meadows and witnesses

I stare at the mantelpiece in our living room. There is a pair of baby nail clippers tucked behind one of the bookends, two small rabbit pinatas for Easter that I've waited to give Jack and June because the explosion of confetti needs to happen on our porch and not in our bathroom. In the middle we display our favorite books. These are the books I look at when I wonder why I write, and sometimes, when I wonder who I am.I run my hands along their spines: there are Davy and Reuben and Swede, Cal and Cathy, Asher Lev, Elinor and Marianne. I have read and reread, slipping into the stories like into a pool of cold water, swift and silent, my body and mind submerged in a world so different and so much the same as our own. I read these stories for the sake of entering a space where good is examined and evil challenged, where the Elphaba and Glinda are more complicated than their costumes, where there are quests to be undergone, circuses to be built, a tiger, an orangutan and a boy in a boat. I read to know their worlds and to have those worlds remake my sight.I wrote almost all of my first book, Forgiving God, with those stories watching over my left shoulder. I wrote in bursts, first one section, then another, paragraphs piling up like the laundry that sits in a corner, never quite finished, never quite complete. I would glance up at these writers and characters, and I would keep going, thinking that I would find the end of my story if I just pressed forward long enough.--I thought that the day my book was published I would feel an overwhelming sense of completion. I thought I would wake up to a new me and a new world, submerged in a new Hilary. The hours ticked by and I felt just the same, my laundry was still undone, my kids still wild and the sounds of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (Act II) still the soundtrack of our bedtime routine. I am still at the beginning, I thought. Have I even changed at all? --I think I keep waiting for a signal to mark that I've grown up, that I'm changing. I keep looking for a report card to come home in my pocket on this season of my life, a neat printed row of letters that tells me how I'm doing, the progress I'm making, whether I can go forward into the next thing. I keep looking for someone to mark and measure the seasons for me. And when the days go by in their usual blur, I am startled, frozen in place.--In ninth grade I traveled down to Texas on a road trip with my school. We were bent on finding the source of one of our school's legends, a van called Rocinante, that had broken down somewhere in Texas when the school was small enough to fit inside 15 passenger seats. We drove down through the south and I fell headfirst into love with it all - the sweet tea in Asheville, the fried okra in Montgomery at a restaurant whose wall was tattooed with the verse, O taste and see that the Lord is good, the gumbo and saxophones of New Orleans.We read this story, this story that's never left me, one afternoon in the heat of Selma while the Spanish moss wafted above our heads. And there is this line in the story, this image that hasn't left me alone - time is a meadow. When we read that, we sat quietly for a while, and tried to imagine our lives not as line but circles. It was impossible for me. I got dizzy from trying to mix up my neatly organized boxes, that steady progress and sure signs of the passing seasons.--Now I stare at my bookcase, littered with the echoes of the life that seems to work only in spirals. I have lived and relived the first few weeks of my son's life, entering and reentering rooms whose doors exist only in my memory. I live on a loop of the same motions, straightening the pillows on the couch or cradling my daughter in the dark, and there is no good measure or meter to these movements. Now I see, perhaps what Faulkner meant was not that we stop making progress, not that we stop changing -but we don't mark our change by rulers or report cards. We can't capture the people we are becoming by holding them up against a measure of completion.Instead, we walk through the meadow. We gather up the bits of our memories and hold them up to the light. We walk back through our memories, feeling how they have changed in our absence. We look at our bookshelves, how they've grown to encompass new stories, how they bear witness to the things we have discovered.I am letting go of the idea that I will feel a sense of completion, that I'll ever wake up to a brand-new self or a report card that details the seasons I'm entering and leaving.And in its place, I am noticing that there are a thousand things bearing witness to who we are becoming. I just have to pull down a story, or walk through a meadow.Love,hilary

my small span of ardent life (guest post at christie purifoy's)

Today I have the huge privilege of sharing a bit of my writing at Christie Purifoy's blog. Christie has been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered her writing a few years ago, and I'm honored to share this post - talking about wisdom, the architecture of our hearts, becoming who we are... I hope you hop on over! 

When I was in high school I was once described by a new friend as doing a kind of “butterflying” – from person to person, subject to subject, leaving conversations half-finished or always to be continued. I had, in the thoughtlessness of a fifteen year-old experiencing peer acceptance, jumped from lunches to free periods and neglected her. I hadn’t realized that she moved more carefully, finishing each thing before taking up the next one. I apologized profusely, and we went on to build a friendship in chemistry classes and after school theater. But I vowed to myself that I would change, I would abandon my butterfly ways. I would be slow, I told myself. I would be wise.Have you ever kept a promise too well? Have you ever been so good at becoming more like someone else that you left yourself behind?Keep reading over at Christie's - and if you want to read a bit more of my writing, you can learn more about my first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith over here and even order a copy from your favorite retailer!Love,hilary

when the writing happened

Five years ago, I was graduating from college, fraught with excitement. I see myself in the embroidered dress that didn't fit quite right but I wore defiantly, insistently, because it was the symbol of the woman I wanted to be - carefree, long-haired, successful, spontaneous... Isn't it funny how we imagine future selves by the clothes they will wear? How we dress up to become someone we think would be better than the person we already are?I remember driving through the silent back roads of New England towns, the dress put away, the ghost of the scrap of paper where I'd given the college boy my address hovering near my right hand. I listened to "Holocene" on repeat and furiously tried to make my mind form complicated thoughts, serve up explanations sophisticated enough for the woman I thought I could step into being.--Five years ago I longed to be a writer. I read poetry in quiet corners of campus and once I read John Steinbeck with a cold mug of coffee in front of me - the cream swirling reluctantly towards the top as the hours ticked by. I told myself I wanted to be one of those people, Marilynne Robinson and John Steinbeck and Christian Wiman, Ted Kooser and Erica Funkhouser and Edward Hirsch, people who made poems out of life and who mades living itself kindling for a flame of words.I used to exchange poetry by email with a couple of coworkers on Fridays. It didn't last, sadly, like so many of my well-intentioned plans for writing. I was so good at telling myself I was and would be and must be a writer that I didn't need to do much writing.I dressed the way I thought writers must dress. I listened to Bon Iver driving those backroads and imagined how someday I would build a world in words and a reader would drive with me and feel the slick new pavement, the sudden silence of the car wheels beneath our feet. I believed this is what would make me meaningful.--I wrote a book. I wrote it looking nothing like a writer and feeling nothing like the woman I promised I would become in order to be that writer. I wrote the book because writing it was the single thread back to Jesus I could find when the maze of the NICU closed in and I could not sleep for worrying and I could not pray for not sleeping and I could not believe what I had always believed I would believe.That is where the writing came. It stole up on me, a strange friend in the nights and I was not ready.. I had no clean Moleskin journals, no special sharpie pens for observing the world. I had not perfected the look of a writer, the feel of the words tumbling forth free. I thought writing would be like breaking a necklace of pearls - one snap, one idea, and the beauty would just spill out and clatter on the table and people would rush to snatch up as many as they could.But for me writing this book was becoming an oyster, shell rough, cemented to a rock and clinging hard at the regular chaos of the tides. Writing this book was building up a single pearl from a single grain of sand that found its way in uninvited and unexpected. My book is not the pearl, really - I think the pearl must be my whole life, my being with God, and maybe the book is the single grain of sand or maybe it is just a glimpse inside this oyster shell - a peek into the becoming of another believer.I hope, in any case, that the book is a story of this becoming.--There is so much to tell in the next few weeks - there is news of publishing the book, titles and covers and preordering and how very much I want to share with you this glimpse into the opening of Jack's story and the opening of mine, too. I want to thank you for reading this blog, this haphazard collection of snapshots. I want to thank you for following along with Jack's story in particular, for how you've listened and loved and prayed us through.This book I wrote in an unprepared season, when my table was not laid and my lamps not lit. A grain of sand and a lot of silence. A lot of my hair pulled back in a messy bun for days on end.But somehow the writing arrived, and now, soon, the book will too. I can't wait to share this with you.Love,hilary