the new shape of my heart

I cry in the bathroom some mornings when I think other people are just waiting for me to finish brushing my teeth. I stand stock-still at the sink and look at my reflection, touch the skin so effortlessly joined together over my cheekbones, the same place where the doctors will help my son's skin join back together, scar tissue so much stronger than my own.The days are getting warmer, summer bending around the next corner.I smell the lilacs every time I pass them going in and out.--These past few weeks my heart has been stretched tight like the skin across my belly that pulls as my son grows, sometimes what seems like leaps and bounds every day. It has been pulled deep and hard, the same old words repeated: take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid. Words from Jesus, not just for Peter.. My heart has learned that there are fewer words, not more, that should be anchored in us: perhaps only these:Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.--Jackson kicks often now, insisting on his presence, his being alive. His being, of course, mine and not mine. He pushes at me and sometimes it feels like he is shouting his own annunciation. You are my mom. No one else. And I am your son, no one else, and when I put my hand next to him and there is nothing but skin between us, I know this more than I know anything else:My son is beloved by God. And I must be, too, because God let me wrap my skin and self around him for all these long months of his becoming.On the mornings I freeze in the bathroom, overcome, Jackson still kicks, but more gently. He is brave for me more than I am brave for him.--.I started this post thinking I would talk about the shape of my heart, how it has changed. Then I thought it would be about how grief is a strange, unexpected guest, one that joins you some mornings with the smell of lilacs and toothpaste when you touch your skin and imagine your son. Then I thought it would be about fear, and love, and walking on water.But it is none of those things.It's just a post about my son, who kicks and moves to a music I cannot hear, whose skin will be stronger than my own, who shows me we are both God's beloved.My heart does have a new, surprising shape: the shape of being his mom.Love,hilary

when this is my anxious heart

My heart is the cave of fearful wonders, a lion made of sand, of endless what-ifs and ideas, and I am Aladdin trying to fly free of the fire, when everything I touch seems to make only more fear. Don't worry, be free of fear, but I'm not free of fear and that means I should try harder and I'm still worried about the original thing which is whether or not I am capable of doing something or excelling at something and now that I think about it I have to manage to give everyone the impression that I've cured myself from all these anxieties that circle me and I have to prove myself a good woman who can be wise and be unafraid and who leaves the troubles of tomorrow for tomorrow.The cave always collapses at the slightest touch, swirls around me the moment I touch the question of how something will happen or work out or be okay. And some days I look around, trapped in the middle of the sea of my anxiety, waiting on a magic carpet to rescue me.--They say that there is a kind of knowledge we don't access as often anymore, the knowledge by analogy. If I tell you what it's like some days in my heart, how it sometimes builds like a hurricane at sea, and I'm battening down whatever hatches I can find, but the storm is still coming, maybe I can give you a glimpse, a recognition.This knowledge requires a deep imagination, they say. I think it requires more than that. I think it requires a kind of courage, to enter with one another into the shape of their world, into the cave of wonders.--So I have said that my anxious heart is like the cave of wonders, but I could tell you, too, that it is like a baby bird, edging to the blue sky beyond the nest. The sky beyond the nest of my worries, the safety of woven fears, is so beautiful. The sky there is an indigo, the kind of sky early in the evening where the world has settled into itself again, where it has turned and will keep turning, and the nights are full of stars and strange beautiful new things and so I am a baby bird edging to get a little closer. There are days when the nest feels safer than surrendering myself to the radical trust in God. There are days when I stretch my wings against the winds of the Spirit and imagine myself flying, free of worry, free of the endless uncertainty of myself or my surroundings or my success or my status or my standing. And some days I take off and the wind lifts under me and I am made alive again.--A cave of wonders. A baby bird. A hurricane. They are all true. Maybe the wondrous thing about the heart is that it can be like so many things at once. It can be known better by the stories we would tell about it than the clinical words we might use to describe it.Maybe kindness to one another is practiced in this: that we imagine by analogy the landscape of our hearts. That we see the baby bird and the hurricane, we see the boat anchored in the deep and the Montana skyline and the quiet river and the chorus of crickets and the countless other thousand things that could be our hearts at any moment.Maybe kindness to myself is in this, too: that I tell stories about my anxious heart more than dwelling only on the word anxious. Maybe I tell God my analogies and hear God say back to me the analogies that God writes and knows and sees in that same heart.Because God sees a new creation in that hurricane baby bird cave of wonders.And God sees a new creation in yours, too.Love,hilary

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 

myself, fourteen

"Dear Heavenly Father," I start the traditional way, the adjectives in a pleasing order, my list of requests and people at the ready. "I pray for..." I am lying on my side inside a thin sleeping bag in a youth center in Montgomery, Alabama. The boys are in a room next door, giggling to themselves. A block falls off a shelf, and they race into our room screeching that there are cockroaches in the room next door, and we screech back that we are all supposed to be asleep and if the teacher hears you he's going to come in here and be disappointed.

We can't stop laughing, though, under the thin sleeping bags and the humidity, I forget my prayer in an effort to scoot a little closer to the circle of people telling secrets and even though I don't know any secrets, I hover just near enough to listen.

This is the summer where I try to be too cool to pray. I sit in church unenthusiastic, thinking more about how I want to marry the boy two aisles up and how I scrawl his name across journal pages. I pretend that church is just this thing we have to do, my family and I, and really I am just like everyone else and I want all the same things and Sunday morning with Bread and Wine is just like the soccer and lacrosse practices at the field in the town. I wish to myself I was playing soccer and lacrosse on Sunday mornings. 

I have braces stretched across my smile, which makes me self-conscious about smiling, but it doesn't really stop me. In the pictures of this trip, you'll see me in clothes that don't quite fit but I wanted so desperately to seem like I was the kind of girl in the advertisements with the cutoff shorts and the long straight hair and the effortless tan. In the pictures you can see my trying.

Myself, at fourteen - the word is trying. There is a yearning that radiates from my pictures, my smile, my neatly three-hole-punched tests and papers. There is a hopefulness that enough makeup will turn the school dance at Halloween into something fun and me into someone who could be brave enough to dance without looking over her shoulder. I watched the people watching, and I was afraid. Who wants to be the girl who prays when there is music and racing heartbeats? Who wants to be the girl who worries over Sunday morning worship when there is adventure on a Saturday night? 

That June of cockroaches in Montgomery, the night we ate catfish from a local pond and I promised that I would come back to the South  - it feels like a forever ago. 

And then the other day I was her. She reappeared at the corner of my memories and my present, waved as if to remind me that in the summer of fourteen, I believed I could make my faith an add-on to my heart instead of its very blood and oxygen and beat. Because I wanted to curl up in the sleeping bag on the very inside of the circle and have the secrets and go to soccer practice instead of church. Maybe it had something to do with the harder things of daily life in faith, maybe it was just a day I didn't really want to kneel, pencil skirt to office rug, over the work week. Maybe it was just a yearning without another reason. 

I recognized her in me the other day, the girl who wanted to be too cool to pray that June and that whole summer. And I waved her nearer, so that perhaps in the mystery of knowing ourselves I could reassure her, though she is a past self, that it will be better to be on our knees for the world. It will be better to yearn after the Word made Flesh who comes to dwell inside and among us. It will be better, in the end, not to have been too cool for any of it. 

Only on our knees can we hear our heartbeat. 

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: don't live in an abandoned house

Dear Hilary,What would you say to someone if they told you that they had trouble moving on after the end of something? What would you say, if, say, someone told you that they had trouble moving on after a breakup? What would you say, if, say, someone told you that they kept wondering if it was even possible to find what they're looking for, or if it just sailed away?Love,The someoneDear The someone,I'm so sorry that a beautiful thing ended for you. And I am so very sorry that one ended in your life, that it was one that made you happy or excited or terrified or all three. I'm sorry for the times it made you lie in bed awake wondering if you were absolutely the most unloveable thing to walk the earth. I'm sorry for how it made you narrow your eyes at the beautiful Ralph Lauren clad couples holding hands while drinking cappuccino out of tiny cups at Eastern Market. I'm sorry for what it made you think when you saw more engagement announcements or baby shower invitations or "generally taking the next socially approved step into adulthood!" posters plastered all over your friends' lives. I'm sorry for the small seeds of bitterness that it left behind.I was talking to a wise woman in my life the other day about just these things, and finally, after going around and around in circles, I finally blurted out - "Look! Doesn't it prove that I'm not worth it? If I put myself out there, if I risked it, if I was there, caring, and he didn't want it? ISN'T THAT THE FINAL MEASURE OF ME, AFTER ALL?"And that stopped me, Someone. It stopped me dead. Where had that self emerged from? Where was that voice whispering in my ear that all those Ralph Lauren couples and socially approved Facebook statuses and altogether enviable people in their gleaming kitchens and offices and parks throwing Frisbees with their beautiful children - they got it right, and me, well, where is the next open cat adoption agency and bottle of cheap wine?When a beautiful thing ends, we often do one of two things: we blame them or we blame us. Sometimes we blame both. We tell ourselves that if only we were cooler, groovier, more fabulous, they wouldn't have left. It's a flaw inside us. Or we tell ourselves that if only they weren't such a jerk, a tool, a massive loser, they wouldn't have left. It's a flaw inside them. Or we tell ourselves, as we sit in front of the mirror thinking, "there can't be anything worse" - we say it's just both of us in this mess: I'm not worthy, and you're a tool. And the cycle goes round and round until we can't breathe for all the lies in our heads.The beautiful thing ended because of both of you and because of neither of you. The beautiful thing ended because it was not what is. It ended because, well, it ended. Don't go too near that abandoned house just yet. Let it stand for a little while. Let it have its winter, and its summer, its falling leaves and its budding peonies. The beautiful thing that just ended is your abandoned house. Don't drive by it every day, sweetheart. Don't live in the abandoned house, wandering its hallways, telling yourself that this was where he said he loved me or this is where we kissed  or but if I had just... or if only he... You'll only drive yourself crazy looking for answers where you can't find them.What you must tell yourself, even if you don't believe it yet, is that this is not the end of your worth. This is not about your worth. This is not about your wonder. This is not about your gorgeous, glowing, terrible, messy, miracle self. This is just about two people who met, who loved, who fought, and who, ultimately, abandoned the house that was their relationship. Maybe forever, maybe just for a time.That's what this is: your beautiful self and their beautiful self, not living in that house anymore. There isn't an answer about your ultimate value in that house. There isn't an answer about what went wrong and who did what. There isn't an answer about whether someone will love you tomorrow or the next day.There is just you, bending beneath the weight of this new experience. There is just you, building something out of what has happened to you. There is just you, not living in the abandoned house anymore, but walking forward, into the world, into the light, into what lies ahead.I believe you'll wake up, many mornings from now, and find that you see the story a bit more like that: two people, who loved, and left, and who are transformed but not undone. I believe you will glow more because of it. I believe you'll be radiant walking forward, and you'll kiss the abandoned house goodbye. Because you're worth so much. And you'll know it.Love,hilary

King of kings (Christ the King Sunday)

They want to tell me why tornadoes are the best kind of storm. "They can lift cars!" "And houses!" "And skyscrapers!" ... a long pause. "And fire trucks!" The scribbling continues in earnest: yellow onto red, blue onto purple onto regular pencil, back to the green on the bottom of the page. I lean in, but I'm casting a shadow over his Jackson Pollock and so I return back to the girl and her world map.She is concentrating on a red dot stuck to her finger, trying to place it somewhere between the Atlantic and Jerusalem. Her tongue sticks out a little, and she hovers over her masterpiece. "There" she says, planting the dot firmly over the northern tip of Ireland. "There?" I say. "Yes, there. Jesus lives there." Somehow, I know she is right.And when the rain stick is held high and turned over and over, the children scramble off their mats, hastily put away wet glue brushes and trays of beads, and gather around the prayer table. They huddle together and we light the candle (fire is still marvelously exciting, as they tell us often). "What is this?" Miss Andrea asks, pointing to the gold crown drawn onto the prayer card. "A crown!" they giggle. "Who wears a crown?" We're told princesses, a girl at Halloween who was a princess, a prince, and finally, the four year old boy next to me says, "Kings." So then we begin to wonder, against the hum of a space heater and the clock ticking relentlessly towards 10:30 - what are kings like? What do they do? What does it mean to be king of kings?The boy next to me, oh, he knows. "He tells the other kings what to do." And when we ask them, who is this King of kings?Jesus, he says.The one who tells the other kings what to do. The one who comes into the world, not to rescue us out of it, but to rescue it with us, to save the whole. To tell the other kings what to do so that we might live in the fullness of His life. Do you ever feel like you forget, in the midst of our good emphasis on Jesus' love and grace, his servanthood, his teaching, his carpentry - that He is the King of Kings?And he shall reign forever and ever.I forgot, I realize as we begin to fold up mats, snuff out the candle, button Kate into her coat and find a stray shoe flung across the room. I forgot that Jesus is King of kings. I forgot that He tells the other kings what to do, that their life, our life, is from Him. That he saves us all, in the fullness of His coming, in the fullness of His time, and reigns forever and ever.Maybe this Advent, it's not about deep spiritual books or fasts. Maybe it's not about finding difficult theology, or wrestling with icons or prayers. Maybe this Advent we are meant to be with the little children who know Him without irony, without amusement, without worry.Maybe this Advent the answer to our big questions - of who and how, and why, and when?Jesus, he says. love,hilary

dear hilary: who it's all for

Dear Hilary,Why do you do this? Why do you write? Why do you bother? There are other blogs of all different kinds, people writing just like you, people with years of advice you can't have, because you're so young. Why do you do this?Love,A Skeptical ReaderDear Skeptical Reader,For October 24, my daily book of quotes from Rilke says,"Here is the time for telling. Here is its home.Speak and make known: More and morethe things we could experience are lost to us, banished by our failureto imagine them.Old definitions, which onceset limits to our living,break apart like dried crusts." - From the Ninth Duino ElegyFitting, isn't it? I hoped he would have something amazing to say when I read your question and fear rocketed through me. Because while we usually preach "no one right answer" we always suspect that there might be one better answer, one wiser answer, one answer that will convince you that I am really qualified to do this, to be this, to name myself this. When I ask myself why I write, I want to say it's because I must, because I see better, because I have a gift with words.But that's not really it. Whether those things are true in any degree is irrelevant. I write because I love people. I write because of you, the skeptical reader. I write because more than anything I'd like to be a vessel of living water and so far, this small, unknown corner of the blog is my first big attempt. I am trying to love with my words.We miss things because we fail to imagine them. I am with the poet, that this is the time for the telling. Not someday in the future when my young self is a distant, blurry picture. Not when I think I have the right reasons to write. Not when I am worn in by children or jobs or cross-country moves or fights in the airport. I don't know when those things will happen, and if I wait until they do, if I wait until I think I have lived to write anything, then I will fail to imagine the telling of this story. I will fail to make here the home for my story. Here, and now, a 22 year old with her pockets full of plane tickets and big dreams, without a clue where to begin looking for fullness. Here is the home of that story.I write for the five people who found a post about singleness that I wrote in the deep dark pit of despairing about singleness and felt less alone, even if it was just for a moment. I write for the good girls who fear that grace might not have enough room for them, who believe that love is earned and not poured out, who trust more in their ability to please than the God who already adores. I write to hold their hand across the internet and promise them that the same God they fear won't have grace cherishes and adores them. I write for the girl in the pew ahead of me who looks longingly at the boy across the aisle from her, to catch her as she turns away and promise her that someday we'll sit on a front porch somewhere and the rejection and wonder and hurt will be the building and making of our bigger life.I write for the people in Starbucks who sit side by side comparing the chaos that lives inside them, and wondering if it might ever become calm. I write for those of us who wonder about sex and love, who pace up and down the floorboards of their bedroom anxious over the non-texter, the non-returner-of-the-phone-calls, the non-job-offer or the non-grad-school-application. I write for poets and stragglers, for letter writers and lovers of words, for ramblers in the woods and for the one person who might read this post and in the five minutes it takes them, steady their heartbeat. That's who this is for. That's what this is about.I write to imagine the person I pray I someday become: alive with wild love, holding hands across tables in Starbucks and in a quiet office somewhere, tucking hair behind ears and pouring a second glass of water.I write because here is the home of my story.And because, most of all, always, because I love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: homeward bound

Dear Hilary,I was listening to a Sarah McLachlan song the other day - "World on Fire." Do you know it? Do you know that line, "Hearts break, hearts bend, love still hurts"? I'm wondering about this as it applies to my decision to stay home after graduation. I moved back, back to familiar people and places, back to what feels like an older self. I feel out of place, bent out of shape. And I look at the people who traveled, who journeyed across oceans or continents, who sit in university classes and write theses, who work in labs or in non-profits on K St or who teach for America... and I stayed here. Why does it hurt?Love,Homeward BoundDear Homeward Bound,Isn't it funny how easily envious we are? If we are dating, we are jealous for unattached freedom. If we are single, we pine over red wine for a relationship. When we are in school all we think is, "get me OUT" and when we are at work all we think is, "Remember that awesome paper I got to write about hermeneutics?" (Okay, not everyone says that).And when we return home, to our old rooms, our rickety bookcases, our messy kitchens, all the things we already know, we can think of nothing else but moving away. We plan elaborate apartments furnished by Anthropologie. We imagine long walks through Lincoln Park, along the Seine with fresh bread, in London, in Portugal. We tell ourselves there we'd find the self we're longing to be: fun and outgoing, breezy and yet thoughtful, maybe with a cool but understated piercing to differentiate the new season of our life and almost certainly with a whole new outlook on life.Ironic, love, isn't it, that the people who moved far away feel almost the same way. We imagine getting a Starbucks in the neighborhood we know, high-fiving the barista. We imagine using our native currency/language/music tastes. We imagine walking through the city knowing exactly where the used poetry bookshop is. We imagine ourselves, confident in the familiarity of things, on a long run around the pond that looks impossibly effortless. We're probably wearing the cutest possible running outfit in said effortless run.We are easily jealous of the lives and gifts we don't have. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: these things can always be your becoming. It matters tremendously that you are, as you say, "homeward bound" - part of your becoming gets to be grappling with the older self, the one you think you've left behind. Your becoming doesn't involve a new presentation or a new start in a strange place. Your becoming involves a mud pit wrestling match with the expectations of who you are and what you do. Most of these are your expectations, sweet heart - and it'll be a tough fight. But your becoming involves this tough fight.You've got a lovely, pining letter here. Hearts do break and bend, love does hurt. It will do that next door to you and 10,000 miles away and inside you. You know what that song is really about, though, right?World's on fire, it's more than I can handle, tap into the water, try to bring my share. I try to bring more, more than I can handle, bring it to the table, bring what I am able... Bring more than you can handle. Bring your share. Bring what you are able. The point of singing this isn't to throw a pity party that you're back in your old neighborhood and others are somewhere else. The point of singing this isn't to collapse because sometimes we suck and are beautiful and stupid and other people are so very mysterious and we want things we can't have and we're restless and... and... and...Give to the table in front of you more than you are able. This is nothing less than your great task. You are homeward bound. Bound there, giving your whole heart, I think, you will be amazed at what you become.Love,Hilary

to my someday second daughter

Some days are the days to write to the children you might not have. But you love even just the fleeting glimpse of the life that might sail past you, that might not be yours, but it is so fleeting and so beautiful that you must write something down.Dear one,I write this to you in the early morning of what already promises to be a long, full, grey day. I write in the helplessness of writing, knowing that these words are far away from the people we will be if, and when, we meet in the future. I write as the overwhelming sounds of Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver wash through my small space. I write because I don't know how else to think, sometimes.I pray that you might catch this restless, big love - whether yours is words or sounds or soccer. I hope with the Anne Sexton that those I love will live in a fever of love. I pray that in the space of our life together, my sweet girl, there will be an abundance of this.It is the restless loves that sustain us, daughter. The ones that hammer away at us. The voice that says we must. I am at the beginning of learning this restless love. I am making a moment of peace with it this morning, and so I am writing to you, whispering in the silence of the life-not-yet-lived that these loves grow with us, always ahead of us. My love of writing and my frustration with writing, my love of philosophy and my contempt of my fumbling attempts. You will laugh when you find my notes on Gadamer in the book I bought a few months ago, because you'll then realize your mom makes a fool of herself chasing down an idea. The scribbles alone will give you and your siblings hours of laughter trying to figure out what I meant by "sig?" "but if hermeneutic..." or the very funny, "NO! Wait. No?".I hope someday we are sitting in the study reading, and you ask me why when I was 22 I said I was like Eowyn, Lizzy Bennet, Anne of Green Gables and Atalanta. And then, we'll pull each other close and begin to read together, and learn how we live in the worlds and characters we love. And then Dad will bring us cups of tea as he always does, the old ritual, and you will fall asleep near me, and I will read out loud to the night, to the dog, for the sheer goodness of those words.Oh, it will be a life of restless, relentless love. It will be this love, and nothing less, that creates fullness. It does not mean you need to be reckless always, or that you cannot also be steady, sure on your feet, rooted and growing in all directions. It only means that we are always pushed forward to the greater, more wondrous thing by these loves that move ahead of us, clearing the path, always asking more of us than we think we can give. When you whisper about how much you love the things you love, how you ache with it, remember that these are the moments of the making of you.What a joy you will be, love. What a wonder. What a gift.Love,hilary (your someday mom) 

to the girl in the pew ahead

Dear girl in the pew in front of me two Sundays ago,

I caught a glimpse of your face looking forlornly at that boy an aisle over. He's got a mop of brown hair that falls into his face when he bends over to pray, folding in at the waist, into prayer, into comfortable Anglican words. I looked over at him, eyes scrunched shut, the Prayers of the People echoing around the room, and then I looked back at you.

You wore that look of teenage tenderness, the special kind that exists just before the world overwhelms you, before you begin to feel the spider web of relationships as complicated, and people as these miraculous, difficult gifts. You wore that look at him during the prayers of the people.

I caught my breath. That tenderness? Don't lose it.

I don't know if he will ever look up at you. I don't know if he will sit next to you, sweaty-palmed and fidgeting, as you pray in the wide space of these familiar words. I don't know your story, your name, how you spend your Saturday mornings or your late Thursday nights.

But I caught that glimpse of you two Sundays ago, in that pew ahead of me, your shoulders leaning into the prayer, your face alive with that tenderness. And I saw in you something I want to ask you to protect and cherish in yourself. That tenderness is one of the first things I regretted about my heart when I sat in a pew years ago and looked forlornly at a boy across the aisle. That tenderness will haunt and follow you, a ghost you try to banish, a softness and sweetness that you wish desperately to avoid.

But please keep it. I'd offer you hours at a kitchen table journaling, runs for months in the woods wondering, the occasional shard of glass that hurts as you heal. I'd offer to walk through the story next to you, if you would promise not to condemn that look you give him when he isn't looking back at you.

I told myself this summer that tenderness was a problem. That caring, having a stake in it, wanting things to work out... that was weakness and worry and it was safer to be controlled, to be calm, to not let it touch me.

But then I saw you, and that tenderness, and how you weren't bent over in prayer but were looking at that mop of brown hair across the aisle, and I remembered that it isn't weakness. It's strength. Don't lose it in condemnation. Stories begin and end for a million reasons beyond our understanding. Maybe this one will end. Maybe it will begin again. Maybe it will be something in between. But the tenderness isn't the reason it ends, if it ends. Your care isn't the problem.

At the moment I saw you, we prayed, "Bless all whose lives are closely linked with ours, and grant that we may serve Christ in them, and love one another as he loves us."

And I wanted to lean in and whisper - this is the tenderhearted prayer. This is the prayer we pray after that forlorn, caring look.

Instead, I bent my head again to the back of the pew in front of me, felt the cool wood and my own heart beating. And I prayed.

Love,

hilary

to the newlyweds

While Preston and I are on sabbatical for the summer in our letter writing, I thought I would keep up with letters. These, though, are letters with a bit more of my imagined, someday life, and a little bit less of the every day. I wanted to store them up, these daydreams, because even though we should live in the present, there is something to every once in a while glancing out and imagining the horizon.Dear newlyweds,I saw your pictures on Facebook the other day, pictures of rings against flowers and book pages, pictures of you staring in amazement at each other, pictures of pinwheels and cakes and dances between you and the hundreds of people who gathered around you to love you.I saw your pictures and I thought about you. About the work that this is. About the wonder that this is. About how you might be wondering and fearing and rejoicing all at once. I don't know very much about the world, not now, probably not for many years. I don't know a thing about marriage except that it is beautiful and difficult and rich with blessings.Sometimes the blessings feel heavy. Sometimes we don't know how to be ourselves. We don't know how to be ourselves AND be one with another person. We don't know if we can surrender that much, trust that much, stay faithful when we desperately wish to run away. We don't know what the big step was, exactly, only that together there is more than when we are alone, and together you are something new. Between the showers and the barbeques, between standing in line at the DMV to change your name, between hoping you don't trip down the aisle or lose the rings or forget the dance steps you both practiced diligently... I wanted to say that what we see, from our pews and from walking down the aisle in borrowed shoes and stiff hair?We see miraculous love.We see promises made right on the edge, the edge of who we are and who we are called to become.We don't worry about whether your napkins are the right shade of coral or if you missed the double spin. We don't second guess your choice of cake or how you made the seating chart. We are too caught up in rejoicing that you love this boldly. That you live with a wild love for each other. I wanted to tell you this because maybe after it all settled down, you still feel the strange surreal heaviness of this new life you're making together. Maybe after you came home to your apartment or your house, to your boxes and leftover spaghetti, you wondered what we all witnessed, what it is that happened.We saw the joy, raw, palpable, spilling out of you. My friends and I sometimes joke that there is a flood on facebook of weddings, of matching dresses and clinking glasses. Sometimes we are jealous of you, jealous of what we worry we won't find, hopeful and fearful all at once. But the secret is that even in that we recognize the heart of what you have done. We love it. We feel the raw joy spilling out over the megapixels and crackling phone lines and from pew to pew.I am touched and changed because I get to see how you love.I learn about love because I get to celebrate with you.Your new marriage, the baby bird of it, helps us remember the feeling of leaping into the unknown and being caught in the wonder of it.So I pause in my day, in between emails and grant proposals and puzzling out the new work before me to whisper to you: remember that your baby bird marriage is a beacon of love. You shine bright.Be unafraid of the big work ahead. There is more grace than you can imagine in store for you. Be unafraid of where you go, what you eat, how you burn brownies and fight over jobs or church or money. Be unafraid of it all.The secret of that big leap is that grace always catches us.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

to my someday friend

While Preston and I are on sabbatical for the summer in our letter writing, I thought I would keep up with letters. These, though, are letters with a bit more of my imagined, someday life, and a little bit less of the every day. I wanted to store them up, these daydreams, because even though we should live in the present, there is something to every once in a while glancing out and imagining the horizon.Dear friend,I'm writing this to you while Misty May-Treanor and Kerry Walsh-Jennings are trying to win their third gold medal in Olympic beach volleyball. This isn't the same kind of letter that I've written on Thursdays before on the blog - to a daughter and a son and a husband I don't know yet. I'm going to guess that I already know you, or at least I have caught a glimpse of the wonder of you and I wanted to be friends. But this is a letter for the future us, the us of more years and (hopefully) more wisdom and more love.My guess is that I was shy about it at first. I so often long to share a table and a coffee mug and a long walk with someone but I don't say anything. I'm afraid that you'll be overwhelmed by my enthusiasm or think that I'm insane or you'll tell me that you already have the perfect friends, and you don't need any more.But I'm also stubborn, and so I asked you, shy and quiet, for that first coffee and confessed how much I admire you and respect you, and how I was hoping that maybe we could be friends. We laugh now, of course, because you know me as the bold, tripping-and-falling, always has more to think about than she has time to think it girl. You remember the random wine-and-cheese picnics I proposed and my absolute adoration of the public benches by the water in Beverly; I remember marveling that you sat on those same benches with wine and cheese and let me be angry and confused and yet you still pushed me towards the truth.I haven't said thank you enough over the years. I haven't thanked you for the Rilke you snuck into my inbox. I haven't thanked you for listening to me on the phone when I called in a sobbing mess because I realized that it was over with me and him, and I felt it settle into my gut. I haven't remembered to marvel at the years that fly by between us, how we stood next to each other during the fierce promises of marriage and the heartaches about children and stuck their finger paintings on each other's refrigerators.I've spent so much time asking God where my so-called significant other is that I forget to thank Him for you. I'm sorry for all the years of agony I have probably put you through, what with my heart racing around without patience or peace. And you've had so much grace for me, my sweet friend. You've kept your light on and your porch open. You've brewed sweet tea. You've let me sit alone in your study when you aren't using it to try and finish writing something, even if it's just a grocery list.You believed in the counseling dream. You believed in the writing dream. You kept those dreams safe for me while I chased other things. I know that you probably wondered when I would just get it, but you only offered an extra hug when it was wrong. And while I know that we've had our hard seasons, the traveling back and forth, the letters that are full and empty, the marriages at different times and the aches and pulls of life, I also know that you take care of me.Years from now, when I find this blog again, or maybe when I'm still here, writing about wild love, I will print this letter and give it to you. I will cry and tell you, as you mix the lemonade and I chop fruit for the salad we're sharing, that you teach me grace and strength. I will mumble to the blueberries as I slide the paper towards you that in the years of wine and waiting, of promises broken and kept and transcended: you carry my heart.I love you, friend.Love,hilary 

to my someday husband

Dear someday husband,This is not a love letter. Sorry. It's not a letter in which I say gushy things about what I imagine you'll be like, what you'll look like, what our days will be filled with. I'm not blogging a letter to you about you at all, really. I imagine you, of course. I'm 22, and foolish, and a daydreamer. You should laugh at this, because you already know how much trouble it's going to get me into. I will write you a love letter someday. But when I do, I will know who you are and what kind of toothpaste you use. I will know in what order you read the newspaper, and where you first felt at home away from home. I will have made it through the fear that you will walk away. I will write you a letter about you, and all the gushy things about how love changes us, and the good and terrifying thing it is to love and be loved by you. But not right now.I'm writing to you because my sister is getting married tomorrow and in the midst of planning my toast to her and her husband, I thought about marriage. I thought about what makes it beautiful, what makes it mysterious. I thought about what makes it worth doing. Last summer I was in a wedding, and I wrote about the delight I saw in my friend's face as she woke up the morning of her wedding and realized that she was going to unite her life with his, that they were going to become one.I see that same joy in my sister now. I see her smile like she's never smiled before, smile in the safety of her husband, smile in the wonder of him and them and the family they begin tomorrow. I see two people who gather around each other, with prayers and hopes fluttering in a great cloud, and I see love there. Jesus has come to this wedding feast, too.I'm going to be tough to marry. I am fiercely independent and yet desperate to be known. I fight more than is good for me, but I want to be peaceful. I am stubborn. The notion of grace, the kind that's free and deep and that really forgets sin and hurt and mistakes (not conveniently files them away to use in a fight later)? I'm not good at that. I am impatient. I talk too much. I trust this world by flinging my heart open but at the first sign of trouble I am a skittish colt running for the hills.I want to tell you this up front. Marrying me will be hard work. I would say sorry but I'm not really sorry, in the end, because marrying you is the same hard work and it is the kind of good that outweighs hard. My sister and her husband have the same hard work in front of them.They make promises tomorrow. These promises are heavy, filled with love and commitment, filled with the energy of a thousand hot air balloon hopes. I will cry. I cry every time I hear a couple promise that they will love and cherish and be faithful in all things, until they are parted by death. I cry every time I hear someone take their name, and take the other person's name, and in one sentence bind them together.Marriage is a mystery, someday husband. Marriage is a great and daily obedience, the kind that takes everything we've got and then more. The kind that between my stubbornness, and your stubbornness, between my picking fights and your withdrawal, between that trip to Rome and the huge fight in the airport parking lot after that trip to Rome - will be a miracle. I am going to walk down the aisle tomorrow, in a blue dress and borrowed shoes and hair someone did for me. I am going to pray as I go that I learn my sister's courage, her grace, her wisdom. I am going to pray that she is filled with joy, the kind that aches and ages and lasts through everything, even what is unknown. I am going to watch her delight, and share in it.And when you and I are sitting in a kitchen somewhere, silent and reproachful, the oven still smoking from whatever I told you I would make for dinner, I will read this to you. (Just promise not to laugh too hard at everything I get wrong. Okay?)I will remind us that marriage is a great and daily obedience. I will remind us that it is a miracle and a mystery. I will look at pictures of my sister's wedding and remember that when I was twenty-two, when I was at the very beginning, I learned love from watching my sister make a new family. And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.I will remember that I wished for nothing less for us, nothing but the gut-wrenching beautiful work this is.And I will ask you to forgive me for being so hard to be married to. And I will forgive you for the same thing. And I will look over at you across the burned dinner and laugh. Promise me you'll laugh too? And in our marriage, however far away, we will become a family.Love,hilary (your someday wife)

love moves freely

Another airport this morning. I sit in an anonymous wooden chair, the girl in grey with the cinnamon raisin bagel and the pile of hair escaping in all directions from its elastic. The sun rises slowly this morning, pausing as clouds sweep over the tips of the plane tails, and Eric Church sings into my ear as flipflops clack against the floor. Next to me, a woman checks her iPhone. Something in her face looks worried, and she checks her watch every minute. I am suddenly desperate to know - what is your story? Who are you waiting for?But I just nudge my suitcase closer to my feet and turn away. When I look up again, she's walking towards her gate, and her seat is taken by an officer with a wrist brace drinking a diet Pepsi.My mind wanders to fearlessness, the strange dream I had last night, and then I remember what Dear Sugar wrote about love to her twenty-something self:Real love moves freely in both directions. 

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

When I first read this I was sitting in my single room in the middle of February. I was in the gap between exhilarated and exhausted. The joy of school, of learning history and tracing stories through time was also the aching, tired eyes of being up too late and doing too much. I was blogging without really knowing why. And I read Sugar's words as dazzlingly true. You can't convince people to love you. There isn't an argument in the world that will coax love from one person's heart into another's.This was protection for my weary heart when I read it more than a year ago. It was relief, courage to walk away, courage to tell the truth about what was unrequited, what should be let go. Then, real love moving freely in both directions meant keeping my heart a bit more guarded. I didn't give as much away.I read it again in this early morning, watching the officer and the woman with her worried face, watch the people sip their coffee and polish their glasses. And I think about how we only have a little bit of time to be with each other. And I think about how I named this blog The Wild Love, because I wanted to remind myself that we should give more than we think we can, and we should love wild.Sugar's right: you can't make someone love you. You can send your love towards them and they may not be there. You can sit at the table, ready to offer your extraordinary self, and they may not come to the other side of the table.But if I have any encouragement, from the very beginning: unrequited love is not wasted. The learning to care for someone, the hope, the teaching yourself to pay attention to how your heart works, the glimpse you get of their glorious self (even in the most agonizing moment when you realize that it will never be more than a glimpse) is not wasted.We should protect our hearts. But maybe some of what we call protection is a lack of trust. A lack of trust that love is good work, that in this divine economy, all things have purpose, all things work together for good. I built a fence, thinking that the most important thing was to be safe, at any cost.I see the woman sitting three tables away, her quiet elegance the kind that only comes with years. She crosses her ankles and chews on a blueberry muffin. Trusting begins here, smiling over at her, risking her early morning displeasure or her pointed ignoring. Wild love begins in the belief that love offered, even if not always taken, is not wasted.I smile at her as she gets up, and she frowns slightly and walks away. I smile at her retreating figure.Real love moves freely - and it trusts.Love,hilary

dear hilary: your twenty two year old self

Dear Hilary,You turn 22 today. Happy birthday, sweet pea. It's an exciting moment in your story. Another year, another step in the midst of your real, wild, precious life. This time last year you wrote a letter to yourself to try and teach yourself lessons for the future. You wanted to learn how to be patient, how to laugh, how to remember the moon rising over the Atlantic or the feeling of your muscles carrying you home.And here we are, a year later. How we grow is not best measured in years. It's a tangled, unlikely journey. You've grown much more and much less than you think. You won't really know what the last year was until you're telling someone years from now, when "Stubborn Love" by The Lumineers plays on the radio and you smile.But the very first Dear Sugar column you read (funny, isn't it? That wasn't very long ago) was from a 22 year old. It was called "Tiny Beautiful Things" and it changed your life. And now a book by the same name is on its way to you. Dear Sugar's letter was asking for advice. What would you tell yourself at 22? It seemed like the right moment, now, to write that letter.Give more than you have. When someone asks you to take a walk with them and they hold their heart out, trembling and raw, to you, take it gently. Sometimes you must give it back to them. Sometimes you must hold it in your hands and not let go. Not even when you don't know what to do and you are screaming in your head that you are only 22 and you don't know anything! Not knowing and still holding on is the gift.You are not your college transcript. You are not the silver bowls gathering dust next to your brother's Star Wars battleships - not the awards, not the opportunities, not even the ones you are most proud of. Laugh, Hilary. How could those things be the sum of who you are? You are alive and growing. There aren't boxes or categories to contain you. If your heart feels left behind, remember that love is never wasted, only given a new purpose. Remember that disappointed hopes are still beautiful. Remember that most of the work you were meant to do was in the hoping, not the coming true. Don't work too much. There is enough time. Not everything you touch is urgent.You are most wise when you admit you have no earthly idea what the hell you're going to do. You are closest to the truth when you lie in your bed sweating on a July night and whisper to Jesus that He'll have to fix it, because you can't.You aren't really very old, sweetheart. So dance to "Hello" and for goodness' sake, will you please stop worrying about how you look? It's the time you forgot your makeup and didn't care that you were the most radiant. It's the joy you have in your body and your heart that's beautiful.Call even if they don't call you back. Write letters. Do not waste your time on less than real love. Sugar's right: it moves freely in both directions. Set yourself free from trying to earn it. Give it to others as much as you possibly can, and then more.Be brave enough to be empty. Be braver than you think you need to be. And yes, you'll keep learning this over and over. Desire and heartache and confusion and courage can't be mastered in a day. Or a year. You will relearn everything a hundred times.It's a gorgeous world and a broken one. But it is your one wild life, love. Spend your heart in it. Love,hilary