraid, because we are all a little of both if we are honest. I can't describe how much courage you breathe into my lungs just being in that second row with you.And yes, you know, it is courage to shake my hips and courage to swing them in something that I think might someday look like a circle. And yes, it is courage to keep dancing at minute 50.But it is also courage to be.You give me courage to be, without walls, without the tap tap tap of the prison guard of my mind that says I should eat less run more be more do more perfect more. In Zumba, there is no better and no best, there is just us and the courageous being of us.If I could tell you anything it is that yesterday at the end of class I walked out and realized that I think you are all, each, singly, remarkably, beautiful. I realized that I know this in my bones, that you are beautiful, that you are courageous.And maybe it's time I walked out of a class and thought of me alongside you, as one of those beautiful and bright courageous beings. Maybe it's time I walked out of class and let the lessons you are teaching me sink into my bones.I wish I could paint this for you, write the way you have built my courage from my pink sneakers to my heart, how you have changed me beyond what I had imagined could change. You, with every routine and every sigh and laugh you are rebuilding my idea of what it could mean for me to be beautiful. To be courageous. To be whole.Gratitude is not measured in a word count, so I will only say, again, you have done infinitely more than you know. And this girl, she is learning beautiful from you.Love, hilary

dear hilary: the shape of your grief

This one, friends, doesn't have a letter in front of it. This one, since Preston told me to write the hard thing, is the letter just for me.

Dear Hilary,

It is always weeks after you think it will arrive that grief finally, politely, knocks on your door. It isn't in the moment you make the bed in the house that is emptied or bake dozens of cookies and do the dishes over, and over, worrying that there won't be enough bowls when the rest of the mourners arrive. It isn't when you finally lie on the bed at home after the flights, after the funeral, after the tears you knew would come when you realize your engagement ring is the exact color of the suit she was buried in, or when your brothers cry next to you, or when you spend an hour playing around the world in basketball in the concrete driveway even though you can't move past the first place, because you don't really know how to play basketball.

But one afternoon, a weekend, when you've done the errands and dropped off the dry cleaning, when you've had tea and coffee and not worried about the whipped cream you put in the coffee, when you're settled adding street names and numbers to a spreadsheet for your wedding, and you suddenly realize it: everything she never saw.

You didn't show her the binder you made, the colors of your bridesmaid dresses or the way your dress fits you, just right. You didn't show her the ring, in person, you didn't exclaim the way he holds your hand or how much he loves to cook for you - and you know she would tell you you are lucky and you and your mom, you don't deserve these men who cook for you. She didn't know that he makes you laugh, even at yourself, or the way you look in a picture together, or your plans for five children, and how your mother thinks it'll be all boys.

And you will sit, binder in hand, on your bed and realize with a start that you are getting married and you can't give her a corsage and you can't hug her and you can't take a picture with her, with all the women in all their wedding jewelry all together, those pinterest pictures everyone tags can never be yours.

The shape of grief is ever-moving, the heart is the hammer that molds it, beat by beat, the well-loved driftwood on a beach after winter, shaped by the movement of wave after wave, slowly sanded smooth, gentle, even. 

This is the shape of your grief, Hilary: an absence physical as presence, while you bake cookies and organize flights and make the world move in the right times and places, the grief waits for you. It waits for your heartto hammer it smooth again, beat by beat.

The shape of your grief: softening, still.

Love,
hilary

so i write today

I am sitting on my bed in the chaos of Preston's departure, unwilling, unable, maybe, to really bring myself to the zumba youtube video workout or the making of dinner or the folding of laundry that's overdue in a corner of the room. It's a hard thing, long distance, because the stillness is lost in the miles logged, the yet-another-plane-ticket, the counting up and down the days and hours until you can be next to each other again. 

I am thinking about Momastery tonight. I'm not sure why, an article on Relevant that people have been sharing on facebook that made me think of something of hers I read once and so I go to Glennon's blog, because Sarah Bessey links to it and I see that under the Relevant article, and I find myself paging through and reading those good words and thinking about writing and good words and spaces with nice colors and clean CSS coding. And I think about how I have so often wanted to have a big space like that, and those thoughts have a something, I don't know if it's a bitterness or just a wistfulness, or somewhere between them, about writing and me and the wide gap between what I think it should be and what I think it is.

Her Ted Talk link is in a corner. I click, lean against the pillows. She is only a few minutes in when I start to cry. 

I want to be someone telling the world to take off its superhero cape. I want to tell you my story of emerging, how I have learned the shape of kindness can be the word no and the shape of grace can be in an ending. I want to tell you, especially, that I never thought I'd ever be a writer because I assigned the role to someone else in my poetry class that first year and I pretended I didn't want it so that it couldn't hurt me if it didn't happen, and I want to tell the world that sometimes the song about freedom has stanzas in it for whatever cage you've lived in. I want to be someone like Glennon, I think, and 17 minutes later I'm still on my bed in the same leggings avoiding the same zumba video with the same hole in my heart. 

There is a part of me that thinks in this moment about the fact that I don't have my own domain name and I don't know how to code CSS, that asks me who I think I am, writing like this, 23 years old and still not sure if she knows how to make pancakes right. 

But I am still writing today. I am still wanting to add some stanzas to that song about freedom and I still want to say to you that if you and me together in this watch these women - who write brave books and who speak brave Ted talks and who keep shouting about things like daring greatly and carrying on, warrior and being a jesus feminist and how mothers are superheroes - if you and me together watch them, 

I think we'll start to tell each other. We'll whisper carry on, warrior in the supermarkets and down the corridors and into all the small places of our lives. We will tell you the new mom as we hug you during the peace in church that you are a superhero. We will learn how to write cards and notes to girls who wonder about how to be brave and dare greatly. And we will tell them yes, you can. And we will tell them yes, you are brave and beautiful and good and let's be in this together. 

And so I write today. 

Love,
hilary

when it was a year about light

I am 22 in this picture I paint of myself for you, looping the words over us like so much leftover Christmas ribbon. I am achingly frustrated and desperately unsure of myself. I am sitting, as I usually do, on my bed with the blankets still unmade from when I woke up. I am living in the in-between, in a place I know so well - so much better, really, than I wish I knew it. I wanted to be somewhere new, I say to myself as the New Year's night lingers on. I wanted to be in DC, I wanted to be in France, I wanted to have done something or gone somewhere, and yet I feel as I type that the word of the year must be light. 

It is meant to be a year of light. 

I expect this will mean the utter brilliance of day. I expect that God will hear this prayer of a word and turn my shadows into sunlight. I expect that when I wake up in the newness of the year, I will be different. I go to bed in that messy pile of blankets and I am ready to be transformed. Perhaps I even smile a little as I sleep. 

God turns out all the lights. 

The months pass and there is less clarity than ever before. I do not know where to find God even in all the usual places I go looking for him. I am still in the same place and I walk into the same building at work and feel as though I must have prayed it wrong, said it wrong, chosen the wrong word. Because in the wintering of the year I am wandering through nothing but shadows and all that I think I know of me is gone. I sit in Tenebrae, the service of the lengthening shadows at the end of Lent, and even there, though I hear Jesus say to me "You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you," I cannot find a window to open for the light to come into my heart. I must be praying some angry prayers in this year, too, prayers that tell God just what I think of this silence, this darkness, this apparent failing of my hope for light. 

But it is the wonder of the world that the shadows reveal the light more brilliantly. It is the wonder of knowing God that we are given a glimpse of how God loves us through praying a word like light and walking through shadows. It is the wonder of a year where I moved from thinking there was an easy way towards the light to despairing about shadows to meeting God again and new for the first time - 

it is the wonder that to be still before God with a trembling self one year ago is to pray a wild prayer. It is the wonder that God hears such prayers, that God is close to such prayers. That God so tenderly answers them. 

Love,
hilary

when it's finals here

It's finals here, with reading day on Friday. There is a light snow falling now, there is a movement across campus - the hurrying of Christmas and Advent, the fear about exams and finishing it all, the longing to be able to just go out and drink peppermint mochas at Starbucks without thinking of all the responsibilities, all of the work, all of the things-you-said-you'd-do-and-didn't.My senior year of Gordon, I remember this time of long runs and this fear, oh, this aching fear that I was not loved, that I was not enough, that the world I was holding by the tips of my fingers had already left me behind. That what everyone thought I was, I wasn't, and what they thought I could do, I couldn't.I wrote this post about "Winter Song" - still, to this day, my favorite collaboration between two artists I love - and I wanted to give the people who were reading my blog way back love, to carry them closer.And today I remembered that our hearts might ask these questions even when we can't ask it out loud, even when it's busy and Christmas-y and full to overflowing.So, if this finds you in the midst or at the beginning of your finals, if this finds you with those questions about enough and beautiful and worthy and cherished, about whether those will be words that belong to you?This is my winter song to you. Can I remind you that the bravest work is done when we do not believe we are brave? Can I remind you that the word "enough" is only really relevant in the story about Christ come among us, the final, full and sufficient sacrifice that becomes victory and redemption and life everlasting - that Jesus is enough. That we are longing for him, the fullness that he brings? Can I remind you that what is beautiful these days isn't caught on camera or in the bright lights at the gym, but it's somewhere living between the kind words you choose to say and the extra Hershey's kiss you remember to put in someone's mailbox, or the hug you give them when you pass the peace of Christ on a Sunday morning? Can I say that you are, and we are, somehow worthy and cherished, because the Lord longs to be compassionate towards us?Because how the Lord longs to be compassionate towards us.This is my winter song to you, and to me, too. Because that senior year when I wrote that blog I was running four or five miles a day to hide from myself, scared to move at all for fear that the careful holding everything in place would collapse. And even now, I wake up to the cold morning and I worry that I will lose the things I love because I am not enough.I write in the hope that, by saying it, I will bring a beacon of light closer - that I will be your harvester of light. Maybe it will shine a little on me, too.Love,hilary

i write a poem

The edge of the row of the mostly-empty plane, three hours from Boston and home and all I can think is how the words have left me. Because there is nothing like holding my nephew for the first time, nothing like wondering at it, nothing like feeling his breathing slow to the steady hum of sleep, nothing like singing him "Come Away with Me" with Norah Jones on repeat in the kitchen, offering him my voice and my swaying hips, my own breathing steadied by his. 

It makes me want to be a writer again, makes me want words to take wing into your heart - and I am remembering how on the days in college when I was afraid I would read poetry in slim soft covers and savor the words, tasting the way I wanted to write. Because I could tell you the story about holding him, the steadied breathing, the sway, the Norah Jones, even the kitchen - 

but I want to give you poetry.

And I want to render thanks to God that way, in a poem written on a plane late at night coming home from a visit that was pure gift. I want to put my poor love for this world into words in slim soft covers someday, put them in your bookshelves and in your hearts, tell the story of how I have been loved, wildly loved, and how I long to live and move in this world, by writing poems.

And so, last night, thinking about poetry, thinking about the steadied breathing of my nephew and the beautiful swirling days of fall, sitting at the end of a row on a plane, I wrote.

Trainspotting

The crickets are resurrected,
singing.
The desert of the station feels the echo.
Everywhere is thirst,

Everywhere, wanting.
I wait, swing my legs along the yellow strip of warning
near the tracks:

Where are you?
The world shivers heat
and I wait, a blue
dress falling down my back.

I am a moment,
An ocean, a longing voice
in the chorus of the night.  

Somewhere, in your day, may poetry find you, and bring you something beautiful.

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: go more gently

Dear Hilary,

I am lost, here in this new place.  The person I thought I was, the Christ I believed I followed, the people I learned to trust, lie now in a hopeless heap of feeling-wholly-helpless, and I continue on, digging my grave among the ruins.  This unknown, this not being known, scares me silly.  And when I am with the one who wants to know me?  My goody two shoes and those giant red flags scream at me, telling me to guard my heart because his heart doesn't belong to Jesus.  But right now, I just hardly seem to care.  Help?

Love,Fearful-in-a-Philly-Place

Dear Fearful,The scene: February (why do things always seem to happen in February?). A Starbucks table, the kind not really big enough for two people so you're crammed together, holding your drinks, each allowed one elbow on the table. It's early afternoon, I think, and I look harried and there are creases in my collared shirt because I don't really want to bother ironing it (truth be told, to this day I'm not great with an iron). I hold a mostly-empty cup, toss it back and forth in my hands. I have everything and nothing to say.Let's be simple about it: I had no idea where God was and I wasn't really sure where to start looking. I was scared out of my mind and I didn't want anything to change and I wanted everything to change. And I was so tired I didn't know if I could physically worry any more. And now, I read your words and they stay with me, I think about them and I think about you, and I imagine us in a Starbucks somewhere, October instead of February, at some cramped table tossing our cups back and forth in our hands. Thank you for your sincerity. For being brave enough to say it, that where you are is lost, that where you are is unsure. I hope you know how brave you are.Building in this life can't begin somewhere less than your courage.You say you're digging a grave among the ruins, but I think you can be a bit kinder to yourself here. Yes, the not-being-known, yes, the unknown, yes, the being lost in the forest of your faith and how it is moving and changing, yes, that is real. But I don't think it's ruinous and I don't think you're digging a grave. I think you're in a giant heap of questions and the pinpricks of light between them don't feel like enough to be guided by. It applies across the board, every time you come to a new question - what do I do about the feeling of being unknown? What do I do about the person I thought I was? What about Christ? What about the boy? - everywhere you look, the question looks bigger and the agony of not knowing the answer grows bigger, too.You're in this giant pile of questions and you're turning around and around inside them, and with all that movement, it's hard to see anything.Go more gently.In the year of February meltdown in Starbucks, I took a ballet class. I learned quickly that I was not as flexible as I thought I was.  And I would get into trouble if I tried too hard to get there faster - to get to a perfect arabesque at the barre, to get to a pique turn with the right releve. I couldn't do any of it when I tried to do it all at once. How ordinary, the need to slow down. And how true. In ballet, like in the deepest spiritual and emotional questions, we must be gentle. We must be willing to submit to a gentler pace that leaves us longer in the uncertainty, longer in some of the fear, longer, even, in some of what is hardest.What does this mean for you? I think it means you should stand still for five minutes and watch yourself breathe. I think it means you should go for a walk outside and yell everything you think you're not allowed to yell at God at God, tell Him about the boy, tell Him about who you thought He was and who you thought you were. I think you then get really quiet with God and ask Him He is. Don't ask yourself to hear or understand what He might say or not say. But ask that. Leave the question aloud in the night. Return to it, see how it changes.And as for guarding your heart and the red flags around the boy? I have a lot of thoughts about it, but most truthfully, Fearful, I think the pinpricks of light around those questions will grow as you watch yourself breathe and talk to God and get really quiet. You care more about this than you first told me. Why else could you have put words to it? Guarding your heart is about so much more than the particulars of this person who knows you, who wants to know you, who you care about - it is about all the questions in the heap of questions. It is about being gentler with yourself. You will know more about where your heart is when it comes to this other person when you're gentler with your heart, period. If anything, I want you to release yourself from the expectation that you can know what guarding your heart looks like perfectly now. It's so much more important to me that you are gentler with yourself. It's more important to me that you get those five minutes in the miracle of breathing and that walk in the woods (or in the park, or wherever it makes the most sense for you to go).And, just as gently, I believe the light will grow.Love,hilary

the ache is still beautiful, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I will never, ever, ever, EVER do long-distance.Was that what I said? Did I say that to you once, in a conversation, in passing, probably tilting my head the way I do when I'm not sure what I'm saying is true, but I want to convince you that I'm being really thoughtful? I imagine you were painting in your garage at the time, and I could hear the paint hit the canvas with some kind of fierceness that I didn't understand. You paint forcefully, and sometimes I think maybe that's the way of making beauty; a little forceful, the way that brightness asks for strength to bear it. Sometimes, when we're on Skype and you can't see me, I close my eyes, and listen to you painting, and the silence says more than my words will.But me and that long distance. My vehemence when I said those words seems to grow in my memory, a defiance to it I'm not sure was there, but makes a story somehow wilder, so I tell it that way. I was stamping my feet against the old hardwood of my bedroom floor, or something like that, insisting that the way of love must be just something daily, something clear and easy and full of Friday nights barefoot on a beach or along a boardwalk somewhere and that attempting to build across miles and continents and time changes was the worst idea, ever.Never mind the stories I have been told my whole life. Never mind the long walk through the woods behind campus that sunlit afternoon when my dear friend told me that our choices weren't ever about distance, but about steadfastness in the face of it. That distance could be agonizingly hard but that the space created between those two distinct places, and those two distinct people, would be nearer and closer, a mystery closed to those who watch it. And of course that afternoon, when my mother opened the pages of her own writing to me, the binding frayed and worn by love and how she, like me, said she'd never do long distance.But I knew the ache already, I said. I knew the work. I knew the uncertainty. I would never give it a try.I knew so little, P. I knew so little of the ache.Because this? This ache is beautiful.This is the ache of remembering how we sit side by side at that kitchen table and make worlds with our words, offering each other living water for the journey. This is the ache of how I can hear how you laugh with me, almost falling off your chair, how I can feel your hand brush the small of my back as we go up for Eucharist, how I remember the way you look at me sometimes, this look of wonder that just takes my breath away.This is the ache of how our hearts whisper loud across time zones but gentle when we're in the same room. This is the ache of wanting to tell you when I burst in the door out of breath from running with God that I realized, just then, the radical grace that is when God and I are quiet, together, how I can feel Him running with me but how sometimes, when I complain to Him (like I did the other day) that He feels far away His words are sharp and quick about the reason He runs with me (love, and sanctification, and my feeble heart). I'm longing to tell you, not in messages or typed words, but in the look on my face and the unspoken question I know you'll ask me, and how I will answer just by nodding and smiling. And we will have said a thousand things without saying them.I knew nothing about the wild love of long distance. I knew nothing about how the bridges it builds withstand the longest days and heaviest hearts, how the spaces of Skype and these two blogs and how you write my name on an envelope, they are spaces that are gifts, too. And I am the first to say, to you, to whoever might read this, that the distance aches and hurts and the dip and sway of it sometimes knocks me over.But I'd not be me if I didn't admit to you, that more truly, I knew so little of this, how beautiful it is. How wondrous they seem now, the people I thought foolish for trying something I called impossible. How beautiful, how brave. How I now want to call each of them up and say, "I need you to know I see your courage and your strength, how you wove the threads that kept you, cocooned in love." How I want to tell them that the ache is agonizing and how I miss you,but how their ache, and ours, is still beautiful.Love, always,hilary

on car rides and kate rusby (a letter to preston)

Some of you know that last year, my friend Preston and I started pondering theology out loud in letters. He writes on Tuesdays, I write on Thursdays, and we wander through Gossip Girl and workloads and grace and mystery and espresso. Won't you join us? You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,Thank you for your letter this week. I'm glad for the PhD, the active cooking life, the moments where you pause and realize you are in graduate school in theology, doing many of the things you once claimed on your front porch you believed you would do. I'm glad, too, that you are keeping the doors open and allowing the Holy Spirit to move freely.   You write about writing in a way that reminds me of Rilke, and all the many voices that I imagine whispering that if you see beauty, you must share it somehow. Perhaps it's through writing or a good martini. Perhaps it's through volunteer hours in the nursery, or long walks with friends. But we are called to share what we have been given. And I'm glad you share so generously with us.I have been sick this week, a cold rambling through, and today I slept and listened to Kate Rusby and watched Gossip Girl (I cannot make up my mind about Blair and Chuck and Blair and Dan). And as I was listening to Kate, it rained outside, and I drank tea and remembered.I remembered how my dad and I used to listen to her. My high school was half an hour away, near to where he worked, and so in the mornings through the year we left the house at 7:01 am. I'm a horrible morning person, silent and wrathful at being dragged out of bed, and at first we drove in with NPR Morning Edition. When Dad's friend introduced him to Kate and her beautiful, haunting voice in form of the CD Ten (a compilation of her most popular songs), we abandoned the news to travel to England. We learned the words, and learned the space. We bought her other CDs, had specific songs that we skipped and others that got a second play.We stopped at the same Dunkin' Donuts every day for coffee and two doughnuts, one for him, one for me. We would sit with the car on in the parking lot, and the whole first year of middle school I would make him wait until 7:35 to pull away for the last ten minutes of the car ride. I was scared. I loved it, breathed it, believed in it, but I was also scared of it. School wasn't home. I didn't know how to be me. I didn't know how to trust others or myself.I wanted to stay close to my dad, in that silence, the car and Kate Rusby. That space helped me carry home with me when I slammed the car door and walked into math class. Her singing, and his quick hug each morning are among the greatest treasures of all those years at my beloved school.I think this makes me a homebody. I want to steady the world, for myself and for others. I want the sweetness of routines. I want Kate Rusby in the car every morning driving to school, skipping track 11 as we round the last 3 minutes and trying to time it exactly. I want the space Dad and I made for each other with her singing and our coffee and doughnuts. I want to carry that kind of space with me, offer quick hugs and regular coffee and familiar music, my hands held out to steady others.I think that might also be why I haven't written about the edgier things on this blog. Part of me really wants to, wants to write about women and work, write about politics or controversial theological problems, and I find myself writing about the steadier things. The things of home, of steady hands. I remember when Anne of Green Gables is talking to Gilbert, and she says, "But I went looking for my ideals outside of myself, I discovered it's not what the world holds for you, it's what you bring to it." I think I often do this - go looking for ideals outside of myself. But my ideals are the things of home, of car rides and Kate Rusby, of stillness and steadiness. And I think, for the first time, I'm beginning to love that.Love,hilary

dear hilary: only a glimpse

Every once in a while, I want to share with you something from my former blog (you can visit it over here). Today this letter to myself struck me, and I wanted to share it with you, and remember together the long kind of patience.

Dear Hilary,

I hit a wall in a friendship with someone not long ago. I wanted to connect, to reach out beyond myself and towards them. I wanted to make them feel at home in my heart, and I wanted to know the real answer, the messy and uncertain answer, that lies beyond what they say to just anyone. But they didn't let me in. They held me at arm's length, kept me at a distance. They were quiet. And now I'm at a loss - I want to know them, really know them. I want to be a part of their beautiful story. But I don't know how to enter that space. Can you help me, Hilary? How do you coax someone out from behind their walls?

Love,

Eager to be friends

Dear Eager to be friends,

The short answer to your question is: you wait. The long answer to your question is: you wait. The middle sized answer is, yes, you know this - wait.

It's that simple, and that difficult. Since we've done the simple, maybe we should talk for a brief, fleeting moment about the difficult. What's difficult about this waiting, this sitting outside someone's heart and wondering if they're going to emerge, or if the doors and windows are locked tight? What makes the "no" they gave you sting so much?

I think there are probably a thousand answers to this dilemma of yours, and I can't pretend that mine are the wisest or the most beautiful, the most elegant or the gentlest. But I empathize with you, with our hearts and minds colliding with other people's locked doors and windows, with an eagerness to be near to someone meeting a hesitation on the other side. It's difficult because you're eager, sweetheart. It's difficult because what you're impatient for is a good thing.

You've recognized something in them, something beautiful, something true. You've been compelled by their mind or their heart or both, you went on a walk around Coy Pond and imagined being friends - really, truly friends - with them and holding their stories in your suitcase heart. You caught a glimpse of their glow and you want to be close to them. 

That's a good thing, love. It means you're paying attention to what is miraculous about people. Your eager heart is anxious to invite everyone inside. It's wild love. It's good. But at the same time it is good, it might not be time. And in love, timing is everything.

I don't mean timing as in - can you stay friends long distance, or you just met three seconds ago and you're leaving so it's all over, or you're moving to Antarctica or something. No, I mean the timing of our hearts. When we're ready to be vulnerable, to draw near to each other. When we feel the tug together. When we are willing and able to unlock doors and windows, to let our glow, well... glow.

You can't rush people into being ready to share their glow with you. You can't demand that they reveal the hidden treasures of their heart. You can't force someone you care deeply about to care at the same time, in the same way, in the same place... The "no" and the distance is difficult because your heart is hanging on the end of the line. The "no" is difficult because you see what it lovely in them and you want to rejoice in it. The "no" is difficult because you worry that it means you're not worthy enough or deep enough to contain the glow they carry inside them.

But can I tell you something, Eager? It is not a question of whether you could carry their heart. It is a question of whether or not you are meant to carry their heart right now. And you can't force or rush the answer to that question. 

The answer is "wait." Let the glow emerge in its own time, in the time that is right for who you are and who you want to become. Don't try to persuade or sweet talk them into letting those walls down - let time and wind and rain and laughter bring them down all on their own. Concentrate on loving what you do know about them, enjoying the wild gift of them... and make your heart warmer.

Wait, love. And while you're waiting to discover what you're going to be, whether you are going to be friends or lovers or simply two strangers who smile at each other? Give thanks for the glimpses of the glow.

Always, give thanks for the glimpses.

Love,

hilary

when what is lost is found

Why do I always decide to deep clean the boxes under my bed when it's humid? I shuffle papers aside, pausing to reread the titles of my academic rambling - The Fractured Definition of Motherhood, Jacques Maritain and the Crisis of Europe, a paper on Reinhold Niebuhr and another still on the theology of knowledge in St. Thomas Aquinas. I stroke their pages now speckled with dust, and add them to the growing pile next to me.

All I really want is to find extra picture frames, books, things to litter on the shelves in my new office at work. I hit repeat on the new Maroon 5 song, feel the sweat slide its way from my hairline down my neck. I'm sore and tired, and my heart is sore and tired, too. As I push the last box back under the bed, another, smaller box falls out. I look at it. It's the box my poetry teacher gave to me when I saw him three or four Christmases ago, when he was back from his travels. He brought the box to me as a gift, a reminder. I can't really remember the conversation we had, our lattes getting cold while I felt the edges of the box with the palm of my hand, traced the carvings and the delicate small stone at the top. "Keep something special in here," he had told me.

I'm trembling, trying to remember what I kept in here. Is this where I put the note from my best friend, the one she hid in between stones in a random archway in Arles, France, that I found a year later using only a piece of Moleskin notebook paper with scribbled directions? Is this where I kept the locket I lost in third grade, and found again when I left elementary school? Is this where I hid my fearless, brave self?

I open the box and the ring winks at me. I scream. It's the ring my grandmother gave me on my eighteenth birthday. It's the ring that my grandfather gave her on their fortieth wedding anniversary. It's my birthstone. "I've been saving this one for you, Hilary" she told me four years ago when she pressed it into my hand. "It's yours." I slip it back on my finger, feel it glide into place. My skin welcomes it back, this part of me that I had tucked so carefully away.

Sometimes when we try to protect things we lose them.

Sometimes we hide the most precious things when we could wear them.

Sometimes we treat each other like thieves who are only hoping to hurt, instead of like friends who are only hoping to love.

And a worry rises in me sitting on the floor with grandmother's ring on my finger and the fan humming and Maroon 5 playing. What if when I hide my heart I forget where it is? What if when I try to stay safe, I get lost?

And then I remember: what we hide is also what we rediscover. What is lost is also what is found. And oh, the rejoicing when we find it.

grace, and peace, and love to find again those things which are lost,

hilary

dear hilary: while we're young, love wild

Today I'm linking up with some folks over at Preston's space to write about the voice we have as young people. So the letter today asks a simple question, and I offer my rambling, here-and-there thoughts. I hope you'll head over there and read what others are sharing!Dear Hilary,People tell me that I'll understand things better when I'm older. That I will learn the ways of the world after I've been in the world longer, that I should just give it time, and then things will become clearer. Not to be too blunt, but is this really true? What about the young ones? What about me - I'm 22, and I want to protest that I know something of love and loss and living, even if I only have a glimpse, even if I'm at the beginning. What do you think?Love,young oneDear young one,We have long been obsessed with time, from the Ice Age to the Babylonians to the Egyptians and beyond. We've wanted to measure ourselves, our crops, our pregnancies. We have used cycles of the moon, the sun, the journey of constellations. We have used water clocks and sundials. We scratched lines in cave walls.We know that we live in time. We know the sun rises and sets, that gravity pulls tides to the moon and back (though I still imagine some days that the moon and the water long for each other, and we are simply watching their love story). We know special and general relativity and the concept of time in multi-dimensional calculus. All this good knowledge, all this wonder, all this learning.We want to put it to use everywhere we go. But the one place perhaps it is not useful is here: in the measurement of our mysterious selves, in the measurement of a wise spirit and a humble, wide-open heart. You see, young one, hearts do not learn according to calendar time. This is of the utmost importance. The time it takes to learn a lesson about letting someone walk away from you freely (like I wrote about last week) takes some people a year in high school, others a gut-wrenching breakup at thirty, still others much later in life. Some of us learn the ache of unrequited love in seventh grade. Some of us learn it teaching seventh grade.I don't know how wisdom really works, young one. But I know it does not arrive because you reach a magical threshold called "old enough." I know it comes to the heart that welcomes it. I know it comes to those who are patient, peace-loving, quick to love and learn, willing to forgive and be forgiven. You do not get wiser because you got older.It is true that in the grace of time, we are allowed to relearn and learn deeper the lessons we most need. It is true that the older ones among us have lived more stories (maybe ten to each one of ours) and can show us the shape of love and hurt and anger and reconciliation in many stories, not just the few we know. But we who are young must offer our stories too - because we alone have lived them inside and out, because in each story, however young, is the thumbprint of Love Himself, come down in mystery and grace and nearness to teach us. We all know nothing in the face of our Teacher. So while you're young and beautiful I urge you to love wild. When we get older, we often shrink back into the shadows of what seems safe. We cling to the familiar. We look for patterns and habits, gentle fences to keep our lives just as they are. So you who are not yet afraid of changes and new spaces? Spread your wisdom to your elders. Remind them that with Love, nothing is to be feared. Remind them that to be new again really does mean to be wild in grace and rich in compassion. Remind them that we are all little children drawing water from a dazzling stream.And while you're young, teach this world to trust.Love,Hilary 

conversations with ourselves (guest post at See Preston Blog)

It's just a brief moment, as I lean towards home, after we celebrated my sister's marriage to a wonderful man, after we danced to "Baby" by Justin Bieber and "Ain't No Mountain High" ... after the vows and the tears and the heart-stopping beauty of it all... but I wanted to share my guest post from earlier this week with you. 

Y'all know Preston already (and I hope you read him, too) from the letters we write on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I got a chance to share my thoughts in his space on Thursday. Won't you take a second and join me over there? It's a conversation, a letter, to myself. 

Dear Younger Self, 

Four years from where you are, you will be a college graduate. You will have lived in the warm and safe space of good friends and you will have made space for them in your heart, too. You will not know what you want, but you will know what you dream of. You will know what you love. This will take some gut-wrenching talks and some fights with yourself. Let Italy inspire you. Let ambition take a backseat to joy. I promise you the doors open wide and surprising and suddenly the Lord, He is with you and quick to bless you. Wait for that moment - wait for Him. 

I write this to you because I need to tell you something: I forgive you.

Keep reading, over at Preston's? 

Love, hilary