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

on dustin o'halloran (and growing wings)

I can't sleep.I have picked almost all the "fearless" nail polish off the edges of my fingertips, stared out into the familiar shadows of my room, heard the rain and its ceasing. I have gotten up for water, decided against it, taken a sip straight from the faucet. I've heard my floorboards creak as I pace, catch my toe against the edge of my bed, felt the sharp sting, yelped.I can't sleep because there is a ghost in my room.She sits down at the edge of my bed, takes in my twisted sleep positions, nudges me awake. I look at her, this ghost of all the things I should have been. She is the anxious ghost, who at 3am has kept me awake wondering if, in fact, I sent that grant in the right way. Wondering if, in fact, five or six months ago I should have played a different game, read a different set of signals, cared less and calculated more. Wondering if, in fact...all of it might have been meant to be otherwise. She is a Hilary I keep banishing. For how can any of us know what might have been? Wasn't that the first lesson Aslan taught those children in Narnia? "To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that." We are never told the stories that are not spun, the ghost ships that never sailed, the result of the left turn when we took the right.She is the ghost of control: the ghost who imagines she knows better. The ghost of if only I had thought before... The ghost of 3am and rain.So I sit up in bed, scattering a warm grey cat and a few pillows in my haste. I fumble with the passcode, fingers touching the screen in search of Dustin, click play, close my eyes.He tells me "We Move Lightly."He plays the repetition back to the ghost on the edge of my bed. The humble kind of piano: gentle and sure, questioning and yet steady. My best friend can always predict the parts of music I love best - the ones that sneak up to the very highest notes, played gently. The moment when strings enter, playing that long note, trembling and vulnerable. He plays, and I listen.Because our stories are thousands of threads woven and frayed, beginning and ending outside of us, and the ghosts that worry at 3am fall silent in the face of what is truly beautiful.Because we are never told what might have been, would have been. In this music, we grow the wings to carry us into what will happen. We become free: lost in something bigger than ourselves, found in the thousand threads.He plays the seventh time, and I fall asleep, winged.Love,hilary

dear hilary: anonymous love

Dear Hilary,I'm ambitious. I have plans in my head for my life, plans for travel and degrees and books published. I kind of want to be famous. But I wonder if it's really that worth it? What do you think?Love,CelebrityDear Celebrity,I think the best answer to your question is to ask myself what I think I'm here for. I was pondering your question drinking a caffeine free Diet Coke watching the newest episode of Castle. I was thinking about it as I smeared avocado clay mask on my face in a vain attempt to do something productive to my pores. It even crossed my mind as I reread old letters from dear friends. Do I want to be famous? Is it worth it? What do I think about that? I thought it over and over. And this is what I came up with.I am not here to be famous.Famous is a cheap kind of knowing. Every one of us can do better than a name on a billboard when it comes to being known. Every last one of us is already loved more intimately than that. I'd rather run up the stairs to my best friend's room soaking wet from the rain and stand in front of her, dripping wet with disappointment and regret and anger and naked, raw, rain-soaked life than ever publish a Pulitzer.I am not here to be famous.Imagine this, Celebrity: you could do an act of radical, unbelievable, earth-shattering love and never get credit for it. Or you could do a smaller act, of love and warmth, sure, but smaller, and become really famous. I urge you to always pick the earth-shattering love option. It's there. When you calculate graduate schools and Sunday school volunteering and living at home and becoming a top notch politician. The option for earth-shattering love is always present. Sometimes that will shove you sideways into fame. Sometimes it will put you up on a stage to accept a prize or a prestigious job or a movie contract. Sometimes it will mean you become "famous" whether you wanted it or not. But we are here to do the brave thing whether it brings fame or a $1.99 hallmark card. We aren't here to climb ladders but to leap off cliffs into trust and grace without any promise of ever getting any kind of credit for it.We are not here to be famous.A wise man once told me, "Imagine, Hilary, what amazing things we could do if we didn't care who got the credit." This man, he lives it out. He works harder than almost anyone I've met, dreams and imagines constantly, builds programs and mentors students. This man doesn't care if anyone ever knows that it was his idea. He doesn't care if he gets paid less than everyone else. He doesn't care if he looks ridiculous or could have been promoted at a different institution or might have had this illustrious career in...When I get all knotted up in ambition I think about him. I think about standing rain-soaked in my best friend's bedroom. I think about buying a cup of coffee for a homeless man in DC who doesn't know me. I think about all the words I write that get me no closer to being a celebrity, but one person reads them and feels loved, and that breaks my heart right open.I'm here, you're here, we're all here to give more than we take. To live towards the light. To hold out our hands to empty ones. To stand rain-soaked in bedrooms and believe in the beautiful and the good.We are called to bigger things than ambition can offer us. We are called to anonymous, wild, love.Love,hilary

on emma louise (and growing wings)

She appeared in "the box" as my friend and I call it almost a year ago. I didn't listen for a full three or four days. I didn't have time, so I said to myself, clicking repeat on The Civil Wars because I could finally let the words wash over me while I typed furious drafts of Maritain and Catholic Social Thought.I'm not very good at finding this music, you know. I stick with old well-worn paths, music that's carried me a long way down the dusty road. I want Winter Song 365 times in a week, a CD that I've memorized in three dimensions - where I listen to it, how, the taste and touch of the sounds. I'm safe there, with Alexi and Sara Lov, away from the edge and unknown, the unfamiliar echoes, the risk.But my friend, she knows music. She breathes it. It's her gift to the world, because not only does she make it like you or I make a sentence, not only do sounds immediately transform her, a full-bodied cello or a harsh dissonance or a quick, light storm on the piano, not only does she make some of the most wonderful music you've ever heard, she also teaches me to listen.In the way of closest friends, she puts a hand at my back and firmly propels me towards the edge of myself.So she put Emma in the box.The song is "Jungle."I stop breathing. The insistence of the bottom beat. The ache you can actually hear swelling in the music - and that "hey" - that rise, and rises, and keeps on rising as she flings her voice into the chorus. My head is a jungle, a jungle, my head is a jungle, a jungle... I don't even pretend to know what it means. Do you have music like that? It's so good, so overwhelming, that you spend most of the time trying to catch your heart back up to normal speed. Music, like poetry, like art, like the silence after a long and lovely speech, undoes me.Emma Louise sings Jungle, Bon Iver sings Holocene, Laura Marling sings Rambling Man, Anaïs sings Hadestown. They coax me back to edge, that terrifying edge of myself where roots end and wings must begin.This kind of earnest, insistent, terrified yet awed girl is no good at sarcasm. She misses ironic comments all the time, takes much at face value, walks around too easily moved and almost always too afraid to move herself.But Emma Louise sings "hey."And I feel the wind whistle along the edge of my wings.Love,hilary

on holocene (and growing wings)

They played "Perth" first. We are almost as a second thought, as they look out at the thousands of plaid shirts and skinny jeans gathered under the white tent, almost surprised to see us there. They turn their heads back to drums, guitar, close their eyes to everything but this miraculous emerging sound.I hear the music, but I'm lost somewhere inside myself, inside my preppy clothes and self-consciousness. I scuff at the pavement, rub my hands up and down my striped cotton sweater, wish I had studied the lyrics or knew how to stand in the crowd with the music and the people and the cheap wine smell. Somewhere behind me I hear a couple giggle as they share a cigarette.Then they play "Beth/Rest", the song I love but don't really understand. The words wash over the crowd and the strobe lights ricochet off the white faces, the instruments, the water to our left. I can't see the moon but in the song, somehow, I hear the night, the landscape, the horizon line.I sway my hips from side to side, conscious, still a bit out of place. I can't quite shake the idea that I shouldn't be here. This music is for the cool kids - the ones who knew this band years ago and followed Justin Vernon before Bon Iver. This is for people who live braver, more on the edge, who can actually play a guitar and who can sit on the beach in late summer humming "Calgary" while drinking espresso.But then? Then they play Holocene.The pavilion of thousands empties. All I can hear is Justin singing, and the drums battering my ribcage. The people behind me are still smoking, whispering that this song is "so good" but they seem hundreds of miles away. I close my eyes. He sings that line, the one that always gets me: And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent.This is the song I played while I drove down side roads the night of graduation day, after all the leaving, before all the arriving.This is the song I played to wake up on cold February mornings.This is the song I played to sway babies to sleep in my apartment in the haze of the afternoon.This is the song I played to make promises, and, sometimes, when they are broken.He sings Holocene and I come back to myself. The guitar repeats its wandering journey up to that top note, the drums roll, and the night suddenly, wildly, is about growing wings.We all have a Holocene. Isn't that part of the reason we keep making music, even when we sing only to mirrors and each other, even when we try to hide our voices in the bigger swelling sound of a church choir, even when we only know how to play three chords on the guitar and the cello isn't yet a part of our body, but an awkward dance partner?We make music to remember the sounds of all the things we can't put words to. We make music to imprint ourselves, to make snow angels across history, to grow wings. Yes, that. We make (and hear) music to grow wings.Last Thursday I went to the Bon Iver concert. He played Holocene, and I grew wings. I stepped for a moment inside a bigger self, inside a self unafraid to be her self.Dear readers, could I ask you something? Could you play your Holocene today? Could you let it repeat itself over, and over, growing your courage? I keep dreaming that with all these small gifts of brave things, someday we'll all take flight together.all my wild and winged love,hilaryPS. Another one of those songs? This ("I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons)