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

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

dear hilary: hormones and love

Dear Hilary,First of all, what is the deal with our hormones? I feel like a hostage sometimes in this crazy pattern of attraction and sex drive and then I have other moments where I wonder what on earth is going on. And then I think, what's the right way to do this, anyway? Is there one? A right way to be young and have hormones and be attracted and want others to be attracted back to me, all without going overboard?Love,Hormones + Love?Dear Hormones + Love?,First of all, the deal is that it is actually quite normal to have hormones. We're supposed to have them. They do a bunch of things for us besides signal somewhere deep in our gut that the man or woman across the aisle in the airplane is oh-so-fine. They help our growth, our metabolism (giving us energy), reproduction, the sexual function, our mood... they are powerful chemical messengers, traveling through our bodies (released, I just learned, by major endocrine glands like the thyroid and the pituitary). All of this, aside from making me very, very interested in biology, tells me that your hormones are not alien invaders. They aren't holding you hostage. They're actually a part of you. Maybe it's our culture or our background or our religious beliefs or just our general fear of the body (powerful yet feeble thing that it is), but we must get past the idea that our bodies desiring other bodies is a strange plot twist. They're designed that way, love. We experience powerful attraction to that oh-so-fine man/woman in seat 12E because we are sexual beings. We experience it instinctively. I think it might be that simple.Like all feelings, realizing that you are wondering about sex and your sex drive and if you should or can or will or might someday want to have it is kind of terrifying. Some of this is fun - I look really hot in this dress! - and some of it is fearful - What if they don't think so, or do I really want that to be what they are thinking about when we have a conversation about politics? - and all of it is new.You don't have to have answers. You don't even have to write a letter to me asking for them. I think my advice in your situation, at the beginning of grappling with these questions is to begin to pay attention. Listen to yourself. What do you respond to? What worries you? Where do you feel a disconnect? Pay attention to your answers. Pay attention to how you understand your body, your sexuality, your heart and your mind. You are you, made up of all these things and more, and you stand closest to it all.You ask me for a right way to do this, a right way to enjoy being young and yet not go overboard. I don't know that there is any way to begin to know "the right way" except by listening. Really listen, though. Your letter tells me that you want more than just a quick answer. You don't want to be told that it's okay to make out, but not get undressed, or that you can kiss someone who you aren't dating, but not more. You don't want the highlighted rules, do you?You want a framework. You want a way to make these decisions so that they echo you: authentic, beautiful, young, nervous you. Lists of rules aren't helpful, in the end, because they don't bring a bigger picture with them. They don't help you see the purpose behind the decisions you make.Give yourself some space to listen. Be brave and go first and ask your close friends about how they might answer the question - and listen to them. Begin to ask yourself, "What do these feelings mean? How do I want to express attraction? What do I want to do with my feelings? How do I want to live fully and well?"That's the best place I know to begin in almost everything in life. Including us and all those wonderful crazy hormones.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) 

when there are no words (a letter to preston)

Some of you know that last year, my friend Preston and I started pondering theology out loud in letters. He writes on Tuesdays, I write on Thursdays, and we wander through Gossip Girl and workloads and grace and mystery and espresso. Won't you join us? You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I think not long ago we were talking about writing, why we do it, and I rambled off something to you about silence - that we write to get to the better, fuller silence. I can't remember exactly what I wrote you, only that I kept wondering the question, turning it over in my mind.Why do we do this, this gut wrenching work, this turning our selves inside out and displaying it? I freeze every time I hover over the publish button. I think about being too revealing and being too closed off. I wonder if books are safer (are they?) because they're bound beautiful and the words have chapters and categories, instead of spilling out all over the same website in no real order. Why do you, Preston? Why do you write?Rilke keeps asking me this week: must you? Is it the thing you cannot live without? And this week my answer is such a tentative, restless yes. It's a yes of impatience, a yes with a no lurking under it, and then a deeper, more reluctant yes lurking under that. I must write. I can't help writing.Some days I wish I could stop. Some days, when I close my eyes and think about the weight of this world, the ruins of St. Mary's Cathedral you mentioned before, that one sculpture I'm desperate to see again in the Musée Rodin, the passage in Atonement that makes me cry when I read it (and I read to help myself cry in my real life sometimes, too) - I just want to stop all the words.I want to sit in silence. I want a small punctuation mark, the comma or period, and then, that lingering space.The pause,The pause.I am tired of seeing how little I'm really capable of saying well. I am tired of the tug of words on my hands, saying, "come, write the world, everything you see, never cease your amazement and sorrow and awe." Sometimes I want to stop feeling amazed and sorrowful and awed and just feel that silence.Do you feel that too, sitting in front of your blog or your books, wondering about the way you see the world and how much you see in it? Your post from yesterday - about the old sadness, and the hope, and the Light that breaks forth? It made me want to stop all the words, except for Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke (because in the midst of my silence I hear, not their words, but the space their words create), and have the world sit in silence.The pause before the storm resumes. The pause when even the wind will cease howling for a moment and listen to the greater stillness that hovers over the land.Maybe the purpose of all these words is just to reach for that silence. Maybe we are supposed to write our way there, and people everywhere sing or paint or train for marathons or bake bread or build homes or families in the unsteady journey to the greater stillness I can almost hear hovering over the land.I'm going to leave us both with Neruda, and the deep space of his words and the swell of the ocean I imagine lived in his heart, whether he could taste and see it every day or not. I imagine that we'll someday, somehow, live inside the stillness.

Let us look for secret thingssomewhere in the world,on the blue shore of silenceor where the storm has passed,rampaging like a train.There the faint signs are left,coins of time and water,debris, celestial ashand the irreplaceable raptureof sharing in the labourof solitude and the sand. - Pablo Neruda, from On the Blue Shore of Silence

Love,hilary

on math homework and mystery (a letter to preston)

Some of you know that last year, my friend Preston and I started pondering theology out loud in letters. He writes on Tuesdays, I write on Thursdays, and we wander through Gossip Girl and workloads and grace and mystery and espresso. Won't you join us? You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,First of all: MUMFORD. Mumford. MUMFORD.Second of all: I'm still not over that Bon Iver concert. I can still hear Holocene echoing in corners of my day. I think it might be one of those concerts that changes you so deeply that you never shake it. It's something about Holocene. The ache and the insistence.You ask how we know we're right, and we both know this: we don't know. There isn't a knowing. Not really. Not the way we wish, the way of tight logic or empirical plot points.We know in all the ways you can't quantify, the ways of songs that burst your ribcage open with singing, sign language that makes you miss a friend living far away, the sign of the Cross made on a Sunday morning in the ordinary way, and the violent grace of Friday night movies and solitude and wondering. We know the story by living inside it.Tonight I remembered why I'd rather that - the uncertainty of living inside this story, the pull of doubt and the rush of reassurance, the twists and turns that makes us wonder if randomness and purpose really can collide. Tonight I helped my youngest brother with his math homework.I haven't done algebra in years, Preston. Most of this feels completely foreign to me, like a country I haven't seen in years, whose language I can't speak. I pick my way through letters attached to numbers and symbols, erased half of our family calendar on the whiteboard in my anxious left-handed scribbling.I did it standing barefoot in the kitchen in yoga shorts. My brother stared into the book, eyes wide with fear. Math is never easy. Math is mystery. It's things that mean other things and relationships described so carefully and precisely that one mistake, a simple one, and it's suddenly ten steps later and your number is negative and six times what it should be. I think I cried before or after every math test in high school, convinced it was the end of me. I loved it and feared it. I wanted to be naturally good at it, like those people who could look at numbers and tell you how they are related and if you multiply numbers three and five by number 7 and square root and something... and something else... and see? They all mean this.But tonight it wasn't about my strange love/hate relationship with math. It wasn't about whether I understood the logical precision. It wasn't even about whether my numbers fit neatly into their prescribed boxes.It was just about love.It was just me in my yoga shorts and my brother with his wide eyes and tightly gripped pencil. Just a family whiteboard, smudged left handed scribble, the mysterious meaning of functions, and the knowledge that I was not supposed to go anywhere, do anything, be anything, but my sister to my brother. I wasn't supposed to work on a blog post or read an intellectual sounding article. My whole self was supposed to stand in the kitchen doing math with my brother. Because this is the world God has made: where meaning is mystery, where we make families and live in them, where music breaks us open and sews us back up. Where you walk to the water listening to Mumford and I stand in the kitchen doing algebra.And through it all is the story we can't prove except by our hearts, which pour out love.Grace, and peace to pour out more than you think you have,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

we are all the lost sheep (a letter to preston)

Some of you know that last year, my friend Preston and I started pondering theology out loud in letters. He writes on Tuesdays, I write on Thursdays, and we wander through Gossip Girl and workloads and grace and mystery and espresso. Won't you join us? You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,It was the warmth of the night as I walked to my car that got me. It's late September now, the month winding its way to a close, and the nights are usually cool, crisped with fall. But we were supposed to get rain, and so there was a warm wind rushing past me as I trudged, three bags and three inch heels, towards my car alone in the parking lot.It was warm, and the air had that late summer sweetness to it as I breathed in, and out. And I paused for a second. Just a second - put my bags down and closed my eyes and took a deep breath of that sweet oxygen - and that fragile wall, those bits of glass I had glued together to protect my heart through smiling and being overwhelmed and getting fifteen emails in ten minutes - that fragile wall crumpled.It is in these moments that I get a step closer to understanding why God blessed us with physicality, with bodies that cry and hyperventilate and crumple in the front seat of the car in the empty parking lot. He gives them to us so that we can recognize when we are in need. If we always stayed lovely, perfectly calm and collected, if we didn't feel aches in muscles or turn red from tears and sweat, I wonder if we would be able to recognize how deeply we are in need. Our bodies keep us humble.As I drove home, I finally, finally prayed what I couldn't pray before this humbling moment of warm wind and just a second to catch my breath: Jesus I know I'm supposed to believe you love me, even if it aches and is lonely. I know you have me here in this place and I have to trust when it's the desert and when it's silence. But I need you to say it again. Will you tell me again that you love me? I can't hear you anymore. I can't believe it. The words hovered in the car as I drove, silent, expectant. I thought it, over and over, Will you tell me again? And He spoke."I will leave 99 to find you."More silence.And oh, the grace of what followed. "Hilary, you belong to me. I will always leave 99 to find you. And I will hold you in my arms stretched out on this cross if you were the only one to ever live. Because I love you. Because I love you, I will always come find you. I will never lose you, Hilary. Because I know my sheep, and my sheep know me. And I will always come find you."Whoever we are, wherever we are? We are that one sheep. This is the miracle of grace: it doesn't matter if you grew up in the church or became a believer yesterday. It doesn't matter if you pray ten times a day or only once, or none at all, or where you live or who you marry or if you have children or if you volunteer at a soup kitchen.We are all the lost sheep. We are all the one running into the fence, into the wolf, hungry and afraid and trembling before the world. We are the one sheep that He chases after. Each one of us is loved so mysteriously and extravagantly that He comes looking for us and does not rest until He finds us and holds us and brings us home, rejoicing.Maybe this can make us more joyful when we meet others returning: because in every moment He pours out love and blessing on a brother or sister we can realize that we are all the lost sheep, brought home again by grace. Maybe we can stop being the older, accusing brother in the story, the 99 jealous sheep, when we realize that we are all that lavishly loved.We are all the lost sheep.He loses no one.Love, and grace upon grace be poured out for you this week from the Good Shepherd,hilary

to the brave voice

Dear Hilary's-brave-voice,This isn't a normal letter. It's partly to yourself, because you are part of me. You're the part of me I wait for - the free, wild, winged part. You are me now, but also me someday. You're already, and not quite. Some weeks you sing out, strong and brave, and some weeks you hibernate. I want to live my way towards you. I want your voice to be my voice all the time: the voice that speaks truth, not condemnation. The voice that says, "it is enough," instead of "why couldn't you do more?"This is one of the weeks where you are singing, so I write to say thank you.Thank you for telling me that my hair doesn't have to flip perfectly across my shoulders in the morning.Thank you for telling me that dancing Zumba with a youtube video of a British man is worth it, simply because it brings me joy.Thank you for giving other people their own emotional freedom. For insisting that I let things belong to other people - their own emotional decisions, their own choices, their own journeys. Thank you for asking me to keep quiet sometimes.Thank you for the delight you have in the world, how everything you see is bursting with possibility. Thank you for being so earnest in everything you do.Thank you for promising me that in the tangled web of loving other people there is room for mystery, for people doing inexplicable things, for putting up a good fight and losing, for setting each other free. Thank you for asking that I love deeper.Thank you for the time that you sat on the couch in the counselor's office and said that you believe I am beautiful. I'm beginning to believe it.Thank you for the advice columns you poured out all those weeks this past year, in the old space.You are the brave voice inside me. You are the voice I reach out towards in the midst of these long weeks when I think nothing I do is good enough and everything I do falls short and I'm asking everyone if they'll tell me that I'm good enough, and you reply, "But you don't need them to tell you that." You turn my detailed plan for affirmation upside down and spin it away from me. You refuse to let me be okay just because someone says I am.I am asking you to stay here. I love you. I love how brightly you smile, how you stand up straighter and laugh more. I love how you are strong and soft. I love how your heart is open. I love how you put on clothes in the morning and march out to the car, bleary-eyed before the first cup of coffee but beautiful. And how you just know it in your bones. I love how you run to feel the muscles working, not to lose the weight. I love how you paint your nails and watch Mad Men.I love how much grace you can give others because you're finally willing to offer it to yourself.Hilary - this Hilary, brave and bold and growing - I'm asking you to keep singing. Sing louder.I'm leaning in closer. I'm listening with all my heart.Love,hilary (the still growing part)

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 my mentor

I walked on the waterfront this weekend. My footsteps were slow, measured, taking in the new feeling of clarity, of answers after the long summer of questions and hopes. I walked, and thought of you. I thought about how it has been a while since we sat here, cups of passion tea lemonade all but abandoned at our feet, my hair flying behind me as my hands act like windmills to illustrate my point. It's been a while since I've seen you laugh and tell me to get a grip on reality.But when I called you on Friday night, curled up in my bed, and heard your, "Hey," I knew that not much had really changed, even if it's been months since that encounter with Mary in that church in Mississippi. I knew that nothing important had changed, nothing of who we are, and how we are. Maybe we're softened a little by life, certainly by grace. Maybe we both grew up a little bit, scrambled over mountains and out onto open plains. I know we had deserts and I know we had hurricanes (we both know if God didn't send them to me, I was sure as heck going to make some of my own). I also know we had rainfall and manna and provision.I walked on the boardwalk in complete silence. I went into the Book Rack and browsed for an hour, because I knew I was lonely and needed to be with words. I bought this funny book called, The Lover's Dictionary, that's a love story told as entries in a dictionary. Alphabetical and everything. It's brilliant, and it felt at home with me. I bought two cupcakes - this hazelnut one I'd never seen before, and the raspberry vanilla one that's always been my favorite. I carried the pink box back to my car like a silent promise that I'd be brave and give my heart back to God, like you told me to.I don't know how to say thank you, and these words are reaching out trying to tell a story that is better told through other things - like beaches and waterfronts and cupcakes, like humidity and fear and courage and wine - but you know that sometimes I write to remember, or to say thank you, or just to remind me that I am me. Today is a little bit of all three.I hope that carpet glue story STILL makes you laugh because it's so epically Hilary that if it was the only story you heard this year you would know it was me.I hope you don't ever forget that hard conversation we had over pad thai my freshman year where you said, "so quit," and gave me the courage to be truthful. And now God has so covered all of the journey in grace that I'm being confirmed in a few weeks and going to confession for the first time soon. And it's still all a mystery.I hope you soak in those highlands and lakes and the rich air of Scotland. I hope you let it feed you. I hope you come back full to overflowing.I don't think wisdom is about the things you know anymore. I think wisdom is how you dwell with what you have been given. How you understand it, learn from it, cherish it, release it - how the one life you have becomes the bottomless well from which you give life to others.You taught me that.Next time I see you, let's go for a walk on that boardwalk with those cupcakes. I can't wait to discover what else you have to teach me.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

to the photographers

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. And sometimes, like today, I just want to say thank you.Dear photographers,I don't think I understood that old line, "a picture is worth a thousand words" until I saw you and your camera. You were laughing and gesturing to us to squeeze closer together under the big Colorado sky. You were coaxing  a worried three year old to pose with her brother in a vintage car. You were wandering the streets of DC with me catching me mid-laugh, staring out a window or pondering life with my chin cupped in my hands. You were reminding the bride that she was exceptionally gorgeous as we drove to the courthouse for the wedding. You were pulling yet another black lens from a hidden pocket in your bag as you laughed, almost tripping over the low lying wall behind you, anxious to capture the surprise and the nearly bursting with excitement of the unexpected engagement. You were in a studio loft in New York City with the afternoon sun with a senior in high school, asking her to tell the world her story.But a picture of yours is worth so many thousands of words. In one still frame, you teach us the look of love, how it laughs, how it gazes, how it feels under the bright sun. You teach us to see the little girl walking down the beach holding her mother's hand as the very expression of hopefulness.How do you do it? It isn't the fancy camera you have, the lenses, the sleek black bag. It isn't the extra flash or the HD-enabled something I can't pronounce.No, you see - it's the beautiful way you see the world. It's the stories you discover behind the camera. You know the ones I mean - the way he holds her hand is a story about their wild promise of love. The way she hugs the yellow monkey to her chest is a story about how to feel safe. The way I look at my sister while I begin to cry during my toast to her and her husband is a story of sisterhood and love and how we must give the ones we love away sometimes.Thank you. Thank you for the way you coax us out of our shells, the way you hold up a mirror to all that is miraculous about human faces and trees silhouetted against the sunrise and a seashell cupped in your hand in late summer. Thank you for telling me I am lovely without using words. Thank you for giving my friends the image of their joy on their wedding day. Thank you for running down a path in front of the Rocky Mountains. Thank you for teaching me to see light and shadow.Thank you for teaching me to be speechless.You make art with our faces and our lives. You give back to us a promise that this mess we make of things is also the beginning of what is truly beautiful. Promise me that today, you'll pause and hold your camera in your hands, and smile at everything the two of you can create.Your work is worth ten thousand words: I only offer mine to begin to say thank you.Love,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)

dear hilary: the four months later reminder

Dear Hilary,Do you have any advice for how to keep myself from panicking every time I make a mistake? The kind of panic that sets my heart racing. The kind that makes me want to throw up. How do you bear a mistake?Love,PerfectionistDear Perfectionist,At a job I had a few years ago, I got an email. It was from my boss, ad it asked me to explain a complaint he had received about something I had done. I read his email while eating a granola bar and plotting my next strategic move to get the guy in microeconomics to ask me out. You can imagine, then, when I read that email.I fell apart. I cried hysterically. I wrote back to my boss apologizing profusely, trying at once to justify myself and take all the responsibility. I cried through a class that afternoon. I cried in bed that night. I was utterly convinced that this was the end. I had ended my job. I had ended the office. I had ended everything.Love, I am here. I am typing into an iPhone screen from Colorado. I am alive, the office is okay. That mistake did not signal the end of all things. It didn't have that kind of power.Our mistakes rarely do. You panic from responsibility, from fear, from imagining the possible outcomes. I think it is wiser to remember that love conquers fear (even in our jobs). Remember that this mistake is yours, too, to own as part of learning and growing. Even what we do wrong is put to good use in a different kind of economy.Four months after that email, and I was fine. You should laugh, sweet pea. You wrote to me looking for what to do. But really, you're not going to need to do much other than wait. Own this as part of how we learn. Own it as you walk around the quad worrying about what went wrong. Own it with all your might, that it will teach you good things and brave things and beautiful things.And four months and then four years from now, it will be part of a story you tell to encourage someone else. It will be so part of you that you do not bear it: you love it.Love,Hilary

to my someday brother-in-law

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 soon to be brother-in-law,I already know you, but I don't know if you will read this before or after the moment you become my brother. It's a funny and miraculous thing to know that my sister is going to marry you. You will become so important to us, a part of our family. I think years from now we'll wonder about what it was like before we knew each other. For you, my soon-to-be older brother, I want to say thank you for the love you show my sister. You'll hear it at the toast, I know, but I might be crying and I'm sure I will forget to say all the things I want to.You teach me how to love my sister better. You take care of her, and you let her take care of you. And the way you love each other and respect each other, the way your heart and her heart seem to meet in just the right way, that teaches me what kind of love to wait for.Thank you in advance for challenging me when you think I'm missing the boat on something. Thank you for cards and words of encouragement, for believing in me. Thank you for being protective, and for the tough conversation I am sure any someday boyfriend of mine will have with you.Thank you for taking my sister hiking and camping and all the things we did reluctantly when we were little and driving across the Badlands. Thanks for laughing about the time I tripped over a root, fell backwards down a hill (after being warned to watch where I was going), and my dad said, "She's hurt herself! The fool!" I can see us all, years in the future, grilling steaks on the back porch somewhere in the Midwest, the sun beating down on my (and my sister's) pale skin, and we are all laughing. Family is like that, isn't it? It makes you laugh more than you think possible. We fight among ourselves (and we all know how much my family loves a good debate...), but it's often playful. And in those years ahead, somewhere in the Midwest, I'll get corn stuck in my teeth and you'll laugh, and we'll all laugh, and the visits will always go by too soon.I'll try to be a good aunt to your kids, to love them with a big love. I will come visit more often than necessary. I will send cards with goofy pictures of my kids, if I ever have them. I will call you on Sunday afternoons or Tuesday nights, just to catch up.My sister is one of those gifts from God I never deserved. Giving her away is harder than I thought possible, but it's okay because it's to you. Because I know you love her with a big heart. I know she is at home with you.In just a few days you will be my brother-in-law. I'm praying that some of these words, however small, however simple, make you smile when you read them. I can't wait to be family.Love,hilary (your soon-to-be sister-in-law)

to my someday son

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 son,I am curled up in my bed in the quiet of my birthday. The house is calm, and still, and I have eaten too much cake and been loved and cherished much more than I can give thanks for. I'm 22 now, so I write to you before your dad and I have sat around with a baby book and tossed names around across our battered kitchen table. I don't know you yet, my boy, but I already love you.You know that your sister and you are the most miraculous things to happen to me. You are my first daughter and first son - and even though I am praying our family is bigger, and I can write letters to your sisters and brothers - there is something different because you were the first. I'll be more afraid for you, more afraid with you. I'll make more mistakes. I'm so sorry for the times that you wept and I raged silently because I couldn't fix it. I'm sorry that I groaned when you needed me in the middle of the night, just to hold you until you stopped throwing up (you had stomach flu, hon, and it was tough). Know that my love for you is so deep and wide I sometimes catch my breath just looking at you.I told your sister last week that I am single now, and young, in the very beginning of becoming a grownup. I know that when you meet me for the first time I will be crying and laughing and your dad will be there, holding you and crying and laughing. I hope you meet us and we seem like one, somehow, two people who share in this great love for you. You won't know it for years, but you and your siblings make me and your dad love each other better. We fall back in love every time we sit on the couch and watch you play with Legos and trucks, dance with your sister playing the recorder in the loud, squawking way.I have probably bullied your dad into writing you a letter about being a man (I made him do it when we were pretty sure we were going to get married, I bet). I don't know what it's like to grow up as a boy - but your dad is the most gentle, wonderful, strong and brave man I've ever met. He will teach you things I can't teach you. Wake him up with your questions in the middle of the night, love. Ask him all the things you don't know how to ask me.But I wanted to write to you, too, because even if I'm Mom, not a boy, you are still my bug and I want to tell you that I love you. You might get tired of hearing it. You'll sulk in a corner of the room on your fourth birthday because love doesn't look like the trip to Disneyworld you wanted. But I promise, my love for you is forever. It outlasts every time you're angry, every time you're sad, every time you fight with me about staying up late or renting the R rated movie or hide the keys to the car just when I have a big meeting. I promise to love you more because of those things.You've changed everything about my life, bug. You've changed how I eat and sleep, the dreams I have, the ideas of myself. I can't tell you how yet, because I'm still at the beginning of the story, before I know the miracle that you are. But you should always know, whenever you wonder, that becoming a mom was the greatest gift. It was the most marvelous and difficult thing that ever happened to me. Right now I think it's hard to say "no" to the wrong things, to figure out whether I should straighten my hair, to not be afraid of disappointment. Right now my life is full of long runs through the woods where God and I reckon with each other. You'll do this, too - run and talk, pray and yell and fall on your knees as the physical exhaustion opens up your heart.So until I meet you, and we go on those long runs through the park where you listen to me talk to God and you play with your brown monkey, until we fight over car keys and girlfriends, until we sit around our kitchen table or on the plane to see see Gram and Granddad in England... I promise to learn from the wiser people in my life. I promise to fall in love with your dad, whenever I'm supposed to. I promise to run and pray. And I promise to love you always, bug, even before I know you.Love,hilary (your someday mom)

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