when you catch a glimpse

It's late on a Thursday - the ordinary, almost-but-n0t-quite-the-weekend day - and I'm lying diagonally on my bed, thinking about working out. I don't really want to, if I am honest. I'd much rather lie there, in my outdoor coat and my favorite brown boots, the ones from the store that closed in Union Station two years ago. I don't want to jump around at 10pm to music that I feel like I know too well. I don't want to run on a treadmill going nowhere.I'm moping, and I'm tired, and the lonely hits me deep after the long week. I remember that once I whispered to a dear friend, almost a year ago now, over cocktails at a jazz bar near campus - that I was tired of learning about myself alone. I want to do all that good work of figuring out who we are, who we want to be, together. I don't want to do it alone anymore. And those thoughts dont' seem to be banished by the lump in my throat. They don't disappear by crying - or by yelling, or by praying the same question, of how long, how long, how long O Lord.So I pull on shorts and a ratty T-shirt. I pull on socks. I find the Zumba YouTube video (yes, I am that girl). I click play. I halfheartedly jump up and down to the first song. I stuff my hair into an elastic and hope for the best. My bangs, which are outgrown by at least three months, flop helplessly around until I force them into bobby pinned submission. I'm still half-hearted, still unwilling to say that okay, fine, it's fine to be me, to be in this skin, to be bouncing around with insecurities at 10pm.But a few more songs in, and I can start to catch a rhythm. I can even (barely) see something like flexibility or strength in my muscles. I can feel my body cherish the work - it is something to do, anything, and it is something more concrete than lying on a bed feeling all over the "how long how long how long" question.By the time the video finished, I was ready:this is the moment I play, "22" and "Kiss You" on repeat at 10:40pm and dance around in gym shorts. This is the moment when I choose to laugh with my body. This is the moment when, looking at myself, I catch a glimpse.It's not a perfect picture, oh, but can I tell you what I saw?I saw a heart filled with stories to be poured out on the people who wander across my path.I saw my laughter - how it can fill a room and go before me down a hallway at work.I saw lonely that became lovely, loveable, even something that I cherish.I saw me, ten years from now, remembering "22" and "Kiss You" and chopping red onion and pregnant or not or in Italy or not or married or not or with a PhD or not, still promising God that I wouldn't forget how much He loves the things He made.I saw a glimpse of me, radiant.And I saw us - fierce, independent and free, each following the wild call of love.Because though these weeks are filled with that, "how long, O Lord?" and that, "why not me, Lord?" and that, "but what about, Lord?" - though we might know so little, though we might doubt ourselves, though we might be disappointed and angry and overjoyed and tired and anxious and gracious -I can see our wild love. I can see it in you. I can catch a glimpse of it, gym shorts and all.a love so wild, so fierce, so free - I almost can't bear it. how radiant we are. how transformed. how lovely. Love,hilary

dear man on the metro

Dear man on the Metro in DC last weekend,I noticed you because of the suit. It was a dangerously well cut suit. And I think you knew it from the way you held yourself, standing up against the rumbling of the car, against the forces and the inertia pulling against the rest of us with our tired arms and suitcases wedged between our knees.I saw you and you saw me. We made the awkward kind of eye contact that you make when you've noticed someone because of their dangerously well cut suit or their unique red-gold hair. We looked away again. We looked back, and then away, and then you leaned in to the very lovely woman sitting to your left and whispered something to her.We didn't make eye contact after that - you made the gesture, the signal, that though perhaps you and I had acknowledged our striking selves, you were with the effortlessly lovely woman to your left.Thank you. Thank you for smiling at her so completely, for your well-polished shoes pointed in her direction. Thank you for laughing just loud enough to tell us that the thing she had said was sweet and you enjoyed it. Thank you for holding her hand oh-so-briefly as we pulled away from Dupont Circle.You see, sir, when I noticed that suit on a Sunday morning on the red line of the metro in my favorite city, when I was lost in the frustration that I was not that lovely woman on your left, my imagination ran away from me. I thought, hey, that guy just looked at me. And a second look, too. I wonder whether he is getting off at Metro Center, or if we're both headed to the airport, and maybe he's headed back... You know what I mean. I thought all the thoughts that a twenty-something in a metro car thinks when she's faced with a second look and her heart is already three months past drained of emotional confidence.But you didn't look again. You instead offered the woman you were with another gesture of your care for her. You told us that there was a story between the two of you, somewhere between her hand in its dark grey glove, and your aviators dangling out of your pocket. Something is alive, you were telling us, and it belongs to the two of you, and whether a girl with curly red-gold hair wonders if you're headed to the airport, or not, whether you are wearing a dangerously well cut suit, or not, you are wholeheartedly somewhere else.Thank you for loving the lovely woman on your left in just the way we all ought to love those people in our lives. Sometimes I think the biggest lessons in love I could learn riding a metro and watching the people who ride it next to me. Because in all the gestures you probably don't even remember making, you wrote your love. You wrote a note to us - as if on a napkin at a restaurant or on the back of an extra customs declaration form just before landing - and that this person, next to you, she was particular and compelling and you were in it.I don't know, sir, stranger, where you fall in the midst of your story with her. I don't know if you two are the novel, or the short story, or even the haiku of love. I don't know if I will see you riding the metro again, someday when we're both in DC again and you will be with her, or someone else, or no one.But I don't need to know the ending of the whole story to appreciate the sentence you just wrote. I just wanted to thank you, that in a moment when I could have sat back on the ugly orange seats, and run away in my imagination with who you could have been, instead, you offered me a glimpse at the kind of real intimacy I hope I someday have.You gave me - and all of us sitting in that metro car on our way to Metro Center or the airport or Arlington National Cemetery - a reminder that love in its best and brightest is often (and maybe always) the simplicity of drawing the other person near to you. Love, real love, is you on the metro not looking back at anyone, but only leaning in closer to her.Thank you, sir, for not looking back.Love,hilary

i begin again

courage: to tell your story with your whole heart.we can't practice compassion with other people until we are kind to ourselves. This. It's this I have avoided and pretended not to know.But compassion -is a result of authenticity -of vulnerability.Nothing less.To have a compassionate imagination, as one friend named my dearest ambition over swirling wine glasses and chocolate cake, to walk into another person's very story- that takes the kind of gentleness we cannot know until we have done it. And we cannot do it without beginning at ourselves.I typed this blog post weeks ago, when I first discovered what felt at the time to be the most revolutionary, inspiring, terrifying, truthful talk I had ever heard. Brene Brown told her audience (and me) on her Ted talk that we cannot begin to be compassionate, to build connection, to grow in love, unless we are vulnerable.Really, she said, the people who live wholehearted don't think about whether vulnerability is particularly good or bad; they simply recognize that it is necessary.But last night I didn't want it to be necessary.I didn't want to build anymore. I didn't want to be vulnerable, to walk around with my thoughts on a blog or in the air against the black sky flecked with a lazy snowstorm. I didn't want to think anymore about whether I tell half the truth or the whole truth, whether there is a window into my heart or not.Sometimes the courage meets the hard place and the messy place and it seems to evaporate. Sometimes the Wednesday night heading home at 10:45 makes you think those words about authenticity and vulnerability are just words on a page without any reality, any connection to you, any roots.And maybe that's okay.Maybe it's okay to begin there. To begin again, there.Some days you hear beautiful and true things and you don't want them to be beautiful or true, and you begin there. Some days, you build bird by bird, brick by brick, and you have to pause and admit to yourself that bricks and birds are not always easy. And you begin there. And if you, wherever you are, find your courage meeting the harder places, find your eyes and arms a little weary, find your beginning in the bird by bird -I'm with you.We begin here.Love,hilary

when it is all quiet

I never really know what to do about writing. There were weeks this year when it felt like the light shone and the world just opened itself up to being written down. There were weeks when I thought, there aren't enough minutes in the day for all the things I want to say, for the draft blog posts and the poems and the maybe someday play.And then I hit the hard.I hit the twenty-something ache, the weeks of working with tired eyes and outdated eyeshadow. The weeks of missed Skype dates with friends far away and picking at limp salads at lunch and worrying again about the same laundry lists of things, repeating conversations I've already had with myself too many times to count. I wore the clothes I love without loving my body in them. I put on the CD in the car called, "You are a Girl on Fire" but I was never listening. I heard people talk and laugh, and I talked and laughed, but I wasn't really listening. I didn't lean in towards their story, close my eyes over the wine and imagine all that they were saying behind what they were saying. I didn't listen.When you don't listen, you can't write.You cannot tell us how the car sounds scrambling over the rocky leftover snow on a Tuesday morning when you are late. You cannot tell us how it feels to shrug on yet another cardigan because you're yet again worried that you don't know how to dress yourself and you're close to being almost 23, for gosh sakes, and you still fight these old battles with your body and heart and mind.You cannot tell the story of discovering there are at least five poems that you want to work on, how you realize it in a rush while checking your email in a crowded room at the National Press Club that one of the things that you want most is to work on those five poems.You cannot put a pen to the page when you aren't listening. Because writing is more about listening than it is about writing.That's why playwrights eavesdrop; so that they can capture the sound of characters in rush hour on the green line, or the silence that lingers when a couple stops arguing to order matching lattes in the hipster coffeeshop. That's why poets talk about how birds holler through sycamores, or how love is shaped in clinking spoons nestled in their drawer next to the steak knives. That's why all of us who blog, who scribble on napkins, who try to breathe life into syllables and consonants have our ears to the ground and the sky.So it has been quiet, because in my haste and frustration, I stopped listening. And in my haste, frustration, not-hearing, I realized how much I love to write. How not writing is an ache that fills me, seeps in the crevices of my Saturday nights and my Thursday afternoons.And the ache is about love. And the ache is about calling.And the ache says, light another candle along the road.And the ache says, listen.Love,hilary

God is not an if-then God

Oh friend, listen close. I've got this story that I'm bursting to tell you.I'm bursting to tell us, because, you see... I want to tell you a story about grace. I want to tell you that "God is not an if-then blesser."I was on the phone when I heard myself say it. I was fiddling with the earrings on my mom's dresser, thinking about the way they caught the light, the way they felt like pebbles and glass in my hand, the sharp prick of the metal backing- and I said it."God is not an if then blesser."And the truth of it stared back at me- that this, this is the beautiful thing about grace in our lives. God does not ask for only the one path, the perfect walk, the right words always at the right times and the best choices and the best, well, everything. No, our God pours blessing over so much more. Over you and me in all our failing. Over the choices we regret. Over the ones we cherish.He blesses because that is who He is. Oh, friend, can I dig this deep into our skin and write it across our foreheads, and remind us when we sit in silence in the face of our choices and how much we fear they will be, not only wrong, but without blessing?God blesses because He loves us.God blesses because He calls this world good and He dwells in it and His dwelling is blessing, and the blessing is uncontainable and mysterious and more constant than you or me or what we do.This is a story about grace. This is about us coming out of the cage of perfect, of trying til we bleed to guess what He wants us to do because we are scared to lose something God is so eager to give us. He doesn't need us to try to calculate our way into His heart.He just needs us to come running, carrying our choices like pebbles in front of us, our faces alight with His light. He is a God of blessing.He is the God of grace.tell me that doesn't begin to sing a little freedom into your heart? I'm singing next to you. Love,Hilary

it is simpler than you think

That is the funny thing about the mornings you wake up in a cold sweat from the fever that broke in the watches of the night: you lie there, and it is simple. Startlingly clear on the outskirts of your mind, in that just-before-fully-waking feeling, and you remember:You remember all the nights you lay in your bed in your small cramped second floor apartment, crying into your pillow that there was no clarity, no plan, no guidance for what "after college" looked like.You remember fighting God on runs around the pond, fighting the hope and the doubt, fighting the talking about the future and the avoiding of talking about it, and how the sunshine and the dirt and the water gathered by wind was beautiful, but you couldn't pay enough attention to it.You remember how when graduation had reached its sweet tearful conclusion, you took your parents' car, the one you'd learned to drive on, and drove in circles listening to Holocene over, and over, watching Rt. 22 go by your windows, silent and fleeting, and you thought of how much, and how little, you understood about yourself.Your remember how even then you didn't totally believe that God had a good plan for you, and how you crept into bed amid piles of half-packed boxes and selfishly, you tried to insist to yourself that you could make it on your own, that you could find a better plan, or make one.You remember how on July weekend days you ran away from your house into the stickiness along the quieter suburban hills, and God told you to trust Him and you didn't know how.But then, in the watches of the night, in February, in waiting for your fever to break, you also remember: You remember all the mornings you woke up and the sun shone through your window and the birds chirruped to each other a song that you just enjoyed, because it meant only that nature was beautiful and worth it.You remember that He gave you a job at the time and walked you down the path towards it, and blessed you by keeping you closer to Him in the months that followed.You remember that on the long drives and walks and not trusting rants in the woods last year, when at 21 you didn't know if you could believe His plan was a good one, He still kept you in His grace. He still gave you wind gathering water and cool breezes and cupcakes on Sundays. He still gave you the words late on a Thursday night from an unexpected person that you saved and wondered over, about being saved as through a fire, and about the wonder that is His grace.You remember that you still knew all the words to sing with you and your mom on Sunday afternoons.It is simple: all of it because He loves you. It is simple: all of it, because He has a plan to draw you nearer to Him.It is simpler than you think, as the morning wind greets you through the rickety panes of glass: all of it, because of Him.Love,hilary

when we grow up together

Dear younger self,You are not so much younger. You're a fresh nineteen, scurrying back from studying in the student center on a February night. You're wearing a dark green puffer coat that you regretted almost instantly after you bought it because you don't think green is a flattering color and the other girls that winter had sleek black wool coats and chestnut brown Uggs and walked through the world with a poise to rival Grace Kelly (or so you tell yourself).But you're marching back to your room holding onto a hot chocolate and shouldering a bag full of political philosophies and Pascal. Just behind you, two boys are laughing in low voices as they carry a pizza box and hunch forward against the wind. You can hear their voices, and you're wondering what you should do or say if you know them.And then you're staring at the stars.You see, your boots flew out from under you on a patch of black ice and your hot chocolate flew up around you and when you realize what's happening (that you're wiping out in public on a Tuesday evening), it's from the ground, looking up at the night sky.The two guys pass you by. They laugh - you chuckle weakly, try to get to your feet... fall again. They pause to ask you if you "need help."You think, Let me think. I've fallen twice by myself, spilled hot chocolate onto this coat I wish I wasn't wearing, and am sitting in a pile of books, in front of some first floor windows in FULL VIEW of anyone inside or outside, and would like to die. Right now. You say, "I'm good. Thanks."And you creep inside mortified, face flushed like the tulips that mysteriously promise to bloom in spring. You sit on your bed and pull off your wet clothes and throw Pascal and politics onto your bed and barely muster the energy to laugh with your roommate who thinks you're the funniest thing.And as you lie in bed, you cry because today was the day I fell on my butt in that ugly coat in front of people who don't know me but now know me as "that girl who fell on her butt and spilled hot chocolate on her head." Honey bun, three years later, you're going to think of this story as you and your mom shovel the lower driveway free of two feet of snow. You will haul on boots and fleece pants that match hers and rain pants from 1980 and your dad's Patriots hat with earflaps and walk into the white stillness. You will make silly faces into your iPhone camera and work out an elaborate but not wholly efficient system of moving snow. This will involve you standing in a hip-deep drift and scraping snow ONTO yourself so she can shovel a clearing for the cars to get out.You will remember how we cannot always be so hard on ourselves. You will remember that it is our ridiculous moments - girl on fire, digging snow in rain pants from the 80s moments - that draw us further into the world. Because who does not long to be a little ridiculous sometimes? Who doesn't want to make a silly face in the snow drifts?Oh, sweet younger self, I'm so glad you and I grow up together. I'm so glad you fell on the way back to your room three years ago. I'm so glad you teach yourself to laugh at these moments, because I think someday the older Hilary, the one yet to come, she will be wiser because of you and me together. She will have a long letter of memories of snow falls and shoveling, moments of crying in her bed for her awkward duckling self and moments of that self, laughing like this:

(the amazing mandie sodoma)

And it will all be a part of the most beautiful growing up.

Love,hilary

the light is gentle

The morning light is sweet but I am not. It's 8:58. Exactly 12 minutes from start time in Sunday School, and I am 20 minutes and a full change of clothes and teeth-brushing away from church. I whisper something about being foolish, throw on the only things that I can find in a bleary eyed haze. I run out the door, spit my mouthwash on the side of the steps that have been breaking since I can remember. My car is cold. It shudders and groans as I lurch out the driveway.Tears prick at my eyes. I'm late, late, late. I speed up through the yellow light at an intersection on Route 1. It's been a long weekend, I tell myself, maybe it's okay to just be a little tired. Maybe it's okay to just be a little scattered. My hair is falling out the braids I slept it, and I can feel bits of it tickling my neck. There is a blue stain on my coat. There is mud on my shoes, and I should have worn socks but I forgot. But my protestations about "having a little grace for myself" (even when I say it as the car rounds the curve to 97), they aren't a match for the steady, familiar rhythm of scolding.And all you good girls who read this, I know you know what I mean - how even in the midst of a big smile and a bright laugh, we're usually thinking about something that wasn't quite right, something that fell a little short. Sometimes we joke about this - call it "the curse of perfectionism" or even pray that we might have a little real grace thrown into our life. But most of the time, I'm still counting the number of missed cues. I'm still thinking about an unsent email or text or visit. I'm still thinking about what might have been better. I'm still resolving not to mess it up again.I run into the classroom. They're already at work, and I get nothing but smiles. No scolding, no "where were you?" And my profuse apologies are quickly put aside, as they want to tell me about the good monster they are making with paper, who only eats flowers, about the colors of the liturgical year and the song we sing about them.And a three year old girl stops in the middle of her puzzle and proclaims, "I WAS WAITING ON YOU". She throws herself into my arms, purple and pink fuzzy socks pulled up past her small knees.I am going to come apart at the seams. Instead I trace shapes and cut them out. I straighten. I use small pieces of Scotch tape to fasten a little identification card to each compartment where we keep the elements of the altar work. When we sit in the circle to sing, and to tell Jesus about our birthday parties, about aunts having babies soon, about dads who paint the basement, the boys squirm and fidget.But then the teacher asks, "This word on our prayer table is praise. When I think about giving praise to God, I think about giving thanks. What are some of the things we are thankful for?"They name bunny rabbits and dogs. They name winter and snowball fights. And then that three year old, she looks at me and she says, "Thank you Jesus for you."The light is that gentle and that fierce.I didn't stay to church. I didn't think I could bear it, encountering any more of this story about me and God in the midst of His people (even though that's good and we should).I drove weeping onto the highway. I drove weeping for being 22 and in the midst of such richness, feeling so paralyzed. For my hair falling out of its braids and my bare feet in their shoes. For all of the things that her prayer reveals in its gentle light: that God would rather sit with me weeping in my car in the back of the Starbucks parking lot. That nothing matters more to Him than this strange chapter of the story where I spend most of my time oscillating between fingerspelling words to practice ASL in my car to dreaming about someday I will be wise to wrestling with the answer "not now". God would rather nothing better than me and Him in the Starbucks parking lot. God would rather nothing better than the light creeping in through my shuttered heart. So He sends His children to teach me what I once imagined I would be teaching them.But when it comes to grace, I have everything to learn.And the light is gentle. Love,hilary

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

He names your life beautiful

Today, I got this chance to share something over at Lisa-Jo's. You know her, I bet - the mama who speaks truth and grace into your heart because she's listening so close to what God says. The one who reminds and encourages, who cheers for us even when we don't understand it...So when she asked me if I would write a post, I dreamed and prayed wide, for words to reach you wherever you are, in this moment of your day."….When I graduated from college in May, I got lots of hugs and kisses. I got fun cards that played “Pomp and Circumstance” when you opened them. I got a nice dinner with two professors I love and Flannery O’Connor books. People showered me with wonderful gifts, with care and congratulations and Starbucks gift cards.But it turns out you don’t get a how-to book for your life...Keep reading over here?Because He names your life beautiful and rich and I want to tell you how.Love,hilary

the day of the blue moon socks

If you ever wondered what it's like to walk around inside my shoes on a typical day?You go to work in the morning, bleary eyed because you don't get coffee until 7:37 at your Starbucks, the one whose baristas know your name and give you extra tea bags and honey when you're sick and sneezing all over their counter and who sometimes slip an extra shot into your morning latte.You arrive at work, do your thing. A few times during the day you'll put your head in your hands and wonder, why am I doing this? Is this even the place I am supposed to be? You'll eat 7 crackers from the whole gran TLC cracker box, then 7 more, then worry for a few seconds about whether that was the right portion size because it's still January and you might want to make this year the year of food awareness or eating right or something... then you'll forget, and eat another 10 crackers while you type furiously because typing fast makes you feel more productive.You'll drive home. You'll pray out loud as you go, rambling prayers, prayers of woods and left turns where you almost forget to put your blinker on. You'll pray that God explain Himself and His plans. You'll pray to see yourself more truthfully, see others more graciously, see God more clearly. You'll pray some things that go deep into your heart and rest there and others that you forget just as you drive through the intersection before your intersection when you're distracted wondering what Dad is making for dinner.You'll work out to Zumba by yourself in your room on the second floor and occasionally wonder if the floorboards might give under your enthusiasm for "Bollywood style" dance routines. You will wear ballet slippers you got sophomore year of college for the ballet class you took. You'll wear these with socks because the toes on each slipper have worn almost through. You'll have your hair in a sweaty bun and you won't really care that you are shaking all your bedroom furniture to music you wouldn't listen to with your grandmother because no one can see you.And then, oh, and then: then you will walk into the grocery store wearing yoga shorts, red TOMS with "Blue Moon" logo socks, a long wool coat, and a T-shirt. I am not kidding. You'll look down in the vegetable aisle and realize this, realize that your coat length plus shorts plus beer factory souvenir socks your mom bought for you when she visited said factory plus hair in its messy bun = disaster.There you are.There, indeed, I was. Not only did I wear that outfit into a public place, but I proceeded to walk around the grocery store holding, now wait for it:grapefruits, iced tea, toothpaste, granola bars , razorsThis assortment of items practically screamed, "LOOK! LOOK! I'm a twenty something! I live at home! I have no clue what my life holds! I cry in my car sometimes to country music radio!"I thought, this can't get any better. Here I am wearing beer logo socks and yoga shorts, lugging around a bag of grapefruits and new razors, looking for my mother...When of course, it does get better.The cute guy from Driver's Ed several years ago, the one who used to (I think, kind of) flirt with me on occasion under the guise of making fun of me? The one who I proceeded to see whenever I went to the local ice cream store or CVS? Oh yes, friends.He works at this grocery store. He works, in fact, directly in front of the Greek yogurts that I was furtively trying to stash under my chin until I could wobble towards the checkout because I hadn't thought to get a basket or a cart.There was that pause. The, "Oh, CRAP." pause. The pause of does-he-see-me-where-is-the-exit-shoot-he-saw-me-too-late pause. I smiled. He smiled. I moved my hand away from the Chobani yogurt. He took in my outfit, my arms full of groceries, said a vague "hey, good to see you," and went back to unpacking boxes.There are these days. These days of blue moon socks and counting TLC crackers in your office. These days of not enough pretty words shared or said to you and by you, and these days of yoga shorts and old ballet slippers and Zumba in your room to a YouTube video and buying grapefruits. Wearing TOMS. With socks. With a long coat and shorts. And the cute guy looking you up and down like he has never seen anything like it (probably true).And you know what? I love these days. They're what make us real. They're what make us gracious, graceful. They're what make us loveable.Love,hilary

the word is light

Last year, at the beginning of 2012, I gave myself the word "build." I promised it was a year to build - to build on the new person I wanted to become, to protect and grow a dream of writing, of loving other people in words, of advice offered in letters like Sugar, a dream of a bolder, freer Hilary. It was the beginning of it all, I stated boldly. Now build.And I find myself back at another beginning today. My hands are full of dreams, just like last year. They spill out around me like ribbons escaping their spools - looping and spinning, brightly colored, almost invisible in their lightness. They sound like England and graduate school and Starbucks coffee dates and maybe someday I'll write letters to strangers and pour out love to them even though we've never met. They sound like the quiet nights of practicing sign language and praying for my friends far away. They sound like that tattoo of an empty birdcage I always wanted, the one that whispers "from grace, freedom." They sound like drinking wine with the people I love, like laughter loud and echoing across a bar or an empty office or a path through the woods. My head is full of questions, just like last year. And this year, I have new answers.Why do our hearts have to break? I tell you the truth, that only in the breaking open do we find love sufficient enough to carry us forward. Only in the heart widened by pain and surprise and change (sudden or long-expected), can grace sound its sweetest chord.Why do we have to do awful obedient things? Because we belong to something bigger than ourselves, and sometimes it calls for putting aside what we want. It calls for us to set apart some of what we wish we could do or say or have, and instead tell the truth. Even when the truth means an ending. Even when it means a fight. Even when it means an unknown outcome.Why do we dream so big? Because we are a people caught up between the fleeting beauty of the snow that melts tomorrow morning and the eternity of the love that did the dishes for you last night. Because we are always torn between seeing everything we cherish dissolve before us, and knowing that all we love is never lost forever. Because in the big dreams, we love each other and this world better.What do you want to build? I want it to be a great unfolding, this next year: I want to build a nest for you. I want to spend 10,000 hours listening and another 10,000 growing wings next to you: in writing your stories and pondering questions together. In declaring that love is brave. In whispering that you are lovely, just because you are. In 10,000 hours of harvesting the light for each other and cupping it in our palms, 10,000 candles to mark our way forward. So this is the way to begin again: with 10,000 candles and a million questions and a big dream to love.And the word is light.Love,hilary

though you are small (Advent 4 and Christmas)

It's snowing here this morning. The flakes swirl just outside my window. It's a lull before the cooking begins in earnest. It's a quiet kind of snow. The kind that makes you quiet inside, listening to the Radiolab podcast while you bake peanut butter cookies for your family, while you give thanks. While you remember that Jesus is born today. The celebration is for something that un-theologically-complicated. For something that big contained within something so small.On Sunday we talked about the prophecy in Micah - "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are of old, from ancient." (Micah 5.2)Though Bethlehem was small, though Mary was young, though the story was on its face all difficulty and pain and uncertain outcomes?Out of that small story comes one who will be ruler over Israel.As I looked at the small faces in the children's service last night, wandering up the center aisle carrying sheep and shepherds, carrying an angel, carrying a star to the manger, I heard it again:but to know me, Hilary, you must become like one of these little children. For it is in smallness that God sends might. In the lonely midst of winter that He sends life. And the children, in twirling reds and silvers, in matching shoes and headbands, in stiff collared shirts they want to trade for fuzzy pajamas - they lead the way to the manger. It is these children, squirming through the one hour service, who know Him in the unashamed deep ways we are so often afraid to know Him. They come to the stable unburdened by our shining theology, our complicated words and objections. They come, small ones to see another small one, in the small town in Israel.Oh, dear friends, have we become too big for this story, with our nuance, with our questioning, with our yes, but...? Have we forgotten that this story does not bring logic, but love?Because my small friends know. They know when they can't sit still while we light, finally, the white candle. They know when they carry breakable Mary and Jesus to the manger with their brother and sister. They know when they gather around to sing "O Come All Ye Faithful" loud and off-key in their parents' ears. They lead the way this Christmas, to the small town and the small baby, to the Love come down bright and everlasting.Don't be too big for the story this Christmas. For though Bethlehem was small among the clans of Judah, from that smallness comes the great miracle.Love, not logic, this Christmas. And the children lead me. Love, always, to bear you up and bring you nearer to the great story,hilary

dear hilary: on bringing sexy back

Dear Hilary,Right before Christmas I look at myself in the mirror and scold myself furiously for all the chocolate I've eaten. For the hours I didn't work out. For the way my stomach puffs out, and I lack good posture, and my eyes are an in-between color like my hair is and I never do anything to it and basically I'm just doomed to look like this. I want to change that. I hear people say it's possible, to love yourself, to think your own body is sexy. To think that your butt looks good in those jeans. To believe that, despite even the worst of worst hair days, out of me radiates a sexy, desirable glow.But no one tells you how to actually believe it. So I want to know.Love,Mirror, Mirror on the WallDear Brave Sexy Girl on Fire,I write this to you sitting on my unmade bed that is covered in approximately 5 shoes, a coat, a cell phone, a wool blanket, Christmas cards spilling out of their case, leftover work papers, ribbon and cough drops. I am wearing 4 inch high heels and orange running shorts and my sweaty white T-shirt, having just jumped around my room in said high heels to Usher's, "Scream" and P!nk's "Blow Me One Last Kiss" and the Glee mashup of "Rumor Has It" and "Somebody Like You". I jumped around my room. I shimmied. I swung my hips in what vaguely resembles a circle. I cha-chaed. I salsaed. I shook whatever could be shook. I put my hair down. I put my hands in the air. If there was sexy in the world, I brought it back.I changed your name when I wrote back to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire, because we don't get to see our heart's desire in the mirror when we call to it. We don't get to see the "fairest of them all". The problem with asking a mirror is that it will only show you what you already think. It will show you a snapshot of those nagging thoughts. It isn't a new voice; it's just an echo.But. What if you whispered, "I am a brave sexy girl on fire"?Just, what if you did that?What do you think would happen?I dare you to put on high heels and Usher. I dare you to jump around. I dare you to shout to your bedroom walls that you are a brave sexy girl on fire. I dare you to do it wearing a sweaty t-shirt, orange running shorts and four inch heels.It's cheesy, love, but it's true. We have to speak the truth out loud more often than we realize. We have to speak it out ahead of ourselves, so that when we wake up each morning and go to bed each night, it is already waiting for us. The truth about sexy isn't like logic. You can't commit it to memory. You can't plug yourself into one end of the equation and POOF! Out comes a belief on the other end.This is a truth that is three-dimensional, living, a heartbeat inside your heartbeat. This is a truth that you build, with every dance party. With every act of kindness, every smile to a stranger on the street, every dollar you pull out of your wallet to tip the girl at the coffee shop, every outfit that you rock in the morning (especially the ones with cowboy boots, neon pink, ruffles... you catch my drift). You build this belief in your own sexiness. In cupcakes and shimmying hips and three hours reading a good book and dreams about grad school and falling in love. You build it.So this letter ends with a dare. A dare to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. I dare you to jump around dancing and saying, I am a brave sexy girl on fire over and over. I dare you to begin to build.Because you don't have to do a single thing different to glow like the French sky on Bastille Day. You don't need to do anything to your hair or your stomach or your eyes or your hair to have the glow. It is already so gut-wrenchingly radiating out from you I can see it, right now. I can see it in your letter. That's why I name you Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. Because I can see you, glowing, all the way from here.I dare you to revel in it.Love,hilary

dear hilary: monsters in the closet

Dear Hilary,Have you ever been afraid of something? Afraid to ask yourself something honestly, for fear of what it would look like? Afraid to ask yourself "why" this was happening, because of what you thought you might say in response?What did you do?Love,AfraidDear Afraid,My closest friend and I, we have a saying: brave new shit. BNS. It stands for all the things we do that defy our fear. It stands for all the things we originally said were completely impossible, the conversations, confrontations, internal moments of honesty, risks. It stands for the believing work we do: believing in being beautiful in defiance of magazines or mirrors, believing we are capable in spite of the mountain of work, believing in descending into that murky pit of ourselves because we know that there is something good there.We are all afraid of the monsters in our closet. In polite conversations at dinner parties, they're not invited. They don't stand with us in our shiniest, brightest moments - they don't live in the open sipping a mint julep with you and your best friends on a sticky Southern afternoon. They live in the shadowier parts of us, and so we don't know them as well.You're afraid of what you think lurks behind your sadness or your frustration or your stories. You're afraid that it might be much bigger than it seems. You're afraid it might be much smaller. I wish I could tell you that it is one thing or another - but the truth is, I don't know. No one does. The closet belongs to you, so we can't peek inside for you and tell you that there's nothing to be afraid of.But you can tell yourself that. You can put on "It's Time" by Imagine Dragons and start journaling. Crack the door of that closet open, and yell - "Come out, come out, whoever you are!" And you can sit with yourself on a couch somewhere, alone or with people, and fling the door open, crying and smiling and laughing, and say, "Who are you, monsters in my closet?" You can do some brave new shit and offer yourself some time to ask nothing but, "why?" - no judgment. No self-condemnation. No guilt. Just curiosity. "Come out, come out, whoever you are."I can't tell you what those monsters are. But I can tell you that your monsters, big or small, are always welcome on the front porch of the people who love you. Those people who love you will love those monsters, love them fiercely and do battle with them next to you and hold you when you discover that they are not so fierce or frightening.I bet you all the monsters in your closet plus mine plus the thousands of people who stand alongside us, all the young and old, all the fearful and brave, all the wild and all the free: you will be loved even more deeply for opening that closet door. Not just by all of us in this big world. But by you, too. You will know yourself better, love yourself better, give yourself a bit more grace if you look at them honestly, lovingly, with grace. BNS isn't just about confronting the things you don't know, Afraid. It's about bringing grace to those confrontations, especially when they are inside you. It's about being careful with yourself, not harsh. Fling that door open, and look at everything inside you gently. It deserves your attention. It deserves your time.That's the real secret of meeting the monsters in your closet: you will grow in love.Love,hilary

stop all the clocks

The bones of the poem are so fragile I'm afraid to speak. He read it too fast, almost breathless in trying to get it out of his voice box. I don't really like it anyway, he says, hearing all the words I'm not saying. He scuffs his feet, stares out the window at the brown patchwork hill. I stare at my hands, troubled. Because I don't think it's a good poem, because I'm mad at myself that I don't think it's a good poem, because he keeps staring at the brown grass and his poem sits in front of us like winter, endless and unrelenting.This class assignment might kill us both, I think. We're here for another twenty minutes, here to workshop each other's scattered verbs and nouns into something beautiful. We're here to write on burning houses and shoes, on W.H. Auden's death, on the conception of Christ (well, I'm the only one who thinks I should write a sonnet about that), on our first childhood memories. We're here to string words together and slice them apart, to fall in love with the sound of "essence" and "lithe" and the harsh consonants in "declaration" and "capture". I think I hate poetry, sitting next to him. He strung his words in careless stanzas, some things falling off the page, others so close together you can barely hear each word. I think I hate poetry, and he is silent, scuffing his feet. He wears a brown vest over a plaid shirt with a limp collar. His black corduroys have been washed so many times they are grey now, frayed at the seems. I see his hands itching for his backpack, for a sketchbook to doodle in, for the obscure band I never know the name of to pull him into a different world.I've never managed to be tactful when it comes to silence, so I plunge into it, my voice ringing against the cold winter windows. "Well, maybe we should read it out loud again. Maybe I'll read it out loud, so you can hear what it sounds like?" He nods. He doesn't care, really, and I don't know why I want him to. It's his poem, after all, not mine, and if he wants to throw it away, why should I care? I tell myself I don't care. I tell myself I hate poetry and I should sit in this twenty minute silence."Stop the clocks." That's how it begins, I think. An ode to Auden, to the poem which was in mourning of another. And now this poem mourns the death of that poet, who mourned the death of someone I don't know and might never know. I think I'm going to start crying, which makes even less sense than hating poetry, and so I keep reading.But it's there now: stop the clocks. The line, his line of poetry, the refrain. It's in my gut now, in this cold winter with the black-turned-grey corduroys and the brown hill. He wrote a poem he doesn't like, that is a mess on the page. He wrote a poem  he doesn't like that now sits inside me as permanent as even the most beautiful poem that any of them ever wrote. I hate poetry, I think. I can't fight it. I can't ignore it. He doesn't even love his poem, and here I am, loving it helplessly, loving it because of the one line that is the Auden line and not the Auden line, loving it as a part of me. Here I am, reading a poem the poet doesn't love, undone by his unloved poem.I must have finished reading. I must have said things about the poem that he didn't hear. We must have rejoined the group, said the usual things about poetry we weren't qualified to say. We must have been given homework and sent on our way, into math or science or art. We must have mostly forgotten everything the way that humans always forget.But now?"Stop the clocks."I'm still undone.

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

on thomas newman (and growing wings)

I already know this story.Four girls, the Civil War, a father wounded, a mother selfless and ingenious with sewing and making joy. Winter, almost always waiting for the spring. Spring was when thing blossomed, love tinged with jealousy, sisters growing up and into different parts of themselves. The men who enter, so different from each other, and the pairs and the children and Orchard House...I thought I knew this story. And then I listened to it.I listened to the soundtrack, that is. I listened to longing trumpets and violins that promised spring and change. I listened to how the music swelled to encompass disappointment, how Beth's music was always softest, most gentle, most patient. I listened to Amy going abroad, lonely for home and yet fiercely independent. I listened to the story told through music, through the dynamics, the journey across major and minor keys.I heard all the things I never heard before: how music can fill in the blanks of words. How there is a whole range of things that I never knew about the story that the music can tell me. I didn't realize how hard it must have been for Jo to want to travel and not know how, how she must have felt turning Laurie down - caught in a life she wished she wanted, but doesn't, caught by love but not in love. I didn't realize that Amy was so wildly insecure and wanted her story to sound different, but that when she told it, it was always about her sisters. In the end, it was a story about her family, not her alone. I didn't realize how much they loved each other, those little women.And I know, I know - it's just a story, they aren't real people. I know that, but you see, to me they have been some of the most important people I could not know: they have been part of the story of me, of my own longing and curiosity and desire. Me, with my restless fitful Jo heart and my Amy longing to be different and my Meg softness and my Beth trust. I have known them and loved them for the story they tell me about the world and my self in it.Thomas Newman reminds me about the beauty of stories: that they contain multitudes. That my imagining of Little Women and yours, and his, and everyone who reads the story, shimmers a bit differently. That in growing wings, we have to dig into the story for ourselves, imagine it, let it talk to us. To grow wings, I have to spend time with my Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth selves. I have to listen to his music, and hear new things in it. New things about those sisters, which are, of course, new things about me.Do you have stories like that, too? Ones that teach you something about yourself? Ones that, when you hear them again, echo back a piece of you?Love,hilary

a meadow, and time

The gravestone is just the same as the others. I slide my back against it, feel the warm sun bleach the ends of my hair. What is special about this man? I barely noticed his name, more interested in the twisting Spanish moss over my head, the heat shimmering around me, the gnawing in my stomach. I don't feel watched over, haunted by the dead in this graveyard. It's the living who follow me: the things I so desperately want, the fourteen year old self I cannot begin to understand, the braces that I don't get to shed yet. It's the friends I can't seem to keep. My head swirls, all the same problems, all the year full of them. I trace circles in the dirt instead of writing in my journal about this Selma graveyard. I don't care about this. I don't have anything to say. I look over to where Elizabeth sits, her dark sheen of hair rippling in the sweaty sun. I want to be that beautiful, and my body shivers with the thought. She is writing, a head full of good thoughts. I imagine that she paid attention to her gravestone. That she is telling their story, whoever they are, the bones under her feet. I imagine that she understood what the assignment was.I am at the beginning of high school. I wear strange knit pants and too many collared shirts with a couple of buttons that always strain against my chest, because I haven't learned how to breathe in and out inside my own body, and I keep imaging I'm shaped like the girls I see around me. I don't know how to put on any makeup, but I believe I should, so it's stashed in between underwear and socks in my duffel bag. It has stayed in the same place for the whole three weeks, because I'm afraid of it. It's not really my makeup anyway, just the free stuff from a Clinique bonus, but I took it in a moment that felt brave, and now, I'm paralyzed.The sun streams through the moss, and I can hear a bird calling out for its mate, but the call goes unanswered. It drops off into silence, only to screech louder, more desperate. I imagine the bird has come home to the nest and she is missing. The cry rings out over my head - where are you? Where are you? I still haven't put a word on paper. I feel thirsty and tired and the sun keeps beaming on me and Elizabeth at her gravestone with her rippling black hair writing in her Moleskin journal and my shirt sticks to my back, finds all the shape in me that I wish away. It reminds me that I am not a slender gazelle. I feel my braces and in-between hair, all my fourteen years.I know the teacher will call us soon, will want us to go over to the meadow across the street, next to the graffiti concrete wall full of the heroes of the 1960s. He will call us to step into a field and sit in the dust next to each other, sharing our stories and experiences. He will tell us to breathe deep the Selma air, to imagine Martin Luther King walking across the bridge. He will ask me a question about A Rose for Emily, about the man whose gravestone I sit next to now. He will call me out of myself and into the past, which is not quite past, and into the future, which stretches too far ahead of me. He will whisper to us, our eyes rounded in surprise, that we are all in a meadow of time together, and our pasts which are not past will someday meet our futures which are present, and not. He will tell us time in a mystery. He will tell us that perhaps, in that meadow of time, we will recognize these selves we are now next to the selves we will be.Tonight, as I write, I am next to her - and all her braces and all her jealousy and all her writer's block. Tonight, I watch her struggle to put her pen on paper, struggle to live inside the curve of her hip bones, struggle against the longing to be a slender gazelle with white blonde hair. I watch her try desperately not to care about things. But there isn't a cynical bone in my body, and she never had one. I watch her stand, brush the dust off her shorts, and turn to read the gravestone.This is the beginning of loving ourselves: simply the recognition. That girl, she is me. And tonight, I walk through the graveyard in Selma to meet her. Our insecurities are not so different eight years apart. Our fears and longings, not so different.I think that high school self, she has something to teach me.

to the poets

Dear poets,The house wasn't big enough to hold me. It was late, later than I should have been up, and it was quiet. It wasn't the leaving, I start to write. But I don't want to write about it, don't want words on paper about it. They feel small, cages for heart to fit into, one after another. The words tell me to feel better, become whole again, rebuild, make peace. The words and their empty, echoing spaces.I was the reader leaning late and reading there, Wallace Stevens. I was the stillness, and the noise. I had all these questions. Why don't we get what we want? Where do we end, and other person begins? And how can this be, that we are so strong and break so easily, the weight of just one question enough to undo us?I remembered a line from a Kate Light poem - "and it flickered, and was frail, and smelled wonderful." I found the book, smoothed out the crumpled blankets, set her pages up between the folds, and drank in her words.

I remembered Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus:To sing is to be. Easy for a god.But when do we simply be? When do we

become one with earth and stars?It is not achieved, young friend, by being in love,however vibrant that makes your voice.

I heard a line from Stephen Dobyns and another from Lisel Mueller and another from Pablo Neruda about the saddest song and the forgetting, and another, and another, until I could not breathe for all the words. I could not breathe for all the echoes.

The poets teach us how to live.You plant words in us. You sing out a blazing, single flame of song, something about the ordinary mundane moment of watching a woman run for the train, something about winter, something about disappointment or the death of a butterfly on your windowsill. You write about Italy or fear or walking alone into the underworld (as Persephone who is Eurydice who is Psyche, who are all different and the same).Perhaps you are always a bit lonely, your words departing you as children do, not ever really yours, always sent to you for the moment when you write them. Perhaps you sit at your computer and dare yourself to cut sentences apart, to watch each word like  glittering fish in a stream.Perhaps this, too, is good. For if you do not write the poems that swirl through my head on the late night when I cannot write, if I could not hear you echo back to me that this world is capable, that we are capable, of making beautiful things despite ourselves, I might lose hope.The poets give me hope.It isn't a sly hope, the kind we have when we already know all the possible outcomes. It isn't a cynical hope, where we have given up. It isn't a safe hope, either, a blind trust that things are good and will get better.Poetry is reckless hope. It strips you bare and looks at you, at the story of you, at the empty room late at night and dares you to make something of it. To make something more of what happens to you. To make something, period.You make me reckless, wild, afraid and impatient. You send out that single flame of song and in my room leaning late into the night, I catch fire.Love,hilary