fragments of glory

I tell him that it is like this: when you write, when you create, you carve out of the ordinary a sculpture, a story of the beauty of God, a story of the beauty of your own being that moves and shifts and desire and builds. We are meaning-seekers.You carve out with pen to paper, and fragments fall around you, dust swirls through the air. You don't always notice, how the pieces fall to the floor near your feet, because you are seeking and carving the big story, because you want to know the wildest version of it - the biggest vision, the brightest horizon.But I want to know the fragments.The fragments are glorious - the stories of the one afternoon of insignificance, where you ran along the same path you always run along, but perhaps, for a moment, you thought about how nature teaches you to sing of God. The stories of the coffee where you were ten minutes late and she forgave you, with the fullness that astounded you as you slid apologetically into the chair, as you listened to her, and as you realized that perhaps forgiveness is simple like bread, like manna, daily, quiet, and good.The fragments are glorious - the days driving along the highway alone, the seemingly unimportant and anonymous stories of how you sat in the library writing a paper for yet another class you don't totally understand the meaning of, the yet-again of school meetings and parent-teacher conferences and board rooms and emails.I tell him, that's what is beautiful about blogging, isn't it? That in the spaces we create online, we don't have to always seek a sculpture of the most beautiful, biggest story? That sometimes, we can pour out the fragments of our lives, watch them spill over the edges of the table, and see -they are fullness of glory. I used to want to quit blogging every other day, stepping half-in and half-out, convinced that without a big story how could I possibly be considered a writer. I spent so much time at the foot of my bed with this thought, that I didn't have a sculpture, a grand weaving together of things, a purpose in my words or in my tiny online home.But then it is years later, and somehow I have still promised that I would do this thing that I hardly know how to do, that I would still write, and I am sitting on Skype with him and feeling the ache of those miles, and I wonder, out loud, about the fragments of story that so often fall to our feet. I tell him that this is his gift - that he weaves back the fragment bits and reminds us of the glory that lies in them. That this is what he teaches me to do.And perhaps that is the beauty of these online spaces, that they are wide and broad and wild enough to show the light of our everyday, to reveal that our fragments are glorious.Light shines through fractured windows, doesn't it?Maybe these are all fractured windows with the fragments of our glorious, every day living.Maybe that's what makes them so beautiful.Love,hilary

last night, I almost quit

You wouldn't believe it, would you? That it should sound so easy, to leave words behind?To give them up.To give, them, up? How could I? Haven't words always been my bones, my bricks, my feathers and wings and roots? Haven't they been the way I learn and forget and learn again? Hasn't it always been writing, mine the quick answer to Rilke's lingering question - whether I must write, else die. Haven't I always said yes? But I almost quit last night.I imagined myself cutting loose the threads that moor me to a space in a corner of the world so much wider than I understand, or fathom; I imagined how it might be, to put away documents in folders, occupy my mind with the already-told stories, the things that are unique and breathtaking and here, in front of us.I imagined silence replacing comment counting. I imagined tucking up my words like quilts in attic boxes. I imagined no more bending and breaking beneath the words and their silence and their speaking.No stories that begin and end in the unfinished places, no more hitting "publish" on a post you're never quite sure resounds the way you  thought it would.No more desperate cherishing of lithe or luminescence or blessing, of caress and carries, of child for the way their sound looks as it finds an ear, the way they build up meaning, the way they are.It’s not the writing of it, it’s the reeling of the writing. It's what I think I could write, if only. But, yet, then, I plaster together words with commas and prayers and they flutter groundward, and there still isn't a good answer, or maybe any answer.I’m bravest and most afraid here.I imagined quitting to fold up inside a safer version of myself; I saw my years stretching out before me, word-less. I pressed my hands to my face, and thought I could see me, not undone by a poem or the way I cannot hear a character speak, not worried over the choice of light and illumine.Brave and afraid, I write still.Brave and afraid, I publish a post where I talk about the almost-quitting, the question of why someone would try this work of penning  glory into syllables and vowels.Brave, and afraid.Love,hilary

why love must be wild

I named this blog almost a year ago - the wild love.I imagined that we would, that I would, live that way. I remember finding the name as I sat at work on a Friday afternoon, in the middle of the ending, with only a few weeks left before everything changed. I remember trying it out, running the syllables over my tongue like water. The wild love. It sounded right.When I was born, my dad named me. I've heard the story told a thousand ways, and there is something precious and funny about it. My name, Hilary, means cheerful. My middle name, Joan, comes from John, and it means, God is gracious.When you ask my dad how he came up with this name, he'll tell you that Hilary just seemed right. He'd always loved the name - but it was decided almost like a lightning strike: this was what I was going to be called, and that was it. Joan is for a dear friend of my parents, and because, I think at the time, Hilary Joan sounded just right to them.Hilary Joan. Cheerful, God is gracious.If ever names might help us imagine who we are meant to become...And now, my blog is just shy of a year old, taking its baby steps into the world. There have been a few posts that have made their mark on me, perhaps on you, dear readers. There has been a lot of pondering. There was been a lot of asking God in the midst of this, the hard of 22, how and why things are as they are. There has been hunger, and fulfillment, a confirmation, a wedding. There has been the loud voice of the Holy Spirit across the waters and my own timid replies.But here I am, with this, the space that I have named, and I wanted to ask again - why must love be wild? Because we are a people too desperate to love only inside the conventional, accepted boundaries. We are a people too hungry, too alive, too beautiful, too broken.Love is wild because we are wild. Because we are made in the image of Someone Wild, Someone who sang out for freedom, who defied logic, who broke his Body and poured out his Blood and saved us once and every day.Love is wild because there is a bird sitting inside our ribcage, like Emily Dickinson said, the thing with feathers perched in us, and the only way to hear it sing is to start singing.I'm only just about a year into this blog and I named it something before I could have known how deeply I would want to become the very thing I had named.I want to live with a wild love: a wild love for words, for readers, for strangers who I pass on the sidewalk and dear friends who stay up late on Sunday nights just to make sure I'm okay. I want to live with a wild love that hopes and forgives and says that "no" is sometimes a beautiful word and that "wait" is sometimes a promise and that "why?" is sometimes the answer itself.I'm Hilary Joan - a name with meaning that still feels a little too big for me. And the blog still feels like that some days. But I want to link hands with you across these words, across these miles and time zones and ages, and love wild.Love,hilary