when I am keeping a quieter vigil

I have a thousand stories that I haven't told.It's snippets of moments of remembering, the way that our hearts remembering, outside of time, bending it back and forth hoping that the truth of it will illuminate in the quiet, heartfelt, wondering places. Last year I wrote some of the stories down, a flood of remembering, in the way that when something changes you want to put it back together, make it a new story so that you can understand why and how and if it even was the way you thought it would be.I have stories of high school, stories of college and the first floodlit after-years. I have stories about midnight drives through the towns of my childhood and ones about walking the dog on a marsh field with my mother in the cold before winter, thinking about how I never imagined being able to grow up, only to turn around and find that it was happening all along.I have stories about the poems I used to write and the ones I write now, how my poetry is a scattered collection of skeletons, ideas that I love because they show me who I was not so long ago.When I think about blogging (and, dear friends, it's been such a long time since I've written over here), I think of all the stories I've been telling: stories of confirmation and falling in love, stories of Easter vigils and long car rides home, stories of missing my grandmother and letters to others about how to be unafraid of the beautiful monsters in our closets.But today, as I sit in the sunlit corner of the building where I do most of my reading and writing these days, I realize that I am keeping a quieter vigil. These are the days of collecting stories, gathering them around me like echoes of the Psalms, stories to rage and stories to pray, stories of God's wonder and God's silent watchfulness, stories of me, learning and unlearning the world. These are the days when the world lights and darkens, when I watch the fan above the bed in the early morning, when winter is coming, when the seasons gather us on their unrelenting way.I wonder if we are too quick to think all the stories are for the telling of them, and not our own hearing. I wonder if I am too quick to worry that I have been quiet on my blog, that so much has happened in these last few months and I've said so little, my space gathering a bit of gentle dust.And then I wonder if the stories won't be better, when they are told, for having been kept a little longer in a quieter vigil?So, perhaps it is not so terrible that I am gathering the stories in, that I'm out on the plains of my life caught up in the work and worry and awe of living, and perhaps it is, even, a great and mysterious thing to be silent and watch it unfold, so that when I find words for the stories, find movement in my heart to tell them, there will be a richness that might not have been otherwise.In my quieter vigil, I might write here or there, and I'm collecting the stories in notebooks and napkins, and oh, how good it will be to bring them forward in the time that is right. Vigil-keeping, it is a practice, a work, but we are the better for it.I will leave you with this, a bit of what I'm pondering in the back of my notebook, in scribbles and half finished thoughts:The goodness is sitting on a swinging bench. The goodness is next to us, near us in from of us and so why do we cry out except because we hope for more than an intangible idea we hope for a weighty glory of sunlight and dirt and squirrels climbing trees. I am along on this bench writing in my journal which is really a supposedly philosophical notebook and my pen keeps smudging as I go I remember the freewrites and how they must have been more about freedom than writing more about light and air touched and sensed and the scratching pen and distant frisbee thrower and how here in Texas the sky is a different color blue. Here the trees have grateful roots in dry ground, rain is a surprise and so always remains a gift like the freedom in writing. How can we know the world without knowing its beauty? Love,hilary