praise is calling, a letter to preston

Do y'all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. This is the first of the new letters - but you can read Preston's last one, from last October, here. (And just so you know, he is unlike anyone I have met before. In all those amazing ways that words fail to capture. I'm amazed and awed and all the rest by him)Dear Preston,"You know what I think? I think maybe I'm finding it. You know, the THING." I cradle the phone lovingly, just the way I used to when she and I would talk the miles between New York and Massachusetts in our college years. I remember how we didn't know who we even might want to begin to be, how then, everything was new and she taught me to joy in that, rather than to fear. I remember how the not knowing used to send me running for some comfort somewhere, for books or academic sounding research projects, but she said I had a calling different than that - something about writing, about telling stories."I think I'm finding it."Do you remember me telling you about this conversation? Did I tell you about it? Sometimes, I think you and I have talked about everything, but I'm back to wondering if I can put words to what is going on in my heart and mind. I'm thinking about this again, this morning, in the long stretch of the day and the longer stretch of the summer, thinking about calling, thinking about what I'm hungry for.We use the word vocation all the time. Is it because we almost never know the real word? What do you call it - the hunger that somehow feeds you? What do you call it - the thing you must do, as dear Rilke would say, the thing that calls forth from inside you and outside you and that will not relent? What do you call it - the way of being?What I'm after, anyway, is a way of being. What I am longing for, anyway, is to wander without being lost, to ramble with a pattern, to... something. I can't quite figure out what.The words trip their way out of my mouth, always a little ahead of my thoughts - "I'm called to praise."But we all are, aren't we?What would be special or different about that calling?Doesn't God have a more unique purpose than that? (the questions begin, a slight trembling of my bright horizon line, and I blink a few times as I continue to pace the pathways of the old, familiar campus)We live in a difficult time to talk about calling  - the emphasis has landed so heavily on our uniqueness, on our gifting, on how God has specifically called each of us to each particular, discreet, place and time and conversation, that we have forgotten how much of our calling is universal, even, dare I name it, ordinary. We spend time seeking the very thing only we can do, imagining that calling must be there, where deep gladness and deep hunger meet (I kept the napkin with that Buechner quote from a three years ago) but also where they meet and I am unique there, a pioneer."I'm called to praise."That's what I can't shake off. I think about the way that words can sing out from one person to another, can Name (you know, like Meg?) things as real, can breathe love. I think about how maybe my life can be flamed with praise. How maybe I can sing in the kitchen to children in the future that we should praise the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation. I think about the world, lit by praise, the hard work of perceiving what is true so that it can be mirrored and imagined and understood.I don't know what it holds, exactly, but you know me with things like this - I just can't get over it. The calling to praise. Perhaps now I am just to listen closer. To the world, to people - and maybe listening is where we can begin.Love, always,hilary

the wondrous offering, a letter to preston

Dear Preston,I know, we sort of stopped doing these letters for a season, and I know that we'll talk about this, on Skype or when you are here, in my kitchen, in not so many days, but we made these letters to write our way towards the true and the beautiful. And when I saw something in church today, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to write it here, first, in this our place of beginning.Behind our altar there is an icon of the crucified Christ. I see it every week, I'm almost blind to his face, until that moment I get on my knees and I'm asking for the Body, and for the Blood, asking Christ to enter me, asking Him to be with me in the deepest mystery. Then, I look at that icon and it is like the Orthodox say - it is a window. I feel the air move differently, a wind coming from the icon, from the altar, from the outstretched arms of that crucified Savior. I feel the air touch me as the priest's robes swing by, the steady gesture of offering.Today I saw something else, too. This is what I have to tell you, the moment that stopped me.Today, I watched as the priest made the gesture of offering during the Memorial Acclamation - the final doxology where we pray, my eyes leaking a few stray tears at the steadfastness of this faith in the face of my own wavering heart, this Church who breaks and breaks and by breaking keeps us whole...

 "By him, andwith him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honorand glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever."

And the priest lifts the bread and wine above, and in this gesture upwards, I realized: the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ icon are still visible. You can see Him pinned to the cross behind the priest praying that this mystery would take place in the unity of His spirit. You can see, not his face, but his arms, stretched in offering, in love. I have never known if I can possibly understand the Cross - and the questions swirl and dip in my stomach some days - is this penal substitutionary atonement or the Moltmann suffering Christ or the cosmic redemption - (and you know how much I trip over theology)but Preston? The outstretched arms are visible behind our offering. What does that tell us? What does it promise? I don't know. But I know my heart has been stopped, that I can go no further, and though the words are tentative and tremulous I know I have seen something wondrous this morning and I wanted to tell you, I had to tell you.Is it that Christ, to whom we offer, is visible because we are offering what already is His? We are making our offering in response to the offering already made, our sacrifice a poor remembering and reechoing through the world that we know who has stretched His arms out, once for all, and every moment? Can we see and hear the air change and move as we gesture upwards, and just behind the gesture, is the Person to whom we make the offering, who was Himself first offered?Do you remember the scene in Gilead, the one with the baby and the girl, the leaf and the river? When they go back to the car, it says, "Glory said, 'I do not understand one thing in this world. Not one.'" That is how it feels now. I have seen something wondrous like the child and her mother kneeling in the cool clear of a stream and learning the world by sight and touch, and I do not understand one thing about it.Christ's arms behind our offering. Christ to whom we make the offering. Christ, invisible yet poured out in the mystery of remembering Him. Today I realized that I have sold the idea of this Eucharist is memorial so desperately short. I have thought that was not the fullest way to imagine it, not when there are mysteries of presence and participation.But we must not make light of the remembering. Christ commanded a memorial. In remembrance of Him - almost as if He commanded that we see His arms behind each gesture of offering. That when we get on our knees to receive, we come into the memory of Jesus outstretched, offering Himself for us.I do not understand one thing about this world. I do not understand one thing, but I wonder at each thing, holding onto it like the child with the leaf. And perhaps it is enough to know that the offering is wondrous, and beautiful, and fearsome to behold.Love, from my heart which is wondering,hilary

dear brothers

Dear brothers,You're each in your own worlds a bit these days, high school and college, relationships and summertime, work and landscaping and extra physics prep and climbing trees. You're together in some of those worlds, when you disappear into the cave of the living room to play video games or watch Duck Dynasty or the Sox game.I don't think I tell you often enough how much you have been teaching me.Take that drive home for instance, the other night, when you were willing to listen to me while we played Eric Church off my iPod, how you told me about your excitement for our someday-families being close to each other, about the cousins we haven't ever had before, about the wonder, about the time. You and I don't always talk about the future, and we're in a forever competition about who knows more Harry Potter trivia (you do, but I will never give up the fight on it), but when you said that I could feel that future smile at us from wherever it lives right now. I could imagine it, all the siblings drawn closer together, children and spouses and laughter, more food than we could possibly eat, the sun lingering on the horizon line just for us, just for those summers.You heard me, and I heard that you have a bigger heart and a braver one and that man, I have so much to learn from you about the kind of love that really forgives and forgets and chooses joy even when we're pissed off. Do you know that? That those years of Calvin and Hobbes at the kitchen table, the years of us eating with paper napkins and a simply set table and not having the cable or the new computers - that all of that, it has made you a tremendous man? This past winter, when I realized I was homesick for you even though we live in the same house, I tramped out through the snow to where you were creating a different world, your imagination still wilder and wider than most, and you taught me how to climb the tree and look out over the back yard, even though I'm scared of heights? Do you remember that? And how you taught me about building your own forge from the bits of old metal we don't need anymore laying around behind the shed and even though we didn't say much afterwards, that afternoon I sat on my bed and cried and laughed with God that you, my youngest brother, are who you are.And then there are the coffee mornings, older younger brother, and how we slip into a routine without realizing it, our hearts beating out on our sleeves, in the quiet space we draw between eggs and toast and unlimited refills. There are those mornings when I confess my jealousy to you, where you teach me how to ask forgiveness, really ask for it, where I tell you that I am afraid I might never find what I'm looking for and you so gently remind me how much of it has already found me.You and I drying the dishes while the kids we love refuse to fall asleep and their parents will be home soon? You and I watching Raylan (me terrified), the house gone to bed? You teach me to love the every day and to be watchful over the people I love. You teach me to care more about the condition of my kindness than my clothes and to treat others with more respect than I would probably offer on my own. I run upstairs to you in the midst of the visit that is changing my life and you're awake, and we lie on our mattresses and talk into the night about how this is becoming real, and you're there with wisdom and patience and you remind me that God is good. And on the drive home from church and lunch I caught my breath again because I saw a truck that looked like yours and I remembered that in our family you are always the first to offer peace to our hearts and slowest to anger and in this, God shows me what it means to love as He loves. I saw a truck that looked like yours, and I just had to smile. What a gift you are.So brothers, who are so different and yet of one mind, all I wanted to ramble about in this blog post, which has gone on a long while now, is that you teach me, and you remind me, between Duck Dynasty and the grill and the summertime, that there is not one thing in this world quite like having brothers - and not one thing in this world like you.Love,your sister

and we are hearing what we are

Last year, on this day, May 10, I wrote a letter to Preston. Something about it caught my mind when I was thinking I wanted to write something today, that I wanted to remember how much the years bend and shift with our changing weight. How gravity loves us, pulls us, releases us, how time spins, and stands still. How it all seems to change and not change and there is wonder, and there is grace. Always that. Something about this letter (originally published here) felt like it was the beginning of the right question. Dear Preston,Isn't it strange, this ache we feel for the departure we must have known was coming? I graduate in nine days - you in just two - and I'm sitting on my bed angry at the idea of leaving, as if it was a surprise tucked into my acceptance letter, a clause I didn't read. You're going to have to go from this place, it says, and I want to rebel, insist that no, we can always be here where it is safe and familiar, where it is challenging and messy, where hearts have emptied and overflowed.But then the thunderclap, as you put it, and the sweeping in of departure. And we'll never come back here, will we? Never as we are now, and the place which seems so familiar will bend with the seasons and look different when we happen upon it in ten years. Among the great and varied changes of this life, it's places changing we forget about most. Baylor and Gordon will change; the green of the quad and the presence of the coffee shop on campus and the feel of the chapel pews and the long sidewalks leading past the baseball field to the track - they will weather new conversations and new feet, new adventures and heartbreaks. These places we love most will not stand still just to watch us move. They, too, will journey on towards their fullness. The places, too, will become more fully His.I'm deep in Rilke, deep in the goodness of those words. After all this, it is Rilke who reminds me, in his gentle way, to trust and behold and marvel. Can I share just one small thing with you, because it's too beautiful to leave on a page in a book?"Orchard and Road" (Collected French Poems)In the traffic of our daysmay we attend to each thingso that patterns are revealedamidst the offerings of chance.All things want to be heard,so let us listen to what they say.In the end we will hear what we are:the orchard or the road leading past.All things want to be heard. I wish I had learned this four years ago, when the stars clamored from the night sky, when the trees whispered, when the people I passed on the sidewalk looked longingly at me, waiting to be recognized. I wish I had learned to listen to what they were saying. I missed them. There are a thousand images I might have captured, rendered permanent in words or in the silence between words; a thousand people I might have loved, a thousand books I might have read, a thousand cool rainy nights I might have walked and prayed and thought.But in the end we will hear what we are. What does he mean by this? By listening to the world, we will hear what we are. We who are so in-between, who yearn beyond the world but root ourselves in the world - how can we know what we are?We are leaving, Preston, and the departure aches in places I didn't know existed. In the traffic of my days I attend to that ache. I listen to what it says: it says I have loved. It says I have given my heart away. It says what I am is human, and to be human is to ache and love.Today and tomorrow, I'm praying that you would hear what you are in the traffic of your day: that you would hear about how you loved, and rejoiced, and ached. That you would hear how you belong to Him. That you would hear the orchard, and the road leading past.Love, and every grace,HilaryPS. A year later, still in the traffic of our now different days, still with our hearts and minds bent towards the true and beautiful - with a year of working and theology and sacramentality (things we know better know that we don't know), and a year of crowded bars and dinner parties, a year of grace that sometimes ached and always lasted - I still wonder about Rilke. I still want to hear the orchard, and the road leading past. I still think this must be about wonder.

dear hilary: why we pray

Dear Hilary,If God is other, if God is something inconceivable and beyond, why would we pray? Why should we pray? How do we even know if he hears or cares, if there is anything real about the Person you say you get on your knees in front of? I don't want to pray anymore. And why should I?Love,The ChallengerDear The Challenger,I'm torn between telling you that I believe in intercession, in prayer, in the agonizing work of getting on our knees because of something about St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, and this one man who lives in rural Mississippi who I met last year on a trip down to see my mentor - and telling you that I'm not sure I always do believe it, but I pray anyway. Both are honest, in different hours of the same day, in different seasons of the same year. And the reasons behind our prayers are mysterious, I think, and somehow beyond words, but I'll try.I pray because of things like, well, the fact that God's otherness has been brought so near to us in the image of God we bear, in how the Incarnation has flung all our ideas of "cosmic distance" out the window. I haven't ever known what to say to the red shift and the rate of expansion of galaxies, other than to ask whether the Incarnation shouldn't shatter any idea that we have about what love is, and what it contains?And when I get on my knees in my office and bend my head and close my eyes against the too-bright office light, I'm not sure I know how to believe Him against the black holes, the waves and vibrations of shadows and shuddering dimensions, the unknowns. And call me a fool, but I remember a love so particular He knows my name, cares where I work, who I befriend... a love so particular, He came to earth to save me. God is inconceivable; but it's His movement that mystifies me more than His being. The fact of them: the fact of this Redeeming, the fact of this messy, sweaty, bloodied birth and life and death; the fact of his loving, not just in the hypothetical, but in the lived. I can say, "I pray because God has commanded me to," and there is something in that all on its own.I pray because God Himself cut the covenant. God saved Israel. God wandered with His people, through the years of disobedience and the agony of distance and all in the movement towards this pivotal mystery: the Word made Flesh.And whether we want to, or not, doesn't really seem the question you're asking. I think if you waited a little longer, you might ask that question differently. I think you'd be asking whether you can trust the work of prayer. Whether it means something.And that answer is a terrifying yes.You can trust the work of prayer, of speaking words too big for your head and your heart, of interceding for a person you love.I can't pretend to really know why. My logical and theological arguments begin to fade at the moment when I face the real question - can we trust this - and I don't know how to tell you yes. But yes.God is inconceivable, beyond comprehension, the creator of the dimensions we know nothing about. And He is wondrously close to us. And His love is particular for you and me. And a love that particular is listening.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gather the threads

Dear Hilary,All I ever see is the clock ticking. Time is always running out. There's never enough time to do it all. When this season ends, a new one will begin but what about when that one comes to an end? Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I'm so scared on missing out on things and losing those who are precious to me.Hilary, how do I live alive in the moment when all I can think about is how quickly the end is approaching? How do I deal with the clock that keeps ticking, and a heart that desires to live so fully, experience so much, and spend time with so many people? My heart feels ready to explode.Love,About-to-GraduateDear About to Graduate,Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I feel you on the edge of your seat with this question, maybe tapping a pencil on your desk, wondering, worried that the answer might be something trite like, "because that's the way things go," or "that's life," or even, "it will all be okay." I want to steer clear of those words, not because they are untrue (actually, I think they're terribly true), but because sometimes it helps to hear it sounding in different words. I want to tell you a story.I was sitting in a kayak in the middle of a French river. My friend and I were in floppy sunhats, my skin already a solid pink, our arm muscles so tired we couldn't even admit to ourselves that we didn't really know how to "feather" or "J-stroke" back to the group. It was early afternoon, just after lunch, and the group was eagerly paddling ahead while we floundered. It was summer, and in the south of France there is a sweetness to the air itself, a dull humming from all the things coming alive: lavender and bees and olives. We were in search of the Pont du Gard somewhere down the river, further into the afternoon. We were in search of ourselves, as soon-to-be seniors, in search of love at 17, in search of everything. I can almost taste that day, our laughter pealing out over the water to annoy a stray duck and a solo Frenchman, convinced that we had arrived at the beginning and this was, and must be, a kind of forever. We floated under the ancient Roman aqueduct singing a madrigal we had learned four years before - "All Ye Who Music," All ye who music love, and would its pleasures prove, O come to us, who cease not daily to warble gaily...As the days in France, and later that summer, meandered by me, I began to panic. It was senior year, I whispered, the end of high school. The end of the daily relationships, the walks to and from the Barn, the end of singing "Wade in the Water" and "I'll Fly Away" in voice lessons, the end of whispers and note passing and French. I stayed busy so I wouldn't see the end coming. I convinced myself it would be fine. Or that I wouldn't miss things. Or that time wasn't really moving at all.But, dear heart, time was moving. And I moved with it. And you, where you are, have moved with it too. We cannot hide in our feathers or in our schedules. We cannot convince ourselves that absence is a word without meaning or the life, so rich in front of us, is not going to change. We are not given permission to do that.I want to tell you that my story in France, which I type as if I am still in the kayak in the south of France, it was six years ago. All of its richness has entered the wider tapestry of my story and now, when I plucked the thread to show you, it brings with it a thousand others. Stories I didn't know about until four years ago, one year ago, Sunday afternoon. It's bound to the things that haven't happened yet in my life - just as your threads from high school, the people you love, the things you love, all that feels most alive in you - they are bound to your future. I promise you do not lose the things you love, and the good and beautiful things that go through the first ending now have a life beyond it.Gather the threads, sweet pea. Run your fingers through these stories of high school, of deep friendship, of strange awkward school dances and movies you didn't need to spend the money to see in theaters and essays and languages and family summers. Hold them in your hands, feel their weight and length. Write them down, or tell them on the phone late at night. Or relive them with your dearest friends.They have a life beyond this first ending.They live among the thousand threads of your one beautiful story.Love,hilary

dear lizzy bennet (on grace)

Dear Lizzy Bennet, dear fictional character I have spent much time and energy loving and fretting over,When I read about you, most of the time, I judge you.I know, that's silly and strange, to admit to you right up front that I am judgmental towards you. You are a character with such a story, with so much of what I dream of and imagine myself to be. You and I love books and being outside, are too headstrong sometimes and we think with our hearts and our first impressions for far too long. For a good long while, the things you did I scrutinized with my pen and my imagination and my hope all mixed up. I wrote about you. I wrote against you. I wanted you not to be so stupid about Wickham and to see Mr. Darcy for what he is right away. I wanted you to be fiery but gentler, to appreciate Jane, to see what was in store for Lydia and do something about it.And I don't have much by way of good explanation, Lizzy Bennet, other than to tell you that most of it was because I was judging me. For my stupidity over Wickham. For my foolishness. For my inability to see Jane well. For being fiery at all the wrong times. I saw in your story so much of me, and I poured out this judgment on you as a way to explain to myself what it was I thought I was supposed to do, and be. I thought if I analyzed your character enough, understood what was wrong and right with each action, each sentence, then I would be safe from making the same mistakes. I would have mastered, through the reading of a story, all the mysteries of life.When I finally say it - that I thought I could master life through the pages of a book - it makes me laugh.Life is only understood as far as it is accepted. Life is only revealed to us as we live it. Knowing that I am like you doesn't stop me from making the same mistakes and different ones, from missing Mr. Darcy and falling for Mr. Wickham. It doesn't keep me loving Jane better. It doesn't mean I protect Lydia. It doesn't even mean I am a better balance of fiery and gracious, tender and firm.Actually, it turns out, Lizzy, I only begin to understand your story when I have entered my own. I only begin to see how we are truly alike, you, the character I have cherished alongside the women I imagine you'd befriend - Anne and Jo and Marianne - and I.Maybe that was what I was missing in high school, when I read how you behaved and thought I could learn completely from the pages of a book. Maybe that's what is missing every time I fall deeply into a story, leaving my bedroom for the wandering moors of Somerset and for New York and Green Gables and even Gilead, Iowa. That these stories are at their best, echoes of corners of the fuller life. They hint at the life we are already in.That's why we love them so much and treasure them and keep them on bookshelves for years and years on a special shelf we've marked "the words you must know to know me" in our minds.So, I just wanted to tell you, Lizzy, that I have a new kind of grace for you. For falling for Wickham and being too headstrong about Darcy and not appreciating Jane or protecting Lydia or loving your parents or for goodness' sake doing something besides mooning around England (why weren't you writing a book?). I have a grace for you because as I lean into this story, of 22 and just-after-college I recognize how understandable it is that you do what you do. I get it. I love you a little more for it. Perhaps this is a beginning of grace for myself.Love,hilary

to the musicians

Dear musicians,You wrote this.And this.And still, then, this.You see, you have made more than music. You have put words in front of me, sounds in front of me, that I turn to when no words seem sufficient. When all has been said, or felt for so long it may as well have been said.I turn to you, Explosions in the Sky, because you are signaling something more than I cannot understand but I wonder, fear. I turn to you when I'm wearing black running shorts too big for me, lying on my bed with my eyes closed in the face of making some real mistakes with myself, the kind that put you on your bed late on a Sunday as the sun bleeds pink into your room and you cry, not the tears of guilt anymore, but of simpler exhaustion. I play you because I don't know what else to do.But somehow you are the answer.I turn to you, Horse Feathers, for the violin. For the song of the year, for everything you realize as you sing that it feels like you are just beginning to learn. I can hear you echo when the last train pulls out of the station late on a Friday night, and it's as if the stars themselves caught wind of the Last Waltz and played it back to me, looked down in something like pity or compassion, something like grace or peace or understanding or tenderness, and whisper your music. I listen for you in the night sky.And somehow the violin plays.I turn to you, The Civil Wars, because when I watch you singing "Poison and Wine" I think of the day when I am telling my daughter the hard stories about love and I imagine that we'll sit on a park bench and I'll play the song, and whisper in her ear that all of this hard is also all that is becoming beautiful, the bass notes to accompany the sweetness of the guitar. I imagine as the song plays, each of us with one earphone, our heads together, that I will tell her that in love aching is a part of the whole, a thing not to be shunned but accepted, embraced. I hold her imaginary self in my heart with you playing in the background.Somehow this teaches me.I turn to you, Bon Iver - I turn to Holocene, strangely, to give me my heartbeat back. Because there are the days when I catch my breath at the clarity of the truth, the invitation to do a difficult thing. I turn to Holocene to listen for my closest friends. I turn to Holocene in the middle of the work day when I imagine writing a poem with a line about peeling potatoes, something so ordinary it ought to become beautiful to us, or as I make the same right turn out of the school driveway to go home, or when I sit in astonishment at the words of the Collect in a Sunday liturgy. I turn to Holocene to write and reimagine. I turn to Holocene to allow my heart to beat, even for a moment, to a rhythm I feel inside my bones.Somehow you play me back to myself.So, musicians, you who struggle for 10,000 hours, who light candles with your sounds and silences, who make a way for the tongue-tied and trembling, who build songs that carry us forward even as we fight, who play the world, and are played by it -who, somehow, create out of nothing, something -I am so grateful. I am so blessed. I am, entirely, awed. 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

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

dear hilary: no small work

Dear Hilary,There is a saying, "there are no small parts, only small actors." I think it's meant to tell us that we are all important, somehow, that our one line in a play is not less meaningful than the monologues, our place at the back of the corps de ballet is not unimportant, even if we might never be cast as the lead in Tchaikovsky. But Hilary, is that true everywhere? How can it? Aren't we supposed to want the work to be meaningful? Aren't we supposed to seek positions of influence and do good in them? Aren't there small jobs? And small work?Love,My work feels smallDear My work feels small,My answer is a resounding and beautiful and emphatic no. There is no small work. There is no small work in a world where something as simple and apparently stupid as being the person on the bus who always asks their seat neighbor how they are can change everything. There is no small work in a world where the right sentence in an email, the right amount of foam on a latte, the best swept ballroom or the newspaper print copy edited for the fiftieth time can be an expression of love.And it can always be that.The phrase about small parts and small actors leaves out the truth about small actors. They are not small because they wished for a bigger part - they are small because they didn't imagine how they might love and live wild in their small part. It isn't selfishness, I think, to want and long for meaningful work. It isn't selfishness to fall into the trap that tells us that meaning is attached to power. There is a lot of good we can do when our voices can speak speeches and our hands touch many people and our platforms have followers galore. There is a lot of good, a lot of beautiful, we can do when we can bend the ears and minds of those around us.But we will only do that good if we build, bird by bird, moment by moment, latte and copy edited letter and email and photocopy, a heart that's widened with an imagination for love.We have to build up a heart for love. And then we have to love.Do that, and there will be no small work.There will be days when the work feels small. When you wonder how any of it can be about love, or about influence, or about the big ideas we once had about changing the world. There will be days when the purpose of vacuuming eludes you. When the tenth meeting about the color of the balloons runs you ragged. When answering the phone feels as important as counting specks on the wallpaper. When you cannot think about babysitting for one more second before you think, I have no idea what this accomplishes in the world... I cannot promise you, my sweet friend, that we will always trust that our work matters. We probably won't. But if we do it even then? If we dare to tell ourselves in those moments that even this work (maybe especially this work), is always about the depth and quality of our love, the tenor and passion of our one-liner in the great play? If we dare to imagine ourselves away from the simple chasing after power?Oh, then, I think we will change the world.One latte, one photocopy. One smile, one remembered favorite coffee flavor for a coworker. One promise, one extra twenty minutes of laughter and compassion behind closed office doors, one email at a time.Because there is no small work in a world this hungry for love. I dare us to love it that much together.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gripped by fear

Yesterday, this kind of amazing and crazy thing happened. I got to share over at Lisa-Jo's space, and I would love it if you'd visit me over that way? Just click here. And if you have a question for me to ponder with you? Just email me: letterstohilary@gmail.com

Dear Hilary,

I don't think of myself as a pessimist (and I don't think others do either) but I'm noticing my tendency to expect the worst. The phone rings and I think tragedy has struck. Someone pulls me aside and I instantly assume I'm in trouble. Sometimes the fear makes me sick to my stomach.  I know worrying isn't productive and most of the things I fear never come to fruition but logic isn't loosening fear's grip on me. How can I shake it?

Gripped

Dear Gripped,

I read your question and thought about it as I drove home from sign language class. I drove in silence, asking myself occasionally what fear is, where it comes from - what might we possibly do to shake ourselves free from it?

The words that came to me as I swung my car into the driveway, and trudged up the steps to my house through the slush and rain, through the night that always feels impossibly dark, were not my own words. They were Rilke's. I wonder if you know them, from his Letters to a Young Poet?

“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

I don't pretend to really know what's going on in these words, because I'm far from having sounded the depths of much of anything. But, Gripped, I think Rilke's bigger point is that the opposite of fear is not only courage. It is also trust. 

We are all convinced that the things we do not know - the phone calls we haven't picked up, the being pulled aside by the teacher, the long silence from a friend, the unreturned email - they must be a monster. They must mean that terrible thing that we have always secretly wondered about, but never really tried to understand or imagine. Fear thrives on the things we don't want to know - thrives in darkness, in vague worry, in the unexamined and unaccepted. We too often keep ourselves from knowing the things we are afraid of. And so we do not trust them. And so the fear lives long.

To shake fear, I don't know that you always need to be brave as we typically define it. It doesn't mean being angry with yourself for your fear or trying to "outreason" or "outlogic" yourself or demanding that you suddenly be fearless.

Instead, perhaps we can shake fear by widening ourselves to receive all that the world holds for us. What might the experiences that have you shivering with fear hold for you that is rich and beautiful and good? What might they grow inside you? What might they help you become? What might the phone call bring you - can you imagine in the thirty seconds before you answer it being something marvelous? Can you widen, even if you just say it inside your head, your heart to accept this new thing?

Fear keeps you from being that fully alive self Rilke talks about: one who is open to even the most incomprehensible experiences, one who trusts that even those things which are strange and terrifying hold something good. Fear feeds on our uncertainties, but most of all, fear thrives on our lack of trust.

I think we shake it by repeating the gestures of trust over and over, in our head and in our life, until they are as natural as breathing: arms open, eyes wide, running toward the world.

It will undoubtedly disappoint us sometimes. It will be less than what we want. It will be too much. It will bring crappy phone calls and teachers yelling and family fights and silence and shouting. But all of this makes us more alive, Gripped. All of this, even the things you fear most this moment, can be the very things that are the making of you.

Trust me.

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

dear hilary: on old flames

Dear Hilary,Do you think that it's a good idea to get back together with an ex? I'm wondering if it's a good idea, because while we fought, and it was hard, and a lot of us felt difficult and broken, there was a lot of good. And so now it feels like a real possibility, and I'm wondering if it's a good idea. What if we just hurt each other more? What if this is it, but we don't get back together and we leave it unfinished? Where do you even begin to go with that possibility?Love,Old FlamesDear Old Flames,Well, here is an interesting question, and an old one, and a good one. Do we step back into something that we left behind? Do we return to a landscape we have visited before? On the one hand, there is that warm call of familiarity. This person knows you, knew you in a moment in your life full of growth/change/becoming. They understand that habit you got into your 20s with folding your sheets or only ironing shirts the morning you wear them. This person knows your favorite movie when you were 5, what you think about taxes or the environment.On the other hand, there is that list of the things that fell apart - the way you couldn't fight fair, the misunderstandings that started over coffee and ended over listening and whether they cared at all about your feelings. The long nights of counting shadows on your bedroom wall thinking about everything else that might be out there, and could this be it? And the conversations where those thoughts slipped out and it felt like things broke all over again.So there you sit, with your old flame, who is wonderful and difficult and folds sheets weirdly and doesn't like Mexican food. There you sit, you who are wonderful and difficult and don't like parakeets and think James Bond is a total sap. You both come to this moment, and ask, do we go back?But that's not really the question. Relationships are only like places in that we live in them, that we make space in our hearts and minds for another. We cannot make the same space twice; because we are changing, and the person is changing. So you are never going back, if you and an old flame decide to pursue a relationship. You are going to build something new together, because you are meeting again as people weathered by the years or months apart. You are meeting, not as old flames, but as a possible fire.I can't tell you what to do - there isn't a universal rule about ex's and get togethers. Some work wonderfully; some don't. Some build back the patterns they had hoped to learn from; some build something entirely new. But always, I urge you to ask questions not from the perspective of wandering back into the past, but from the perspective of bringing all that you have learned from your past into your present. What did the first falling apart teach you both? What do you want it to teach you about this new possibility? Who have you each become in the time you were apart? Do those people fit together?Don't be anxious, sweetheart. These questions won't be checked off a mental to-do list before you make a decision; you'll ponder them lying awake in bed at night no matter what you do. Your gut will make the decision and you'll step into it, tentatively and boldly, with confidence and trembling. But ponder them with all your might, and listen closely to your heart. It will tell you whether to work out those questions alongside your former lover, or whether those questions are better pondered alone, in preparation for the next relationship.We do this work of love, whether with people we have just met or have known a ten thousand days, whether lovers or friends or teachers, by allowing our hearts to guide and be guided. By asking ourselves about the people we were, and are, and who we would dare to become, and letting those people point the way. In the great unfolding of your life, getting together with your ex is a sparkling silver thread; no matter what you choose, there is bound up in the choice itself such wonderful things to learn.The poet Robert Bly once wrote, "I love you with what in me is unfinished." Does it get more beautiful, Old Flames? Does it get more true?You are unfinished; your ex is unfinished. This choice will not finish or complete either of you or your life stories - it will only help you love with what is unfinished inside you.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

to the moms

Dear moms,I'm lying in bed sick with what feels suspiciously like strep throat - a raw ring of red across the back of my throat, a headache that wraps around the back on my neck... all the usual symptoms. I woke up this morning whimpering in a small voice for my mom, for a cup of tea and a hug. My eyes were full of tears, from the feverish dreams, from the tired, from the need to be taken care of. And my mom, she cracked open the door and smiled at me, the smile of understanding that promises a cup of pomegranate green tea and a long hug and a forever kind of love.I don't know how often you get a thank you note for what you do.I don't know if there are good words for it. You see, I want to be a mom. I drive through the long winter afternoons and I wonder about making a home and a family, of learning how to rock a baby to sleep with one song on repeat, how to color with a toddler and how to bake cookies with a seven year old girl who doesn't feel accepted by her friends at school. I dream about that unglamorous life. I imagine how it will weary my bones the way it has wearied you, and how beautiful it has made you.I see you as marvelously beautiful. My mom is, I know that. My mom makes room in her bed for me when I'm sick. She hugs and kisses me when I come home, makes me a cup of tea or a bit of toast, just because she knows that I am lying in my bed sick and sad. She tells me jokes, bad dating stories when I'm lonely. My mom surrounds me on every side with grace and courage.You do that, too. You in the unglamorous life, you are beautiful in your 1am new mom outfit. You are beautiful in bringing chicken noodle soup to your sick kids. You are beautiful folding laundry and watching cartoons and desperately coaxing gum out of someone's hair with peanut butter.I want to say thank you for pouring out so much love onto your kids. When it's difficult. When we yell. When we are ungrateful. When we push against you and demand too much and don't know how to be grown ups and when we do selfish, stupid things. Thank you for pouring so much love out on us that we are surrounded on every side by it.Thank you for holding us tight when we're sick. Thank you for building a nest for us. I am going to guess that the twenty-somethings I know and love, we all have complicated moments. We are grown ups and yet young. We are trying too hard and not hard enough. We don't know where the future will lead us, and we trip over ourselves sometimes.But as we have fumbled, I don't want you to think we forget. We don't forget that you make a nest for us. We don't forget that we are safe in your heart. We don't forget that, for all our fumbling, you trust us to become something wondrous.So thank you, from all of us, for the years and years you poured out love. Thank you, from all of us, for the sick days and the cranky days and the art projects and the road trips. Thank you, from all of us, for that wondrous love.I hope and pray that someday, we'll sit down and share stories about that wondrous love.Love,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

dear hilary: don't live in an abandoned house

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

to the gypsy mama

Dear Lisa-Jo,I'm writing quick because there is always another email or another call or another worry, and I wanted to put something in my space, reach out across these clicking computer keys to tell you, like I told you the other week - your book is a beautiful thing. It's beautiful in all the unexpected ways you taught me to think about beauty. It is the beauty of brave, of encouragement, of moving outside yourself to give something real and living and true to the people that you love, to the people God calls you to. I'll never forget how I first met you - my heart racing and worried about what you would think, since you know my dad and I didn't want to disappoint. And you opened your arms to me. You hugged me onsite.You took this 20 year old lost sheep in DC inside your heart, told her to hold fast to Jesus, to hold fast to the heart she hoped to have, to love bigger and wider. And then you lived it out for me.You lived it in Himalaya (turned Tandoori Grill, but still with that lunch buffet).You lived it when you let me marvel at your pregnant Zoe belly in November at Family Night Dinners.You lived it when you brought me to Relevant (now Allume I think) and let me learn the dip and sway of afternoon naps, and I still hear you and Zoe when I hear "Winter Song" and "Poison and Wine".You lived it, this big, bold love of Jesus when I got to meet Ann and Holley and I about fell over with amazement, that such women could look at me instantly with love, me, "the baby whisperer," as you called me. It might be the best title I've ever had.You live it every day, gypsy mama, and now there is going to be a book about it, about this marvelous rich love, about this parenting journey, about how God breaks our hearts open with His good gifts. And every time I look at you, my eyes full of uncertainty about those boys, you know the ones, and the longing to be with them and the not-sure-how-it-will-ever-work-out - you give me back a gypsy mama love.You give me a love that believes God calls us to a bigger life than just a job. That God calls us to a bigger love than just quid-pro-quo. That God calls us to dance silly in our kitchens at 22, drink caramel mochas without thinking about calories, to listen to one song on repeat 1,009 times.I love you, Lisa-Jo. I love this book of yours, this beautiful idea. I love this bold new step. I wanted to tell you, so that you knew it from my words to yours, from my heart to yours.Someday I hope I am a gypsy mama too, all bold love and wild grace. Someday, I hope my love looks like yours.Love,hilary