when you wake up to the desert

In the cross, in the cross, be my glory ever, til my ransomed soul shall find, rest beyond the river. ~ Fanny Crosby, "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross"One day you wake up to the desert, angels and ladders and wrestling long over. You've wandered far from whatever Ebenezer you raised the last time you felt sure you heard God speak a word over you, the last time the song meant something in your mouth and on your lips, the last time there was fire in your bones singing out for the Holy Spirit. One day, you wake up, and it's a fine day, it's a good day even, but it's all dull unholy light, it's all regular sand, regular camels with regular burdens. You can't complain, can you? Because of course this is the rhythm of the spiritual life, because wise people told you that and you believed them, or thought you did.One day you wake up to the desert.--I'm not a spiritual mother or an ascetic. I like remembering my Ebenezers raised because I like remembering that there were moments I could raise a monument to, that there were times I felt a dove descending or a ladder rising up from the ground. I like feeling my footing on the water and thinking, here I am. Where has all that been these last few months? Where have I been? I started to ask myself why I couldn't muster up the vision to see ordinary as extraordinary or to see miracles as what they are or to see things aflame with God. A cardinal on a tree looks just like a cardinal to me. Where I walk the leaves crunch with just the regular sound of leaves crunching.Is it possible that sometimes, there is no amount of trying that will make the world flame in glory before your eyes? Is it possible that sometimes it's not a matter of looking long enough or praying beautifully enough, but some wood is just damp, smelling like those cold February mornings in the woods behind my college where I used to run? And I loved those woods and I close my eyes now and I smell them but they do not rustle with some hitherto unfound holiness. They stand quietly in my memory. And that's all they do.--The other Sunday in church we sang this hymn, and the third verse sat like a stone in the palm of my hand, smooth and weighty. Near the cross, O Lamb of God, bring its scenes before me, help me walk from day to day, with its shadow o'er me. Perhaps this desert is that shadow, a glimmer of the shadow, accompanying me day to day. Perhaps, oh Lamb of God, this is both desert and shelter, both oasis and aridity, and perhaps even in the moments the world does not spark and catch flame, when no ladders descend, no voice beckons forth -then, when the trees stand quietly, the shadow keeps watch.Love,hilary

a heart black and blue (for mothers)

"There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blueWhen they hold 'em to the light, you can see right throughEvery dreamer falls asleep in their dancing shoesI may say I don't belong here, but I know I do" - Iron & Wine, "Thomas County Law"

Three years ago, I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car, driving up the highway after my first maternal-fetal medicine ultrasound with my son, Jackson. We drove back holding our hearts in our hands, beating mercilessly with the news, the medical lingo, the printout of three-dimensional photo capture. Jack was missing an eye, Jack's chin measured small, Jack had cleft lip and palate. We kept the silence that seemed the only language we could both speak.Somewhere, I imagined as we drove, there was a country of mothers in fields with beautiful baby bumps and smiles, with easy pregnancies, with children ushered into life with no worry or intubation or surgery or possible threat. "Somewhere, on the far side of other hills", I believed, there was a land I was supposed to reach, a place where motherhood looked the way I had always thought it would, where the aches were always sweet and the tears always tinged with laughter.But how to get there, holding this news, this ultrasound? How to win back that song and join the ones singing?--I began to mother in the NICU, I began to mother in the surgical pre-op, I began to mother with a beast pump and an alarm set for every two hours. I began to mother by untangling my son's wires and reattaching his pulse oximeter. And what of my own wires, those images of what it might have been, me perfectly coiffed and only slightly tired, nursing a baby in the dim hours of the morning? The NICU cut them, quick and to the core, and there I was in a nest of broken wires, old expectations, unfinished images. I still had those ultrasounds creased from living in the pocket of my shorts all summer. I still thought I could hear other mothers singing a song of something that had been taken from me.--There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. Three years later, I hear this line as I'm driving to Target, paused at a stoplight. There is quiet in my car, a rare thing, my son looking out the window and my daughter asleep in her carseat. I am only half listening to the song, but the line pricks at me, and as I pull the car into the road I find that I am crying.There was no other country, there is only this one where all mothers, however they became them, live with a heart black and blue with love, bruised with the work of giving and aching and worrying, the work of cherishing and holding up again and again their children to the light, to see the wonder.Our hearts, wherever they come from, NICU or birthing tub, adoption paperwork or emergency c-section, worn with loss or grief, with worry or hope, measuring doses of baby Tylenol or repositioning a tracheostomy, going to physical therapy or solving another math problem-this list that lives endlessly in us and around us,it has worn our hearts to the same patterns, widened them to the same infinite space, made them translucent when held up to the light.--Three years ago, driving up the highway in that poorly kept silence, I believed I would not belong here, in this country of motherhood. I believed that I had no way to reach or understand mothers whose stories were different. I thought I would be forever separated from them, walking hallways alone, signing consent forms and pumping behind a screen, memorizing the procedure to clean and change a trach tube and a g-button.There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. We all belong, no matter how we began, no matter the shape of our aches or the number of our tears. We all belong, no matter the manner of birth or the length of time we've been at this -our hearts are the same color.Held up the light, we can see right through. We can see each other.Love,hilary

to a poet that I love

Delighted with myself and with the birds, I set them down and give them leave to be. It is by words and the defeat of words, Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt, That for a flying moment one may seeBy what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. – Richard Wilbur, from the poem “An Event” (from his book Things of This World)

Dear Richard Wilbur,You passed away this fall, just a few weeks before I read this poem for the first time. I never met you, a great regret of mine. I don’t know that I would want to tell you something about the reading of this poem, what it meant to me, how it changed me, because I think the poem knows—and you its creator knows—that such conversation would fall immeasurably short. Words, and their defeat. The flying moment, the “drunken fingerprint across the sky!”So I want to thank you for that very thing, the defeat of words.When I first determined that I would be a writer, after I had read East of Eden, before I had read Peace Like a River, I believed words could be caught, slippery silver fish in a rushing stream. You wade in with your jeans pulled up over your knees, barefoot, sliding on the worn down places in the rocks, catching bits of grass between your toes. You press down, commanding gravity to hold you, and you slice the water with your hands and come back with a rainbow of scales thrashing in your fist.I never got beyond the catching in my imagination. I have no idea if I thought you release them back, or if I thought you took them home triumphant.The words never obeyed me. I pressed my feet into the river bed and I fished for them and they darted past me. I sat in front of the computer sure that words would emerge if I wedged my mind into creative crevices and when they didn’t I was furious with myself. I am a writer! I shouted. I am a poet! But words do not have ears, no matter how many ways I try to make them into living creatures. Words do not obey, no matter my metaphors. No, words are like and unlike the black birds of your poem –

“they tower up, shatter, and madden spaceWith their divergences, are each aloneSwallowed from sight, and leave me in this place”

Mr. Wilbur, how did I not understand?Your poem is a gesture, a promise that the life words echo is infinitely too rich for the “nets and cages of my thought.” Your poem gave me permission to believe that part of the work of being in the world is to abide alongside beautiful things, things that move and change, like the fish in the stream or the trickle of rain on my left shoulder when I stand in the right spot on the porch.We need this permission, to abide alongside the beautiful, to permit it to change without needing a pen to pin it down. We need permission to stand among the things that change in the world, and in ourselves, and know that the living of those things will defeat the words we try to put to them. Only then, I think, can the words take their place as what they are –Gestures, echoes, signposts along the way of what we have loved.Mr. Wilbur, thank you for defeating my words, which gave them back to me.Love,hilary

so much refracted light

For the past six months, I lost my words. I reminded myself, put on a weekly to-do list, but when I sat down, the words seemed hazy and far away. I kept a list of things to write about, I tried rising early in the morning or staying late into the night. I tried to coax them with prompts and questions, I tried to bully them with deadlines and numbers and visibility.But when I looked for the words, I found myself sitting in an empty, white room. The room was bright, seemingly lit from within, as if the walls were light, and there were no words accompanying me. I searched my pockets for even the most steadfast ones, metaphors and images I've stored up like breadcrumbs from better poets, and even those were gone.I was alone with the light, and I had no way to explain the experience to myself. I had no way to mediate it, no way to keep it at arm's length, no microscope to place between me and it, the quiet hum of the light itself.--When I first began to write in earnest, it was in a Harry Potter notebook in the sixth grade. I wrote the tiny stories of sibling injustice and lunchroom betrayal, the way that someone convinced me while we were decorating a bulletin board down the first grade hallway that I should tell them who my crush was, only for them to turn around and tell the person. I wrote in pink ballpoint pen, staining the edge of my left pinkie finger where my hand rubbed the words as I went.--And now it has been months of sitting alone with an unmediated light. Each time I sat down, telling myself, the words will come if you just try to write, I encountered the same silence, the same empty, humming room, the same me but without the words to sit between.I couldn't think of a single elegant sentence, even in the very season I most commanded the words to arrive.--So what can I tell you about the wordless season? What explains why I was sitting in a room full of light - why that seems the best metaphor - when the words weren't with me?It is easy for me to choose words over the experience that lies behind them. I can spend twenty minutes planning how to express one minute of living. I can ignore the feel of the sunlight because I've decided that I must find the perfect image to give to someone else of that sunlight.And so, when the words become sparse on the ground, then I am lifted back up out of myself, out of my need to make the words capture the moment. Then I become unselfconscious, as Madeleine L'Engle said, and I become able again to just feel the sunlight. No metaphor of its warmth, or the color it casts on Jack's playhouse in our backyard. No artful half-finished phrases marching down the page. Just me, the sunlight, the backyard.I was telling someone the other day that I think beauty is light refracted from the face of God. The beautiful here is not merely an echo, a dim fog, a shadow of something better. No, I think it is light bent and angled out and back from God's own self. For in him we live, and move, and have our being, it says in Acts, and this is a great mystery, but it is a mystery we are swimming in, a mystery that surrounds and buoys us up even if (even when) we cannot understand it.And though we often feel the air cool with passing shadows, though the light is too often veiled by ordinary and extraordinary living, this light bends but does not break. And when the words do not come, still there is a light, and still there is sun and a small red playhouse in a backyard and still there is oxygen entering our lungs.Beautiful, this refracted light.--I hope that the words are returning. I hope that I have become more willing to wait for them, to admit that there is far more we cannot say than what we can. I hope that even when I don't have a metaphor, a sentence, a poem -I still feel the light surrounding us. I still breathe it in. I still know its source.Love,hilaryP.S. My first book comes out in April! You can find information about preordering it at my publisher's website here. And you can still enter the giveaway on Goodreads here!

the watches of the night

In college I listened to one Fernando Ortega song a total of 1,0003 times, according to my iTunes clock. It was his rendering of Psalm 63, and it prayed on my behalf in hours where I thought myself unable to ever be the person I thought I most wanted to be.

I remember you at night, through the watches of the night, in the shadow of your wings, I sing, because you help me. 

In those days I was a well-worn believer looking for a story of rebirth. Or maybe I was an infant in the faith looking to appear wise and well-worn. Maybe some of both.In those days I hardly ever met the watches of the night. I stayed up too late only a few times at the end of college, once to walk the campus making only right turns to keep the conversation going, once to sing songs too loud in my roommate's car, and once, finally to say goodbye.What did I know of these hidden hours?--I am acquainted with the watches of the night. I have walked their hallways in a hospital in Temple, I have paced their floorboards and felt two babies sink into sleep on my chest at 1, 2, 3am. I have crept into the kitchen for peppermint Jo-Jo's and chocolate chip pumpkin bread and orange juice and dill pickle potato chips in the strange cravings between pumping or nursing.These are the watches of the night.Spending yourself to help another sleep, keeping company with the stars that guide only some distant sailors to safety.These are the watches of the night.The list of things undone and still to be done stretches itself and embraces me, thin ribboning arms weaving in and out. Wallace Stevens once wrote of a quiet house and a calm world, a poem that comes back now in the dark like a friend hailing you from the other end of an airport. The house was quiet, and the world was calm. You whisper it to yourself, but can't quite remember the next line.These are the watches of the night.--So much traveling I have done, in these hours I once knew only as words in a song. So many miles I have crept, belly pressed to the earth in prayer, looking for a sign of Jesus in the dust. So many verses I have sung my children back to sleep and hoped the songs were navigational stars, for in the watches of the night a weary sailor needs a guide. I feel the same, and not the same. This I still know is true: you alone, O God, are the song and the star.Love,hilaryP.S. My first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith is coming out April 3! You can enter to win a free advanced copy at a Goodreads giveaway by clicking here. So excited to share this with y'all!

when i meet my ghosts

The ghosts cling to me, thin and cobwebbed. They trail behind me. I don't notice them for 1,000 days and then I play a song, five minutes of praise and the ghosts crowd the car, clamoring for my attention. They all want to hold my hand. They all want to remind me, to whisper their moment back into life.There are 43 days of ghosts and then there are 180 days of ghosts that surround them and there are moments that stretch too far forwards and backwards to count.They are ghosts dressed in scrubs and halogen lights. They are ghosts that use hand sanitizer and take off all jewelry below the elbow. They are ghosts of footsteps and clipboards and bedsides.I tell myself we have moved farther out on the water. I tell myself that me and God, we are so much farther out, we are finally okay together again, we can talk.But when I sing that the grave cannot hold what your grace has justified, when I try to sing that this is the day that the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it then I am a living ghost, driving the old roads by the Waco airport, praying, believing for a miracle that became 43 days and two surgeries and 7,000 cotton tipped applicators and 104 trach changes and two nights where only the ghost of my heart kept beating and only the ghost of my lungs kept breathing as we suctioned and prayed and ran out of oxygen and drove to the hospital.What should I do with these ghosts? One moment I declare that they should be banished, for there is no use for them here where we are all living. And then I feel my daughter moving inside me and I see my son moving outside me and I realize that I do not want to give them up to the God whose name I sometimes cannot really speak. I do not want to know how frail my own arms are. I do not want to keep going in pursuit of him. I imagine that Peter's sinking was not just because he doubted, no, it was also weariness, because the days are long and the nights can be longer, living with the mystery of the Son of God. I imagine that the work of faith to keep your feet afloat was too much for him - how often it is too much for me. How far away Jesus must have seemed on that dark water. How far away Jesus seems to me when the ghosts remember for me how very deep and dark is the sea.This is not a story of banishing those ghosts, this is not a story of dismissing them with the fierce words of promise or the declarations of Zephaniah spread over me like a shield. This is not a story of taking respite from the storm in the Word because here the Word is in the storm, and the Word is troubled waters, in the very midst of them, not just a peaceful bridge over.But the Word of God is not a ghost.No, the Word of God is living and active, and sharper than a sword... and it pierces past my memories and the clouds of tears in the Target parking lot. There is no easy resolution. But there is encounter. Among the waves, in the water itself, there Jesus comes to meet me.It's been almost two years since I walked the hallways of the NICU. And there are songs that call up those footsteps and Subway still tastes like waiting for a surgeon's call - but now I see Jesus walking next to me. We haven't talked much about those days.But we somehow have been in them together.Love,hilary

on a lemon tree

I read Rainer Maria Rilke to my plants. They're two small bushes, lime and Meyer lemon. This year is the first I ever thought seriously about growing something, tending to it, watching over it. I have been too good for too long at letting plants die in their original pots. We bought rose bushes last summer I never planted. They scorched in the July Texas sun, and every so often I would feel a sadness come over me when I looked at them. That's how it feels, I would almost say out loud. Overwhelmed, and scorched by the sun, by the heat of the rush and bustle. I learned later that it was also the slow creep of depression, settling in along my veins, my brain quietly putting its seratonin production on bedrest. Without knowing it, my body rearranged itself to survive. It is a miracle that they do this; it is a miracle that so often we do not notice until much later.So this winter, so new to the feel of a daily pill and a gulp of water, so unsure of how to permit myself to walk slower through a quick world, I bought these plants. I positioned them near a south window. I let them drink in the winter sunlight and overheated our living room by pulling up the blinds for hours at a time. The lemon tree flowered quickly, filling me with a strange sense of achievement. Of course, when I stopped to think about it, what had I done? But I didn't worry myself with it too much. I watered and I lifted the blinds and I took credit for the first tiny lemon that sprouted. I felt a sense that the season would turn around for me. I would get better, heal quicker, return to my usual pace.And then I forgot to water the lemon tree. The lime tree is vigorous, pushing upwards with new leaves almost daily, though it is stingy with blooms so far. But the lemon, in all its exuberant growing, had five or six tiny lemons on it immediately, small and green and perfectly shaped.And I forgot to water it, and those beautiful tiny lemons, signs of my imminent return to some mythic normal, fell off. A branch or two turned brown, the green shrinking back further and further into the main stem.I wept and fretted. I brought the trees outside. I repotted the lemon tree. I watched in apprehension to see what would happen.The tree is still alive, and it's still flowering. I can't get those first lemons back. I can't take credit for its living; though I'm some part of the story of its first losses.What is this all about?When the first lemons fell, and I felt the salty taste of despair in the back of my throat, I remembered having read that reading to plants, or playing them nice music, can help them grow. I reached for the first book of poetry I could grasp - the collection of Rilke, a daily reading. I opened to that day. And it said:

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathingthat is more than your own.Let it brush your cheeksas it divides and rejoins behind you.Blessed ones, whole ones,you where the heart begins:You are the bow that shoots the arrowsand you are the target.Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall backinto the earth;for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.The trees you planted in childhood have growntoo heavy. You cannot bring them along.Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 4

It's Rilke who said that so much of everything that is most true, most important, is unsayable. And poetry is the gesture, the promise, that though we cannot say the unsayable, we can glimpse it, we can approach it.I feared the loss of the lemon tree. I feared the loss of a myth of returning to normal. I feared slowing down permanently in a world where the pace quickens, quickens, quickens.I read to the trees still, read to myself while reading to the trees. I read it out loud to the backyard and the fading Texas sun. And now it's been a few months of learning the companionship of depression and its unpredictable arrival. I do not know that I will come back to a place I've been before. I do not know that I wish to.Love,hilary

bring back everything

I wander in the thousand windsthat you are churning,and bring back everything I find.Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 55God.I pray in the cloisters of a thousand older prayers that I have to believe someone before me prayed, that I have to believe are already well worn, broken in shoe prayers.I am wandering in the thousand winds.You've brought me here to the beginnings of everything, and there are a thousand winds, each so full it seems it will take a lifetime for the words to catch it. How can I bring you back what I find?I find my old shoes on new pavement, a Texas sun planting freckles on my shoulders, a bridge over an unhurried river, the smallest breeze lifting my hair off the back of my neck between red lights, almost as if you wanted the ordinary world to come a little closer to me. The air, the sweat of the morning, the silence.How can I bring you what I find? Because he is next to me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep, and there is suddenly, finally, and all at once, the ark of marriage, as much mystery as calling and covenant and courage. Oh, the courage it is to be married, to wake up next to each other with so much more than ever can be said between you, with so much fullness, and so much wonder? How, God? How can I bring you what I find?You are churning these thousand winds, O Lord, and I am so small. How can I bring you what I find?The question echoes along the corridors of my heart, walks with me into the grocery store, when we walk down the street to talk about our days, or what has surprised us, when it is morning and the words don't seem to be there, for what it is that I want. But this is what I want: to bring back everything I find.To be a gatherer of the scattered pieces of your goodness in the world, the smallest goodnesses of muscles that move me along that unhurried river and the goodness of the man who moves with such ease in the small kitchen, his smile betraying so much more joy, the goodness of the well-fought fight, of the bigness of Texas sky or the way a phone call will pour water on a thirsty heart, of Life of Pi read out loud one morning, of country music through speakers, of running out of words long enough to be asked to listen again.This is what I want, God, to walk these cloistered prayers and to be in the churning winds and to bring you what I find.I find your fullness in these thousand winds.I want to bring back everything.Amen.Love,hilary

for when the poem makes promises

I'm a haphazard writer, at best. These days I turn to the keyboard and I find that I have little to say, that everything coming to the surface is about the waiting, this endless waiting, or about the hurry-up-and-slow-down dance we've been doing. I keep thinking that I have nothing new, that there is nothing new under the sun, to gift or to give, and I want to sigh like Anne of Green Gables, exhale all the sorrows of the ages into the world, breathe in the goodness, breathe out the worry, begin again.My wordpress dashboard tells me that this day two years ago we began here, a wild love for people and God and words and the way those things are in each other and through each other. Two years. The two years of agony and wonder that only a life lived full can bring at the same time.And there, the silver thread running through, the minnow in the shining water, is poetry.It is the beginning of every metaphor I have given in the past two years, the end of every sentence. It is the heart behind the heart I present, the asked unasked question that shivers in the dark. It is the stolen moments at work when I type to remember how to write at all, to stitch limbs with words like so much dissolvable surgical thread, hoping the body, the poetry, will heal itself. It is itself, too, spurning my company in an instant for the sticky sweetness of the afterword, the last punctuation, the ghost in the air.I started this blog with the idea that love is wild, and maybe that is the prayer which is the poem which is not either thing, but I want it to be so I can be writing about poetry, so that I can be a poet, a prayer. Love is wild. Is it?The poems command me to say yes, that it is an untamed thing, living like fire, the other breath in our lungs. Love is basic, built from what builds our bodies and yet, like our bodies, beyond its elements. Love is hormones firing in the brain and then pushing out into the kiss, the skin cells meeting, the silent late night sorting of the recycling. Love is basic, built up from the periodic tables we live in, then reaching so far away from us it takes a poem to pull it back in, takes words, takes the Spirit's speaking. And a listening ear.Poetry is that listening ear against the galaxy, against the spinning chaos, against the noise that becomes the music that still is chaos.Poetry is my surgical thread, the minnow I imagine at the bottom of the pond that most days looks too ordinary to notice, poetry what turns my gaze back towards the world in horror and awe.Poetry pulls the wild love out of me, of you, makes more of us wherever it is, sitting in dusty chapbooks abandoned by the world.Day by day, stitching us whole.Love,hilary

for when the poem hurts your pride

This is for the poems that stand defiant on the other side of the fence from you, sure that they have evaded your grasp, and you are tired, limb-tired, arms hanging off your shoulders like skinny stockings, and you are too tired to understand them.This is for the poems that read me better than I read them, aloud in my office in the eerie stillness of an evening working too late, my halfhearted defiance against the ordinary. The poems that sat contented to watch me struggle in pronunciation or in prayer, poems that I imagine laughed at my third or fourth reading where I adopted a British accent in the hope that would uncover the meaning in the page.Poems are meant to hurt our pride.They are bruising things to the tender fruit of our thinking ourselves wise or right or people with understanding. The poems tear down our defenses. The poems reveal and reveal past layers of skin and shards of interpretation to that quickening heart, the one that beats and beats and goes on beating even in the longest day.When I wind my way home on an afternoon, when I am convinced that I will be weighted and measured by the accomplishments that gather dust in the old battered shoe boxes at the top of the creaking stairs in my house, there the poems arrive.One after another they cling to me like stubborn water, in my hair, in the hollow spaces of my ears.I can hear them even now, their echoes -"so, through me, freedom and the sea" (here)"He had cancer stenciled into his face" (here)"Something there is that doesn't love a wall " (here)"Out on the flats, a heron stillas a hieroglyph carvedcarved on the soft gray face of morning."(here)That's Pablo Neruda meeting Edward Hirsch meeting Robert Frost meeting Leonard Nathan.And still, they devastate me with the promise that I am not the accomplishments, I am nothing as neat as a checklist or a perfect score. I am nothing as simple as dotted i's, for the space between a lowercase i, ee cummings, and the regal I of Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" - that is where  mystery begins.If a poem was a graph, I think, I could map its meaning, plot it, make a line of best fit to zip the untidy grammar and preserve this idea that I can be known by what I do, and by that I mean you can know me by what I presume and present.If a poem was a graph, but, then - a poem in the midst of the thought -the small clustered army of empty boxesmarches across the white desert, line by starved blue lineawaiting the signal to scatterplot, parabola, sharp V like the neat geese northboundin June.I can't even write a post about poems without being taken up with the idea of one, the promise and peril of words on paper. These poems wound my pride until it sits meekly in the corner, finally, aware that there are a million acres of understanding between me and the poem, me and the poet, and those acres in an instant no distance at all.This is for the poems that make me think I can never love poetry.Those same poems preach in my worried heart that I wanted to be taught the wild love, and they are the unrepentant teachers.These are the poems that will uncage us. These are the poems that call out our sweet, living flame.Love,hilary

on poetry (a guest post for Seth Haines)

Today I get to share over at the wonderful Seth Haines's space about poetry. About why I love it, how I love it, why it makes me move and think and wonder. Join me over here?I'm not a poet, I'm the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I'm not a poet, I'm wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I'm not a poet, I'm a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I'm not a poet, I'm a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door. I don't write poetry because I'm a poet. There'd be no point to the words, then, they'd be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I'd say, "I'm a poet" and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I'd say, "I'm a poet" because I'd want you to think I'm a good writer and the title will tell you everything.Keep reading over at Seth's place, and let's celebrate poems and poets and the way that words make this world so beautiful.Love,hilary

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

all I know how to do is read

"To write good poetry," he said, that cold afternoon, the kind where the fall burns to winter, our bodies huddled in bulky sweaters, feet crammed into rain boots a bit too small for us, pens and pencils out and at the ready over the white spaces, "you must read good poetry."This was not the first time he said these words, not even the first time he had reminded us that most of the work of poetry is reading it.We were ready to slice sentences like bread into fragments tripping over the page, to pair words the rhymed with precise, clean movements. We wanted the ease of the clicking consonants and the sticky slow rhythm of iambic pentameter. We were ready to be poets - but perhaps most of us thought poetry was the easiest art, since it had the most silence?He told us to read.It was Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda and Ellen Bass. It was Katha Pollitt and Tom Hennen and Donald Hall and Richard Wilbur and Linda Pastan and a hundred others who write into the vast world without our knowing, most of the time. Every day, a poem. Every day, a person who saw the world and who spoke it back, its absence, its presence, its earthy goodness, its salt.He told us to read, and for the first time I became hungry for words, for the way they each sound and how they flow into one sound which is many which is one meaning which is many, again. I wanted to read as I had never read before, savor the pages of the thinnest books, not the hefty pages of great American novels and trying physics textbooks. No, give me the lightest touch of pen to paper, the silence of Emily Dickinson's dashes and the desperate yawning chasm of Edward Hirsch's "Self-Portrait as Eurydice". There is something deep in the words, something I would start to grasp just as I finally let the book slip from my fingers, and with it, the memorized neatness and the words and all that was left was the impression that I had met something, been asked a question, been gifted a bit of living fire.He told us to read, and I have been reading.And not just the books in the old poetry bookshop down the side street in the heat of summer when I am falling in love with Preston, not just the poetry I find and write and make, no, I have begun to read the world.I have begun to see the way the sun rises slow in the April and too fast in fall, how there is a dance to rain against a windshield, a hypnotic, unending chaos that draws you in. I have begun to read the steps between home and the pond, the wind like Braille against my fingertips, hands moving like scissors as I run. I have begun to believe that to read the world like this is, indeed, to love the world, as it is, as it must be, as it yearns to be.It is this way with the man who shovels snow too early in the morning to talk back to the silent trees. It is this way with the woman I see making her way nervously, heels-clicking, down the sidewalk towards the post office on Saturday, the way it is with the bird chatter or the dog and his patient tail thumping the song of our mornings.All I know how to do is read, for poetry does not teach you to write, only to see everything new through the ache between your eyes and your pen, between the word you must delete despite your love of it, its syllables and sounds, because the poem itself does not need the word. I know how to read and, if I am patient even with myself, the world who is patient with me still will read me, open me up like the well-worn copy of Farmer Boy that I watched my father open, night after night, years ago.This is the most brazen command of and to the poet - read. Love,hilary

this is a place of remembrance

"I AM DONE WITH THIS!" I scream it over and over, part hysterically crying, part hyperventilating, the oxygen fighting to enter my body. "I am done. I am done. I am. DONE." Who am I talking to, on the drive back to campus to charge my now-dead phone? What am I talking about?Is it the ever present shadow of bride to be workouts, the ticker of the treadmill and the stairmaster, the well meaning tight lipped smiles of the people in the gym all out to prove we love our bodies, love ourselves, have the balance, have the motivation, the stamina?And the way that I tell myself that 382 calories is insufficient for an afternoon, add up the numbers, spend them again and again, streams of numbers divided and earned, calculated on the drive from Starbucks to work and home again, and so I climb stairs for an extra ten minutes because you must, you must, be above 400 every time. You must or else what is the point and do you know what will happen, the wild collapse?"I am done with this" - with what?With the endless looping ribbons of thought about whether it is worth writing a blog post about something as small as climbing stairs at the gym on a Wednesday, that who needs or wants to read such a thing, with the frustration that even when I start to write it I want to tell it better, that there is some other voice asking if this is the right word choice, if I would get more traffic by using some other words, if I got to the Jesus part of this quicker then I would be a better blogger, a better writer, a better Hilary.With the frustration that there is no clean telling of a story that I live in my skin and bones with oxygen that still fights to enter my body and leave it, the most common of journeys, the most transforming of journeys. With how much I have paused and deleted and revisited, thinking I will find a new ending if I hit "save" enough times.There is a Jesus part to this. There is a part about God. But I can't run there because when I run there I get pushed back into the hurricane. We have arenas of salvation, arenas of sanctification, Julie told me once. This is mine: that I am not allowed to run from the fact that I struggle, wonder, worry, count and obsess and overplan how to keep my body in the form I have chosen as right enough (but always, the enough, because there must be room for improvement, there must be more zumba classes and more pilates and more of everything else that might make me better). This is the arena of sanctification, me and God in the ring, wrestling as much with each other as with the bystanders, the voices offering those classes and the quick fixes.Didn't Jacob call the place Peniel, where he encountered God and yet his life was delivered? And wasn't it there a striving with God? And wasn't there the fierceness of blessing, the ache for it, every muscle overworked with the longing?And I build a place of remembrance between my dashboard and my heart, a remembering that somehow my life is preserved. That's the Jesus part to this story. That when I drive away from the overcounting and the oxygen fights with my body for permission to breathe again is that this whole post is a wrestling. This whole story is a wrestling.A day after I scream there is a cancelled appointment, an idea in my head that I'll go to an extra class, fit in one more day at the gym, an email to my father to ask if he can bring the gym bag I left behind with him, and not five minutes later his head pokes around the door to say he is already here, he can't go back for it.Who will say this is not all a wrestling?Nor this writing my own place of remembering that my life is being delivered?

a poem is still

There was no reason for me to fall in love with poetry that first semester in high school. We sat around a fireplace, notebooks ready, pens hopeful. But we didn't write anything right away.  Charles told us that to write poetry you must read good poetry. He told us to read poems twice, once for sound, once for meaning, that the better question is always, how does this poem mean? and not the elusive "what" or "why" that the poet so often slides by you, unconscious as water, so that it isn't until you read the poem years later that you realize it must have meant something about faith, or something about how humans hide from each other, and in hiding, are revealed. Charles told us we would read much more than we would write that semester, that to be a poet you must be a listener to the beauty and weight of words.Oh, I want to be a poet.Preston sends me prompts in the morning, ideas and quotes and snippets of things he must have overheard or imagined while he drinks a dry cappuccino before work. He doesn't give me more than a sentence, a moment, a question, but he tells me quiet in the afternoon where we sit side by side in the ordinary, he says, you are a poet, Hilary Joan. But being a poet is stillness incarnate, wild enough to sing freedom to a shuttered heart, soft enough to whisper over you in the desperation of another morning of unknown. Being a poet is love. Being a poet is listening.I've been trying to write this post for so long, to confess the dream, that I want to be a poet -and maybe I need the stillness first.Maybe being quiet here, on this blog, is about learning to listen again for the good words of others. Maybe it is not just the poems that must be still -maybe it must be me.So I will write - words on the page like this - and pray.Childhood Friend,It was a happenstance morninglooking out my windowwhile coffee dripped behind me.My husband slept to the quickrhythm of water. You ranpast - a ghost? A memory.I am no longer young enoughto drink from the well in your backyard,to prance in white dresses, splash pink floweredselves along a sloping hill behind your house,but remember with me oncehow we whispered to each otherclutching teacups in the forbidden living room,grownup ladies dressed as children,children dressed as they someday dreamed.You wore lace beforewe knew its name.Our friendship grew barefoot and wild,your mother planted roses the yearwe forgot.Seeing you again, out my windowas it rained, your figure cutting throughthe road, the morning,no longer young.I'll be listening. I'll be still.Love,hilary 

a midwife in heaven

She will go before Shakespeare.She will go before Shakespeare in the wild parade of the blessed, after the striving, after the yearning ache or the clambering up mountains to see something (was it just ourselves we wanted to see, after all?).She will come forward, who labored two new beings into the world - the mother, the child - kneeling on a cold bedroom floor in countless houses in the town, kneeling to watch that which God made, new and new again.She will be known among the crowds of the heavenly, and Shakespeare, laughing, will sweep his words aside to make room to praise her.Because this is the kingdom of God, where love is too wild to be measured, where the parade is laughing and ever laughing, at the knots we tangled ourselves in thinking if only we had the recognition or the security of it, the words embossed in prizes or publications, the fame, the knowing.But this is the Kingdom of the anonymous faithful named for all that was glorious in their calling, where the hierarchies are scattered in our abundance of eagerness, where we leave behind how we have named one another - famous or critically acclaimed or somehow not quite enough yet (oh, how often have I named myself that?) -where we leave it behind because the Kingdom is coming, and our joy sees its fullness, and so we abandon decorum and procession and we run, children again, to the throne.This is the Kingdom where a midwife marches in step with a poet, where the bankers and bakers and those who mothered and fathered six children walk through the streets, unknown by accomplishment but known by calling.And some days I sit in a train car with a man whose calling I can hear sounding in me as fierce as my own heartbeat, and I write these words on the back of a receipt from a coffee shop where I met someone two months ago and told us both what I want to write here, what I want to shout to everyone: in the Kingdom of God there is too much joy and too much wonder and too much life abundant that our ladders will be unraveled by the power of the river of living water. I write that the midwife will go before Shakespeare, and laughing, they will praise each other. She will whisper how she saw Twelfth Night once, and he will whisper that he ought to have written ten sonnets in praise of her hands.I sit in a train car in a green dress in summer, remembering how my friend, she first told me this truth: that a midwife will go before Shakespeare, that in a Kingdom where last is first, our measurements fall to pieces, and this will be joy to us.Thy Kingdom come. love,hilary

poetry is wonder (a guest post)

Hi y'all!You know something I love (while I'm sitting here in Waco, TX, with that guy who makes my heart stop)? Getting to hang out and share some words over at Hannah's space. I love her loud, wondering and curious heart - and it's a joy to share at her blog. I even got to write about poetry, and wonder, and tell a few stories. I'd so love for you to head over and check it out here.

In a night of soft rain, she lies on her bed, angled just so her feet dangle off one edge while her head rests on the lopsided pillows. She feels her stomach rise and fall with the work of breathing, the letter still resting in her hand. She wills gravity to bring it back to the floor, but it stays nestled in her fingers. She won’t let it go, because in it is the truth, the kind of truth that once you read it sears itself onto your skin, an endless repetition. So she holds the letter and she closes her eyes. There is no music playing, not fitting soundtrack, just the night of soft rain and the rise and fall of breathing.

Keep reading with me, over here?

Love,

hilary

words keep vigil

I don't remember the last time I felt this unsure about what to write. I can't remember the last time I sat here and knew the words were waiting for something I wasn't willing to wait for. The words are wiser than me.Maybe that's what writer's block is about, sometimes, a protection of your heart from the things it wants to say but shouldn't, or can't, or if it did it might tremble the foundations in the ways that destroy but do not build.Maybe the words keep watch over us. I'm not above believing that, in some mysterious way they have, in the way writers and words befriend each other, every day, and heal and reconcile and fight again. But maybe my lack of words, my sense that they are hiding somewhere just beyond my reach, maybe that is their offering of protection.We will come back to you when your heart is ready.We will come back to you when you have allowed silence to teach you as much as we teach you,when you have given us up as your birthright or your talent or your calling or your property, and remembered that were-member you.I sometimes hate how when I write I discover that there are a thousand things the words would like to reveal to me. The words find me out, hollowed by a lie I'm trying to tell or weighed down by the truth I've been avoiding. The words - about love or calling or fear or last night's conversation or this morning's prayer - the words gesture at the bigger silence I must enter. The words find me, too comfortable in what I know I can do, too sure of myself, and they look back at me from the white of the screen or the page and I see how little I actually know. I see the silence they point to - the delicate and unsayable - and I see how I hide from it.So I sit here and I wait, and I wait, and I think about how I'm trying to write a post about waiting for words that are patient inside my impatient heart, and again, even here, the words point to the bigger silence.We will come back to you - the promise -when you have allowed silence to teach you as much as we teach you - the work -when you have gotten out of the way long enough to remember that He is always speaking.I don't know what to write. But the words, somewhere beyond me, keep a vigil.Love,hilary

be, still.

Tonight I walked back to the chapel, after the black caps and gowns had paraded past, had gone out to dinner, had found their way to celebrations and shouting and the I-can't-believe-it's-here that was my own just a year ago. I walked, and walked, feeling the blisters where my shoes don't quite fit my feet, feeling the dip and pull of my shoulders after carrying the day, feeling the weight of my body pulled towards the earth.Maybe my knees knew where they wanted to go before my heart did.I sat alone in the chapel, in a back pew. I stared at the empty chairs, the empty, echoing room. There were only a few chandeliers lazy and lit, swaying almost as an afterthought of wind. We breathed, the room and I. We waited each other out. I waited, what felt like an age in the sweetly dimming sunlight, for God or maybe just for some sense of something out there, some echo of yes, we see you, from the pews and benches, from the hymnals flung in piles or the ferns beckoning me with their long green fingers.Oh, God, love is hard.It is hard to want a thing so delicate, so very unsayable, that our words gesture at it almost helplessly. It is hard to walk in a thing that I barely know. It is hard to widen my heart past the length of the day and the ache in my feet and the steady drumbeat in my left temple. I slid off my shoes - a reflex - and I folded in on myself.God, love is hard.I sat and sat and sat and sat. And nothing changed. No whisper in the breeze through the single open window. No flame of hope or joy streaming over me. No promises or reminders resounding in the empty room. I could hear the fans whir themselves to sleep. I could hear a clock keep its time. I could almost hear the slight shake in my hands against the edge of the pew in front of me. But the house of worship was quiet.I'm the girl who always wants the voice from heaven reassurance. I'm the girl who expects Him to say it loud and say it obvious, a gold star on my forehead at the end of each day, an answer when I worry. And the stillness echoed so loud I was afraid I might drown in it. Be still and know... I've never know how to do that. Be still. My mother knows how to make silence with the littlest ones on Sunday mornings. With them, she weaves stillness through their hands and toes and flailing elbows and anxious knees. The youngest learn to listen to the silence, the hollow widened space where God walks. Again, they must teach me. Again, I know so little, sitting alone in the chapel in the middle of the sunset chasing away the afternoon. I know so little about a world hollowed and lit by silence. I know so little about how God sounds; I wonder how much I have lost in not listening.But it was still in the chapel tonight.Maybe that was Him.Love,hilary

and we are hearing what we are

Last year, on this day, May 10, I wrote a letter to Preston. Something about it caught my mind when I was thinking I wanted to write something today, that I wanted to remember how much the years bend and shift with our changing weight. How gravity loves us, pulls us, releases us, how time spins, and stands still. How it all seems to change and not change and there is wonder, and there is grace. Always that. Something about this letter (originally published here) felt like it was the beginning of the right question. Dear Preston,Isn't it strange, this ache we feel for the departure we must have known was coming? I graduate in nine days - you in just two - and I'm sitting on my bed angry at the idea of leaving, as if it was a surprise tucked into my acceptance letter, a clause I didn't read. You're going to have to go from this place, it says, and I want to rebel, insist that no, we can always be here where it is safe and familiar, where it is challenging and messy, where hearts have emptied and overflowed.But then the thunderclap, as you put it, and the sweeping in of departure. And we'll never come back here, will we? Never as we are now, and the place which seems so familiar will bend with the seasons and look different when we happen upon it in ten years. Among the great and varied changes of this life, it's places changing we forget about most. Baylor and Gordon will change; the green of the quad and the presence of the coffee shop on campus and the feel of the chapel pews and the long sidewalks leading past the baseball field to the track - they will weather new conversations and new feet, new adventures and heartbreaks. These places we love most will not stand still just to watch us move. They, too, will journey on towards their fullness. The places, too, will become more fully His.I'm deep in Rilke, deep in the goodness of those words. After all this, it is Rilke who reminds me, in his gentle way, to trust and behold and marvel. Can I share just one small thing with you, because it's too beautiful to leave on a page in a book?"Orchard and Road" (Collected French Poems)In the traffic of our daysmay we attend to each thingso that patterns are revealedamidst the offerings of chance.All things want to be heard,so let us listen to what they say.In the end we will hear what we are:the orchard or the road leading past.All things want to be heard. I wish I had learned this four years ago, when the stars clamored from the night sky, when the trees whispered, when the people I passed on the sidewalk looked longingly at me, waiting to be recognized. I wish I had learned to listen to what they were saying. I missed them. There are a thousand images I might have captured, rendered permanent in words or in the silence between words; a thousand people I might have loved, a thousand books I might have read, a thousand cool rainy nights I might have walked and prayed and thought.But in the end we will hear what we are. What does he mean by this? By listening to the world, we will hear what we are. We who are so in-between, who yearn beyond the world but root ourselves in the world - how can we know what we are?We are leaving, Preston, and the departure aches in places I didn't know existed. In the traffic of my days I attend to that ache. I listen to what it says: it says I have loved. It says I have given my heart away. It says what I am is human, and to be human is to ache and love.Today and tomorrow, I'm praying that you would hear what you are in the traffic of your day: that you would hear about how you loved, and rejoiced, and ached. That you would hear how you belong to Him. That you would hear the orchard, and the road leading past.Love, and every grace,HilaryPS. A year later, still in the traffic of our now different days, still with our hearts and minds bent towards the true and beautiful - with a year of working and theology and sacramentality (things we know better know that we don't know), and a year of crowded bars and dinner parties, a year of grace that sometimes ached and always lasted - I still wonder about Rilke. I still want to hear the orchard, and the road leading past. I still think this must be about wonder.

when you can't go back to sleep

I've been waking up every morning at 3am, then again at 5, and then, finally, at 6:20 when I'm supposed to roll out of bed and open the day.But some mornings, I can't go back to sleep. I lie and look at the grey sky - the sun must be rising somewhere, I know, but I can't see it yet - and I stare up at the ceiling. I like to imagine that if I could read it right, my story would be written in neat and beautiful cursive above my head. I want to believe that if I looked for the clues to the mystery of who I am and what I am supposed to do, I could solve it.Solve the not-going-back-to-sleep, I mean, which is solving the I-don't-understand-God, which is solving the what-is-this-life, solving the find-your-place-in-the-world.When I can't go back to sleep I do math equations in my head, add and subtract and subdivide by unknown quantity "n" looking for a way out of the grey. I wrote them on a piece of paper once:Fear and hope about job - (trust in God / WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE) + a boy who must exist in the universe somewhere / messy relationships (people hurt! + people are wonderful!) ^ the power of deep friendship - how do any of us even know what friendship means! + N, unknown = the meaning of life. This problem, I think, should go on the secret mathematician's list of "the world's greatest unsolved problems." They call them the Millenium Prize Problems: P v. NP, Riemann hypothesis, Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness... and then me, with "The Life Problem."On Sunday a girl in our Sunday school asked about the word "mystery" as the teacher presented on the Eucharist. "You mean like Sherlock Holmes?" She asked. The teacher, moving the clay figure of Jesus to the middle of the table, his arms frozen in outstretched blessing over his clay disciples, paused. "Do we solve it?" The little girl asked. I nodded with her, me and my life."Actually, this isn't a mystery that we solve." The girl wasn't buying it, shot the teacher a knowing, I-bet-you-say-this-to-everyone look. I mimicked her. "This is a mystery we wonder about."We wonder about how Jesus in his outstretched embrace loves the world and moves in it. We wonder about our lives and the people we cherish and the people we hurt and the love that moves  freely. We wonder. And perhaps it is better unsolved.

Mysteries, Yesby Mary Oliver from Evidence (Beacon Press)Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelousto be understood.How grass can be nourishing in themouths of the lambs.How rivers and stones are foreverin allegiance with gravitywhile we ourselves dream of rising.How two hands touch and the bonds willnever be broken.How people come, from delight or thescars of damage,to the comfort of a poem.Let me keep my distance, always, from thosewho think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,and bow their heads.

Love,hilary