for when it isn't time yet

I've been thinking about those big dreams we have. Sometimes people call them "the God-sized dreams." Sometimes we call them wild. Sometimes we call them brave or reckless or even the dumbest thing we've ever thought. At some point, I'm guessing you've heard yours call out to you, and you've said all these things and more about it.But the moment that we have this dream, even while we resist it and we run away from it? We also start to expect it to arrive. Immediately.We want progress towards the goal, we want to start running, we want to see the fruits of this big dream we can hardly dare to dream, and all right away.When we move across the country or the world, when we start the new program or job, when we give up the things that were familiar and safe because we have this dream of becoming something really unexpected and delightful, we unload our bags and think, "Where are you, dream?"Where is the fullness? Where is the business I've successfully started, the website with 3,000 views a day, the advanced degree with a specialization in metabolomics? Where is the person I've come to become? I've asked this almost every day since I graduated and set off to chase a big dream of writing, a dream of higher education, a dream of wild love. I drive along the same roads piled with melting snow and look at the same sunrise spilling through the black fingers of the trees, and I want to know, Why haven't I gotten my big dream yet? Do you think the answer might be, it isn't quite time?We weren't ever promised that we would receive in full what we envision at first. We weren't ever told that the dream would be anything but a hard, unknown, journey through the deep dark woods and bright fires and sunrises and years.Rumi says, "When I am silent, there is thunder hidden within me."Just because the dream you dream hasn't come true yet, doesn't mean it doesn't live and roar inside you. Just because you must walk through the many years of not knowing how it will come true doesn't mean that you were wrong about it.It just means that now is the time for your silence. It just means that now is the time for the thunder to be hidden within you.Maybe you see people around you who are thundering their dream to the world. Maybe they have the pageviews, the degree, the family, the words, the settledness you crave and envy. Maybe you wonder if that is ever going to be you.You, too, have thunder hidden within you.You, too, have a big dream that is worth a thousand years of walking without knowing where.You, too, with your suitcases and uncertainty, with your waiting and your silence, are in pursuit of a bold, wild kind of dream. Now is the time for silence as you take shape. Now is the time for listening to your roommates and friends and parents.  Now is the time to make midnight grocery store runs or watching a full season of The West Wing. Now is the time to pray in your car and slam the brakes for a turtle crossing the road.And when your thunderous dream bursts forth, and you step into the midst of it, it will roar all the brighter.Love,hilary

dear hilary: make something beautiful

Dear Hilary,I don't know what to do. I love people with this fierce love. I love their stories, coffee with them, wine with them, crying and laughing with them. I love how terrible they are, and how miraculous. But you can't make a career of that, can you? I don't think it's counseling, exactly. I don't think it's social work or psychology. I don't fit in the traditional higher education boxes. I'm not quite philosophical enough or theological enough to do that kind of work. When you ask me what I'm working on for 10,000 hours, ask me what I want to be an "expert" in - I tell you it's listening. It's watching. It's carving out spaces and times for others. I want to spend 100,000 hours listening. But who does that for a career? No one.Love,Out of the BoxDear Out of the Box,The other day I did something thoughtless. I pushed my way into a conversation where I very, very clearly did not belong. I did it because of a bunch of things that are only half relevant to the situation: jealousy and desire and insecurity and the laundry list we always list for each other and ourselves. And, so very graciously, I was reminded of that.But something miraculous happened when I did that. Something that I have to tell you, Out of the Box, makes me believe that you are in the right place, wherever you are, doing the right thing, whatever it is. The miraculous thing is that I learned something from it.Out of that awkward situation, and the careful grace of the people who reminded and called me to account, I learned something about boundaries. I learned about what my jealousy/desire/insecurity can yield. I saw lived out in front of me the reality of our careless movement in the world being chaos and hurt to others.It shook me up. It worried me. It gave me the knot in my stomach, the one I get when I fear that I am, after all, just a disappointment. But I learned. And this is the kind of miraculous, mysterious, beautiful alchemy that happens when we take what happens to and around us, and we build with it. We expand on the inside. We build bridges. We are opened wider and, as a consequence, we are filled with more. And, as a consequence of that, we pour out more.So. You say this is what you want to do? You say this is your 10,000 or 100,000 or 10 million hours. This listening. This alchemy. This making beautiful the things that happen to people. I say, Love, what are you afraid of? You are in the right place. Because that is a big freaking dream. Because it isn't a dream that you achieve by graduate schools or meetings or promotions or raises. It isn't a dream that has a ladder.You will only begin to realize that dream if you live out everything in front of you so forcefully, so laughingly, so achingly wrong and right and wrong again, that you learn from it. You will live inside this dream only if you expand on the inside. You will live inside this dream only if you make beautiful things of your stories.Spend 10,000 hours listening, yes. But spend it listening to yourself, alongside all those others. Spend it striking out in an attempt to write down these beautiful things and failing miserably. Spend it watching the world and telling us what you see. You have to practice this work inside yourself if you want to pour out for others. You must take that stupid thing you did and accept it inside yourself and listen to it. You must take that situation you refuse to acknowledge is happening and accept it into yourself and love it, and listen to it.To make a life of this (because it's a life you want, not a career), you must be willing to do it for yourself. To offer a candle to others, to share your vision of all that could be, of all that might be, you have to have that kind of vision for yourself. Stop worrying about the ladders and labels, the unknowing, the strikeouts of what you are and are not and what jobs and what cities and what barely-paying-the-rent stories you live. And go make something beautiful of it. When, and only when, you are willing to believe that this very story you are living in is right, because it is yours, because it is bigger than you: then you will live inside that dream. Oh, and how we will be blessed.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the tuning fork

Dear Hilary,I want to please other people. I want to do whatever will make them happy. You want 100 photocopies in 3 minutes? Done. You want a strategic plan for the future of an organization at this college? Done. You want me to be there, run this errand, listen to this problem? I would love to. But then I run headlong into this wall. I really want to be a writer. I really want to be a counselor, of some kind. I really want to put writing and counseling together in some strange beautiful combination, and I don't want to lose threads of theology, or of my love of French, or my love of theater... When I ask people what I should do, they tell me that I would be a great PhD student, of history or political science or philosophy. They tell me I could run an organization, a school even. I want to please them, and I don't want to disappoint anyone's dreams. Help?Love,Afraid to DisappointDear Afraid to Disappoint,Our piano is out of tune at home. The keys clink strange half-tones, and I swear I can hear it groaning when someone asks it to sing one more rendition of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." Have you ever watched someone tune an instrument? They take that strange fork instrument and hit it against something - your knee, or a piece of plastic or wood, the door frame, or something. And then they hold it up to their ear to hear it ringing. The air moves between the two tines of the fork and the note - a middle C, or an A - becomes the foundation for the rest.I have been thinking in these last few months that certain loves in our lives are like a tuning fork. They give us the foundation for the rest, a measure against which we can understand how other things might fit into our lives.Sometimes it's terrifyingly clear that they don't sound the same. I do not love everything in the magnitude that I love writing. I do not breathe, and ache and live in biology; I do not yearn for one more hour with a potter's wheel or a linoleum block printing press. And why should we be afraid of this? We will never be able to do everything, anyway. In the small amount of time we are gifted, why shouldn't our hearts be caught up in the work we love most?I think you ache to write. I think your body physically feels the need to put words on paper. Why else would you write? I think you are beginning to tune the piano of your life by the writing tuning fork. So strike it and listen. Does counseling sound like that? Does teaching? Does directing plays or traveling to France? Does politics, or philosophy, or history?You write to me that you don't want to disappoint others in their ideas of what you should do. I can understand that. You don't want to say no to a career in history or political science or philosophy, partly because you love these professors and mentors. You want to honor their work, affirm the value of their field. That's admirable. But, Afraid to Disappoint, I have to tell you that the only sure disappointment in this life is living less of you. You are the unlikely combination of counseling, writing, French, history, politics, philosophy, and faith. You are the unlikely wedding planner meets chemical engineer. You are the unlike-everything-else musician turned playwright turned nanny turned environmental advocate...Being that, that strange impossible combination, takes everything you've got. It will cost you the security of pleasing others. It will cost you the comfort of a plan. It will cost you a life characterized by steps and guidelines and directions and each thing done right.It will pay you back with a heart that hurts so much sometimes you think that the person just stabbed you. It will give you back failed attempts to plan weddings and failed attempts to get a second interview and failed attempts to move to France. It will give you back uncertainty and breakups at two in the morning when it isn't said but unsaid, and you leave and lie on your bed thinking that for sure you are dead and there is no more and what else could there be, and you'll play country music and read Dear Sugar and throw the book across the room because this life will be so damn mysterious.But isn't that what you really want? To throw books across the room because of the damn mystery of it all, the deep love that roars, the brilliant failure, the moment of singular compassion, the breakup at 2am and the return flight from France and everything it teaches you?Strike the tuning fork. There isn't anything to be afraid of.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