when this is the seventh month of gratitude

I promised a long while ago that I would keep up this accounting of gratitude for marriage, for the spin of our ordinary days, for the way you learn to move, two by two, day by day, in the quiet and the loud and the in between. I promised myself, maybe in some way I promised this blog, this space I keep carving in, bit by bit, marking where I am and where God is.We've been married almost eight months.When I say that it sounds long and short. It sounds like newlyweds and it feels like we've been married forever, we've always been here, always been rounding another bend of time. I forget to be faithful with the laundry. I get mad at myself which makes me avoid it even more, til there are two laundry baskets and a hamper full of things quietly asking for my attention, for my simple act of caring for the space we share and the work we take on, two by two. And it's so gentle, this forgetfulness, that it makes me so angry I'll pick a fight over something completely unrelated because I have this idea of what kind of person I should be in a marriage, what kind of house I should keep, what kinds of things I should do and say and feel and think...I get mad about the laundry. That's the truth in this seventh month, and the gratitude is as simple as that: he waits for me.He waits for me through the rage portion, the avoiding eye contact and getting eerily quiet portion. He waits for me to lose my temper and then go silently inside myself to find it again. He waits even when his hands are full of dishes. When we have only 10 minutes to get somewhere and we are already behind. He waits.And in waiting, he keeps his heart open to me. He waits for me to find the words, to find the thread, to walk my way back from the edge of cliff or from the confusion or the silence.Marriage is the fullest kind of mirror. It shows the ways that you're loved right in the midst of showing you all the things you really do and say and think. It reveals and it redeems. Marriage calls you out of your secret, silent heart and into that hallowed space where your belonging sings in your bones. In this, the seventh month, where I know I've gotten mad about laundry or sad about not going on a walk every day or worried about absolutely everything for no good reason... in this seventh month I can list for you all of those things, but what I know most deeply is just this:The love of my life will stay at the sink with the dishes undone or sit in the car when we're already late or hold me in our living room with all that unfolded laundry, and all the while, he is teaching me that love is patient.I'm grateful for this: that the love of my life waits for me, especially now that we're always around each other, always nearby, always close. He still waits. And that waiting is a great gift.Love,hilary

when I choose the economy of God

"So, I guess you're going to have to figure out three things."This is my husband, in the still, dark room where we sit and write with the rain outside and the quiet inside. He's talking about gratitude, something I'm resisting, and I don't have a good reason, I should tell you that right now.Actually, I should tell you that I have some bad reasons.In the economy of an anxious heart, your minus columns are always outlasting your positive ones. In the economy of a perfectionist heart, a minor dip in expected performance is the 1929 crash of Wall Street. A lower grade than you expected of yourself or a missed opportunity to make friends with someone or some nice thing you can't quite put your finger on but you're sure you failed to do. You name it for yourself and suddenly it is another thing you've forgotten, and you work and live on an ever steepening incline of failure, and somewhere along the way you're also drowning in your own misunderstanding of yourself, and you've mixed your metaphors together so you are a drowning person climbing a mountain with a top you can't reach, pushing a rock maybe, like Sisyphus, or maybe just pushing yourself, hauling yourself up and up and up and already you are sure you have been defeated.That's me sometimes. I don't know if it's ever you, but it is me. It is me when the grades and the papers and the research ideas come back with critique or comment or areas for improvement. It is me in the quiet fights and the loud ones. It is me lying in bed on a random Saturday morning cataloguing the friends I haven't caught up with lately or the places I have not brought peace or the way I should have and could have and would have been a better me.--The economy of God looks nothing like the economy of my anxious heart.The economy of God is God coming towards us, promising abundant generosity for the laborers who work an hour and those who work a full day. It is a strange, terrifying generosity, the kind that makes my neat columns of deserving and undeserving and the weight and sift of my measurements look foolish. The kind that puts us to shame in our race to merit and earn, but rescues us in the midst of it too. God laughs, I imagine, and sets us free.--Once my counselor asked me what the big bad was that would happen if I didn't win. If I didn't get perfect grades or perfect GRE scores or a perfect record of performances. I still don't know the answer to that question. I think that was her point.--I want the economy of God. I want the economy of generosity, the economy of grace. I want the rescue from drowning my way up a mountain I can't ever finish climbing, the setting free. I want the economy that will force me to give up my pride in making each and every thing perfect, my disappointment at myself when things aren't just as I would like them. I want Jesus, in the end, whatever it might cost me and my well-worn anxious heartbeat.And so I do have to figure out three things, write a story that is full of the richness of a generosity I didn't earn, full of receiving blessing where I can't say my goodness or my rightness is the reason, but the only reason is the sufficient reason is that God loves. That's the new story. God loves, and the richness of the story is there. I'm caught up into it, and set free by it, and this is the better story.Preston asked me for three things. I won't tell you what they are, but I'm thinking I might keep a journal somewhere, and start writing them down.And so in a little way, widen my welcome of the most wondrous love.Love,hilary

when I find dirt on my wedding shoes

I had a plan for my wedding shoes, even before Preston proposed to me. I'd seen them in a magazine the previous Christmas and in so many wedding Pinterest pictures. They were the perfect color pink - ballet pink, the kind that's gentle but strong and not too flashy but not too pale - made of what look like satin ribbons, flat but elegant. I've wanted to be graceful like a ballerina for a long time (far longer than I actually studied ballet, I should admit), and these were the shoes I imagined wearing.They fit perfectly, and I kept them in their box without ever touching them or wearing them. I would show them off in hushed whispers, the tissue paper crinkling, slip them on for no more than ten minutes and always inside. I couldn't imagine ever wearing them anywhere - they were the thing I thought would make me beautiful.--And today I was cleaning our closet on a whim listening to the rain outside and I tried on my wedding shoes again, just to see. I don't know if any of us are very far from thinking beautiful things are magic, and so I stood amid the dust and the old scarves and the sweaters and I slipped them on.They fit perfectly.They're covered in dirt.I began a lament, half-formed the words on my tongue and half whispered them to the mirror, looking up and down and wondering where all this dirt had come from, if I should put them somewhere safer than in the midst of all my other ordinary shoes, as if they should be kept safe from my ordinary life, from my growing self.--But I couldn't stop looking, noticing, and then I realized: the dirt makes them beautiful.The dirt is the witness to the growing of a young marriage, the beginning, the glorious running through the world and the slowing down, the catching each other, the catching ourselves, the being constantly caught up in God. They're bearing the marks of marriage: the almost five months, the honeymoon where we got tattoos and the wandering through the grounds of my high school where we got married, the scuffs of grass from down by the river where we walked in the haze of a Texas summer. I can squint and see the mystery green pen marks I tried to erase with a Tide pen now permanently etched at their edges. They're wearing history now, a bit of rainwater, worn from being stamped in frustration or impatience. And they wear the history of love, how different and the same it is, how easy it is to forget that love is always moving in wild uncontrollable circles, bringing more people in, bringing you closer to the one you love, sealing the ark and the ache of marriage with every click of the lock and every first peek of sun too early in the morning.--We tell ourselves to make memories because time goes too fast, to take pictures, to Skype every detail back home lest we lose sight of who we are or were or could become.But perhaps our lives are already bearing witness to it. Perhaps it is we who are too worried to notice that the rest of our ordinary is holding and bearing to us the story of us, of our marriage and jobs and moves and fights and triumphs. Perhaps our shoes, even those we were so afraid to touch, are beautiful when we let them wear and retell our stories.Perhaps the dirt on my wedding shoes is a better storyteller of this hallowed beginning than I can hope to be.And perhaps, I should stand still in the perfect pink shoes now flecked grey and brown and that funny hint of green in my closet on a Saturday and listen.The story they tell is so beautiful.Love,hilary

when no one else can believe it for me

We were back at a church we love this past Sunday. I'm a long-road Anglican, winding my way along a path from childhood and pink dresses at First Communion to that St. Michael and All Angels confirmation, a swirl of the Spirit descending and those words, this is a new anointing, my daughter. This particular church, where the light spills in across the altar, where the choir and the electric organ sing bold to hymn and spiritual alike, where there sits this beautiful banner I stare at every time I go in - yellow, gold, that proclaims: Yours is the glory, Risen Conquering Son. is where I first saw my husband in the midst of being deeply and irrevocably in love with God. This is where I learned that there are ways of being traditional that sing spirituals and pray for the Spirit to come and fall upon us. This is, in short, where I relearned how to encounter the Lord Jesus.On Sunday the pastor preached on fear.On Sunday, Jesus came and sat down beside me.We sat together, my eyes on my hands, hearing what by now feels so familiar - that anxiety is not our nature, that we are fearful from the first moment of disobedience, that perfect love, who is the person of Jesus, casts out fear. And you all know, in your journey with this rambling heart, that I am acquainted with fear. I've lived and wandered inside it often. It's the kind of dark where my eyes adjust quickly, my adrenaline kicks in, I feel my way through the blackness and so often think I'm doing just fine.And you all know that I've been thinking about that a lot. I keep writing about it. I'd say it was some kind of theme or meditation for the season, but I think it's more likely that God is content to dwell with us where our hearts most often go to hide from Him, and so He waits for us, comes out into the dark after us, beckons us into the midst of His very self.So here we are, me and Jesus, and I'm counting the invisible threads in my skirt and I'm hearing again that Jesus will cast out fear, I am hearing that the Holy Spirit lives in me, I am hearing, I am hearing... Jesus, just the stillness of Jesus, is near me.Then the pastor says, "I cannot believe this for you."I bristle at the thought. Aren't we carrying each other? When the road is long and we are weary aren't we leaning hard on the faith of each other, on the promises kept generation to generation, of the stories others tell us when we cannot tell ourselves?But then there is this moment, where I think about it again. I close my eyes, stop counting the threads.Jesus desires relationship with me. Me, without helpful scaffolding or hiding behind the true things someone else has said. And having faith isn't just assenting to what someone smarter has said. Jesus doesn't desire my agreement with someone else. He is too in love with the being of me to want less than my self. My whole self. My whole self, believing.I do believe we should lean on each other. I believe we should carry each other. Oh, but how we must believe this without hiding from the nearness of God to each of us, in the just-us-ness of our being?I told my mother once I was doing something because of the lightness of me. I think God's answer to that question, the one we keep asking, the one we keep hiding from, the one not about God's goodness or qualities or cosmic salvation or any of that, but just the one about how God loves -because of the being of you. Because of the you that is so gorgeously alive. And you are enough of a reason for all the nearness of God. It is our whole self that must believe. It is our whole self, believing, that God is desperately in love with.That kind of love is so particular, no one else can believe it for us. We have to believe it, too.Love,hilary

God is speaking joy

"And I think to myself, how long has God been speaking this joy over my life, and I have been too filled up with anxiety to hear it?"I tell this to her on the phone pacing outside the building where I spend most of my time as a new graduate student. I try to let my feet carry me where they will on the winding paths of campus, past library and other classroom buildings and people on skateboards and scooters, past trendy backpacks and BPA free water bottles.I am relaying a conversation I had with Preston about callings, about anxiety about the future, about what is happening in our lives and what it will mean and how it will happen, and it's in the midst of telling her about the conversation (not even the conversation itself) that I realize it:God has been speaking joy over my life.Anxiety is an unruly substance - it fills up the spaces wherever you let it in. It creeps into the corner of yourself and becomes the drumbeat and gives the marching orders.And I fill myself up with anxiety so much that I cannot hear God speaking. And it is in the very act of resisting anxiety that we will find, that we can hope to find, the ears to hear.Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. Habbakuk, 1.5.When was the last time I was astonished at the Lord? When was the last time I was astounded? When was it that I stopped and marveled and felt my knees go weak from seeing the wonder and the blessedness?When I resist anxiety, even for a moment, I can catch a glimmer of the song God is singing over my life: joy.In resisting the anxiety there is promise, there is purpose, and no, it's not a new life plan with a bigger God stamp on it. It's purpose that is drawing nearer to the Father and purpose that is becoming more like Jesus and it is purpose that will lead you to a new city in a new state in a new marriage so that you might know God better and love him more. The places where we live out our vocation have a tendency to substitute their purposes for the ultimate purpose: we think that we're here to become a certain kind of scholar or a certain kind of teacher or a certain kind of electrical engineer, and that's the real reason God said go. But in that we forget: we forget that Jesus first and always and finally calls us to be a certain kind of human being, one who is made glorious by the Spirit dwelling and moving inside them, one who bears God's image, resplendent, made new, gracious and graceful and alive.Before Preston and I got married, I memorized Romans 8. I don't know why, except for the ways that, daily, I have had to remind myself of it. Remind myself that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Remind myself that you are in the Spirit. Remind myself that those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. And here again, I remember: nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. In the midst of what is unknown, we are not apart from the love of God. In the midst of what can make us anxious, we are not apart from the love of Christ Jesus. In the midst of hoping and praying and waiting and raging, in the emptiness and the fullness, the silence and the singing, we are not apart from such love.Be astonished! Be astounded! For nothing will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. And thus, rejoice.Love,hilary

when this is two months of gratitude

There are long days. The days where you wake up full of your own self, your own thoughts, your own worries - and there is the other person, the one whom you love, awaiting you.And you brush your teeth and think about what clothes to wear and what work needs to be done that day, and you think you'll fall behind if you don't spend every ounce of yourself in your new work, in school, in all the big bold things God brought you here to do.And you'll eat your yogurt and say something you don't even think twice about, which is the problem, of course, that you didn't even think about it, and then you are caught, not just by this person whom you love - no, you are caught too by that description of Jesus from Philippians 2 -

"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:Who, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with Godas something to be exploited;but emptied himselftaking the form of a slave,being born in human likeness.And being found in human form,he humbled himselfand became obedient to the point of death -even death on a cross."

And it goes on, this kenotic hymn of such clarifying, terrifying beauty, you know that moment you hear something you keep wishing you wouldn't hear?  Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed - not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence - continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2.4-8 above, then 12-13)Most of the time, my husband goes first in the self-emptying.I am grateful that marriage is a self-emptying work. One that I fail at, more often than I can accurately describe. Because the work isn't a trick of convention or a sudden blaze of glory. It is smallness made holy, an unbecoming of so much of what we grow accustomed to being - caught in our own worlds, however beautiful they are, however good, however purposeful. We grow used to our largeness, the hero-of-our-own-life-ness, the safety of being wrapped up in ourselves.And then we are charged to work out our salvation, to self-empty, to loosen our grasp of the secure circular thoughts and to love one another. To love another.My husband so often goes first. So often, he asks the first question, calls out for me, insists on knowing what's behind the sigh or the half smile or the look-away or the hopeful side glance. And in the long days, when even your two-months-of-gratitude post is late, that calling out is an aching kind of love.I don't know if gratitude can truly capture it, how it makes me see him, see myself, how often I forget that we live and move in tandem with each other, how it is such work, such hard, gratifying, knees in the dirt work, to love each other.He reminds me to cherish the work that is love.The longest days, when it takes self-emptying, you sense that you are at the very beginning of the work. You eat your yogurt and you hear God tell you again -This work of love is the coming alive of you.To have this mindset, as was in Christ Jesus,to empty, to become small again, to rememberthe terrifying and beautiful fear and trembling,and God, who works in us.Love,hilary 

I'm leaning harder

"You've changed." He tells me this as we're getting ready to turn in for the night among the whir of electric toothbrushes and the ripples of the brush through my hair. I turn, still trying to loose stray knots from the red lion's mane around my neck. "Changed?"I know you're thinking that this is an obvious one: marriage changes you. He nods. "Yeah. You're more sure of yourself. You're leaning harder into Jesus, too."We keep talking, our voices circling in the dark, how things are new and different, how my thinking has sharpened on some things, how we've both learned to weigh and sift our words anew, because we live with someone who wears our words like birth marks on their skin. We slowly drift into the silence, the comforting dark of another day that has been put to rest.But I can't fall asleep. I'm still thinking about that, the leaning harder, the change.It's not that marriage changes you that surprises me: it's the weight of the change. It's the way you carry the change in your ribcage and guard it like your bones guard your heart. How you feel it differently, more than just self-awareness or increased confidence or courage, feel it some more physical than that, feel it in those tugging counts of the hairbrush and in the whirring electric toothbrush.I've said for years I don't do change well. That I'm a creature of habits of my own making, that if I want to be spontaneous I want to the only one in control of that spontaneity, the one who decides to change the plan. I've declared foolishly that I'm just not very good at it and thought it would be a sufficient excuse to never have to do it. I thought God would give me a pass on transformation bigger than the ones I say I'm ready for.But the Spirit moves us along in the wiser pace - the pace we wouldn't set for ourselves. So here I am, being changed in big ways, ways that make even the word marriage bigger because it has now begun to mean all that changing, all that becoming between me and my husband and our voices circling in the dark.I'm weak-kneed from the changing. Maybe that's why I lean so much harder. Maybe we lean into Jesus not out of the virtue of feeling like we have the time, or we simply desire it - maybe we lean in desperation. Because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and his joy in my changing in the ways that are perhaps much more than I wanted is the strength in me to do the changing, to submit to the changing.So I lean harder on Jesus because Jesus calls the change forth from me in this marriage, in the little ark of family that my husband and I make every day, and because Jesus is the way to change.But what about that other part? Me being more sure of myself?I'm still awake, my eyes searching the ceiling, my hands over the blanket, tracing a pattern in the quilt. Most of the changes these past weeks make me weak-kneed, remember? So how can that make me sure of myself?In an Orthodox church near my hometown there is an icon of Mary, called in Greek the platytera, which means "wider" or "more spacious."  The icon is of Mary, her womb a golden circle with Christ inside, holding up a hand in blessing. Mary's hands are outstretched, a position of prayer.I think about that icon often, for it puts an image to the meaning of Christian - to be a bearer of Christ. To bear Christ in this world, even as Mary did. Somehow this is not separated from her hands in prayer, the way that she is presenting Christ to the congregation in the icon, even as she presented him while he was on earth and even now as we in turn are sent out each week to put on Christ, to see Christ in one another.Maybe being sure of myself is in this: I am learning what it means to put on Christ, and therein lies my real self, my self that is raised to new life in the power of Jesus. Maybe being sure of myself is not a confidence but a clinging, my own hands and weak knees opened in prayer, my own feeble heart even now becoming more of a home for the living God."I've changed."I whisper the words in the dark as I begin to fall asleep. Perhaps it is its own prayer.Keep me leaning on you, Jesus, where I can be sure of myself.Love,hilary

the first month of gratitude

When this is a month of gratitude.That sounded like a good way to title this post, but truthfully I don't know what to call it.--It's been a month and a day since I married Preston.And in a month I didn't know you could learn so much thankfulness that it seems foolish to try and contain it in words in an online space, seems almost laughable, but then words are cherished vessels, and sometimes, they're what we have, and the writing is a most needed remembering.--I didn't know you would be grateful for the noise of the coffee grinder because it means he lets you stay in bed longer. Or the way that taking out the trash when he's running another errand would mean so much. I didn't know you could learn to revel in doing small things like unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry while watching a show together, how that could be the most romantic afternoon. I didn't know about the joy of takeout or the joy of leftovers that become something new and beautiful tasting under his watchful eye. I didn't know about the Splendid Table podcast or how to share in things that you are new to loving with the one that you love. I didn't know your heart could be taught again and again the meaning of the word, "thank you" when it's dinner or dish washing or keeping track of the ways to use up the vegetables from the farmer's market. How saying thank you would be a thing that he would teach me, day by day, gesture by gesture.--I didn't know that sometimes I would need the discipline of writing down the gratitudes, the way that you must ask of yourself the work of remembering, of thankfulness, because even the deepest love becomes accustomed to itself sometimes and even the thing that was and is and will keep being so wondrous, like making a home with your best friend, asks to be remembered among the work of building it.He has told me more than one about the importance of telling stories, so that things will not be forgotten. He told me again on a drive into the city, my feet in their customary position tucked up under me and my eyes half-closed against the sun. I didn't say anything in the moment, and I should have. He has a wise heart. I should have said that, should have said then and there that he is teaching me the work of remembering and telling the stories, the love stories, the ordinary grace stories, the extraordinary provision stories, the stories that we will write on doorposts in our house that the generation to come might yet praise the Lord.I should have told him the story again of the drive home from the airport the first time, when everything was so new and I didn't know how to lace my fingers through his, when we knew and didn't know how we knew, on that walk leaning late into the hazy rain of June.--It is a month of gratitude, the thousand thanks Ann teaches, spilling out over our days. We must do the work of remembering the blessings, tell again and again the story of manna coming down from heaven and the way that we are provided for, the way that we are loved. We must tell the stories of love at first meeting and the way we build love, gesture  by gesture.This is my first month of gratitude.Love,hilary

put on a little emmylou (a letter to preston)

Dear Preston,It's the one-month-mark today, here at the end of the winding road, the one that will so soon become that impossible stretch of green grass between us, aisle to union to marriage on the other side.Tonight, I'm playing songs on a playlist I made called, "h&p" - with everything that's indie and everything that's country and everything that's the way that these last days make me feel. I'm cleaning the almost emptied room, looking at the bags packed, the dresser drawers that creak with their once full life, their own sort of sweet goodbye.I'm playing the first dance song from J&E's wedding last weekend, the one that made me cry, the one where I was leaning against you, feeling your chest rise and fall with the steadiness that belongs to just you, that's more than oxygen entering and leaving, but the very tenderness of being next to each other.I wanted to write you a marriage letter early, the way Seth and Amber have written those, calling out on the waters of these blogs something, I don't even really know what, but something, some echo of the impossible hope that I feel building in my chest when I look over at you, after more than a year, awestruck and comforted all at once.But we aren't quite yet married, and for all its ache, there is something about being engaged that I felt like I had to remember, now at its closing days. So, Preston, here - a last-month-of-engagement letter.Put on a little Emmylou with me?We will move slow across the room, just a sway like that other time, and the time before that, when the work was too much and for a moment we shrank the world to the small steps across the ancient wood floors. We will move in the sticky rhythms of a second summer together, make our way around her voice laughter tickling our ears.Put on a little Emmylou with me, and I will press my hand into yours, we can drink lemonade along the water and you can steal more than one kiss before I duck my head, blushing, as the teenagers walk past in their colorful struts. I will wear your favorite dress and ask you a thousand questions about your favorite kind of pie and whether you think you'd ever live in the South of France.Put on a little Emmylou, Preston, and we will reread our story in the pages of graduate school applications and gall bladder surgery recovery, in wedding menus and Pinterest pages, in my grandmother's lost and now found ruby ring that I'll wear in a month and again, in the smallest whispers across a French 75 or a morning cup of coffee or a birthday present and a made bed. We will remember how we build this, and I'll make a joke that you laugh at and roll your eyes, and I'll make that face and you will laugh again.Put on a little Emmylou, darling, and I will start singing the way you like me to, unafraid, my feet up against the dashboard on the long drives, and I will promise you again and again, there is nothing quite as wondrous as stumbling on another way you've loved me - the boxes you've saved to open together or the the way you remember how much I love the Trader Joe's twizzlers or the way you relentlessly force my hand with Jesus, day after day, so sure that the only way to heal my heart is to ask me to open it again to God. Again, and again, I will sing it out, one year and two and ten and sixty-five, how it wasn't just happenstance, this love, but whole, and maybe even, holy.I'm singing with Green River Ordinance, now, again that line, put on a little emmylou, and we'll dance into the night, singing hold my loving arms, my loving arms are for you. And I remember how much love was singing at their wedding, in this song, in this dance, and so, my not just yet husband,put on a little emmylou,and slow, in the softness of these last days -hold me. My loving arms are yours.Love,hilary

for when the poem makes promises

I'm a haphazard writer, at best. These days I turn to the keyboard and I find that I have little to say, that everything coming to the surface is about the waiting, this endless waiting, or about the hurry-up-and-slow-down dance we've been doing. I keep thinking that I have nothing new, that there is nothing new under the sun, to gift or to give, and I want to sigh like Anne of Green Gables, exhale all the sorrows of the ages into the world, breathe in the goodness, breathe out the worry, begin again.My wordpress dashboard tells me that this day two years ago we began here, a wild love for people and God and words and the way those things are in each other and through each other. Two years. The two years of agony and wonder that only a life lived full can bring at the same time.And there, the silver thread running through, the minnow in the shining water, is poetry.It is the beginning of every metaphor I have given in the past two years, the end of every sentence. It is the heart behind the heart I present, the asked unasked question that shivers in the dark. It is the stolen moments at work when I type to remember how to write at all, to stitch limbs with words like so much dissolvable surgical thread, hoping the body, the poetry, will heal itself. It is itself, too, spurning my company in an instant for the sticky sweetness of the afterword, the last punctuation, the ghost in the air.I started this blog with the idea that love is wild, and maybe that is the prayer which is the poem which is not either thing, but I want it to be so I can be writing about poetry, so that I can be a poet, a prayer. Love is wild. Is it?The poems command me to say yes, that it is an untamed thing, living like fire, the other breath in our lungs. Love is basic, built from what builds our bodies and yet, like our bodies, beyond its elements. Love is hormones firing in the brain and then pushing out into the kiss, the skin cells meeting, the silent late night sorting of the recycling. Love is basic, built up from the periodic tables we live in, then reaching so far away from us it takes a poem to pull it back in, takes words, takes the Spirit's speaking. And a listening ear.Poetry is that listening ear against the galaxy, against the spinning chaos, against the noise that becomes the music that still is chaos.Poetry is my surgical thread, the minnow I imagine at the bottom of the pond that most days looks too ordinary to notice, poetry what turns my gaze back towards the world in horror and awe.Poetry pulls the wild love out of me, of you, makes more of us wherever it is, sitting in dusty chapbooks abandoned by the world.Day by day, stitching us whole.Love,hilary

for when love is desperate

I woke up in the haze of the night, that space where the sunrise is slowly bleeding into the day, where rain casts an enormous shadow, where there are things like jury duty and immediate deadlines and the last plane ride of the man back to Texas.Sitting in the eerie, half empty room with the other wanderers with their bleary-eyed coffee, their newspapers and knitting, their snuck-in granola bars eaten quietly, it struck me that this journey is almost over - well, perhaps, almost begun. Or both.I can't tell you why, but when they dismissed us - justice reached between the hallways and the bank of elevators - and I was driving back in to work, to meet that deadline, it hit me: this is the man I'm marrying.This is him.I started to laugh, but at the same time I started to cry. I was laughing and crying along a 10 mile stretch of road that I have never seen before, with small clumps of pansies blooming in the median boxes, the rain still hesitantly pounding the windshield, and two UPS trucks turning left and right and me in between them. I was laughing at myself, at this beautiful world, at the fact that in that moment I realized it:I'm marrying the person I always and never imagined.I had to tell myself that I was still driving, that this is the middle of the workday, that the world is racing past me and there are places to go and deadlines to meet, because in a moment, I am a heap of tears and shaky breathing and laughter, so much laughter it seemed to rebound off the walls and windows, carrying me.I think this must be what it is like to fall desperately in love.Not a hurricane, no, but the steady second, third, hundredth time falling into love. This is the we've been engaged for a long while now, the we know who does the dishes and sets the table, the ordinary missed words and not missed eye-rolls, who loves hummus and who loves sea urchin, where she always forgets her glasses and where he always puts down the car keys. This is the falling in love again with all the familiar, with all the still-surprising, with the way that love turns out to be eating leftovers on the floor or walking to the pond when the sun finally comes out and warms the earth.I always imagined that it would be as simple as that, the person as inevitable as breathing. I never imagined it would be so good, goodness essential as breathing.This isn't the post where I can say anything profound about love, other than I didn't realize how much you keep falling into it. How you fall into it, again and again, when you realize that this person still thinks you're the best thing that has ever happened when you oversleep and mess up plans and forget things. How the fact that he knows how much I love hummus and steak makes me cry. Or how he never lets a day go by where he says, "Hello, beautiful," and there I am, hopelessly falling into love.This is the post where I say that I spent that drive laughing and crying because I'm getting married to Preston. Because it's the hundredth time I've fallen in love with him, and love it wild, and sometimes I could cry with how extraordinary it is. And laugh.Love,hilary

dear hilary: talk to me

Dear Hilary, Finishing up my Freshmen year of college, I have found these last months to be consumed with the desire to fullfill a definition of beautiful and be the sort of person a boy would desire. Everyone around me seems to be speaking of identity and verses are continuing to declare God's love and claim of worthiness on my life. Yet, I find my self so deeply desperate for the affection of a boy, for a romantic relationship. I have never had a boyfriend and I feel like I have no one pursing me in that way. So I'm really wondering, is it okay to dream of this man? Because I used to believe that God had that man for me, it was just a matter of waiting and loving him first. But now I wonder, that perhaps I am called to that single life or an early death or to not finding that guy until I'm in my 30s or to marry someone that is not like the man I have dreamed of. I just don't feel like I am worthy of being loved in that sort of way or if it is even fair of me to dream of such a guy. How do I approach the Lord in prayer when I don't even know if there is a guy? And can I dream of a guy with particular qualities or is that un-christ like and foolish because the only thing I should look for in a partner is his love for Christ?Love,Just AskingDear Just Asking,I was driving home one weekend from college, in the midst of thinking about and wondering about this one guy who was in my microeconomics class. We sat next to each other, we passed notes about where the supply and demand lines met in the graph and whether that always determined the price. We occasionally saw each other outside the regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday clock. It's funny how you can find yourself in a rhythm of thinking just like the other rhythms of your life. 4:30 on those days saw me turning my thoughts to the what if we dated and the why doesn't he ask me out? and the ever-present am I worth that? There is a certain kind of ache in the rhythm, a certain all-too-familiar. I would overthink what I was going to wear to class that day, I would write those notes in the margins of my notebook and I would walk back to my dorm wondering everything you are wondering, about love and the person and whether Jesus was going to get around to giving me a person anytime soon.And I could write a lot about how this remembering is a work of conviction in the heart but also the practice of grace, the realizing that our past selves are not to be condemned as the worst possible versions of ourselves, but to be loved and accepted as being the people that they were, knowing what they knew... but that is a different story.I am driving home. That's where we are. I am driving home and I am turning left, sneaking around the bend in the road a little fast than I should, and as I swung the car through the turn I found myself saying, "God, what is the deal?"And God said, "I see you've decided to talk to Me."I promptly started to cry. I drove and cried and talked, spilled out the story into the empty car which is not empty because God and I are finally, really, talking. I said everything, the notes, the protests that what if I was not worthy, the questions about if he was ever going to ask me out. I said it, spoke it into being.And that was the beginning of the change for me. Not when the boy dated someone else, or when the other boy and I ended things, or when Preston and I got together. The beginning of the change was this drive home, the fall whispering through the trees, promising winter, promising, further on, spring.God, what is the deal? We do not always begin in a glamourous, beautiful, prayer. We do not always begin in the right words. But if we begin, then we begin. If we are willing to say something to God, then we open our hearts to be changed, to be molded, to be made more.I will not tell you whether you should desire specific qualities in a guy or not, dear one - because I do not believe it is wrong to ask and imagine. I believe only that it is more dangerous when you are not honest with God. I mean gut-wrenchingly honest. I mean on your knees honest. I mean with your Bible open and your pen raging across the pages of God's promises honest. I want you to get real with God so that you can get quiet and hear God.We hear so many times that we should make our worthiness not about guys. Oh, have I heard this and preached this in the coffee shops and along the sidewalks. But can I tell you, across the wires of the Internet, something?I think God is more willing to tell us our worthiness without us trying to make ourselves believe it without Him. I think God wants to tell you you are worthy. I think God wants you to get alone, to get rage-y, to get serious, to ask the question. I ask it, still. Only when we are willing to ask God, who alone can answer our questions with the fullness of His life, can we begin to feel the life moving in us.The point of your life and my life and all the lives that scatter this beautiful world - the point is the real conversation with God. Not whether he wants you to love him before he gives you a guy. Not whether you'll have an early death or be like Paul or find love in college or work 10 jobs or 1. Not whether you are a poet or a preacher or a physical plant manager.The point is always Jesus, looking at us, looking at you, in the beautiful singularity that you are, and saying, "Talk to me." When we start talking, and only then, do we start to make our hearts able to hear God. About boys. About college. About love. About worthiness. About the aches wrapping around our hearts."Talk to me." This, my dear friend, this is our invitation.Love,hilary

dear hilary: that impossible brightness

Dear Hilary,My question concerns (as most questions seem to) fear and love. For a long time, I was afraid to love, and then I was brave and fell deep into it, and then what I was most afraid of happened: I was too much, or I wasn't enough. The end of it was confusing and tangled and I got hurt again and again, but I held on, thinking that I wanted to show him grace and love and forgiveness. The problem is, I didn't show any of those things to myself, and now I'm so embarrassed and afraid of how hurt I got, how long I held on, and how badly I was willing to be treated. The question is, how do I forgive myself for that? How do I move through the fear of love ending and fall in love again, now that I know how the ending burns? How do I get over the fear of never falling in love again, which is partly what motivated me to hold on to the love I found for so long after it hurt me?Love,The Edge of HopeDear The Edge,"It is not the critic who counts." Can I ask you to go look this up? I won't say more, but I will say click beyond Goodreads, beyond the quote itself (I'll give it away - it's Teddy Roosevelt), and down towards the bottom will be this name, Brene Brown, and if I say nothing to you in this, it's just that you remind me of her mantra. This letter, this act of describing your question, this being willing to be you here in this space - that is what she calls daring greatly.Today all I can think about is this time that Preston asked me something that flipped me upside down. "Are you," he said, pausing over the words and over the rim of his mug (we were sitting in the living room), "always this unkind to yourself?" We were drinking coffee and going through my applications to graduate school and I was telling him with a lot of confidence that I was NOT going to get in and I should NEVER try and I should just quit and not be a philosopher or anything because everyone would find out I was a fraud and... then he asked that question. "Are you always this unkind to yourself?"I got mad. I don't really know why. Maybe because the truth doesn't set you free before it royally pisses you off and arrives at the most inconvenient time and screw up all the plans you had for avoiding it. I hated the question, though, for what it pointed to in me: that my unkindness wasn't towards others in that instance. It was towards me. It was shame and regret and hurt I piled on and on as a way to protect myself from potentially being rejected. "Who am I to apply to school X? Smart people apply there" or "Who am I to have loved so wildly? Only fools don't realize what it costs..." or my personal favorite, "Who do I think I am to be enjoying such a good life? It won't last!"  Unkindness asks that question, tries to protect us in a cocoon of doubt and embarrassment, tries to keep us from making what we think will be a mistake.The cocoon is not where it is at. I mean, we all go there, we all build one, but maybe specifically here, when it comes to love and fear, I want to put up a big warning sign that says, BE KIND TO YOURSELF. I want to stamp it across every sign you see today. You do not need a cocoon of doubt or fear or embarrassment or shame. Because actually, in fact, I believe you are already stronger than the cocoon. I believe you are stronger without it.Here, in love, the critic in you does not count. At all. In any way. You loved, and it ended, and it was terrifying and beautiful and tangled and ugly and hurt like hell and probably still does on some mornings (I have those days too). But the forgiving of yourself begins in a kindness to yourself. A basic, gut level kindness. A kindness that says, "I dared greatly. And now it hurts." A kindness that says, "I was brave. I believed in love. It disappointed me that time." A kindness that does not hide the truth - the real truth - which is not that you should be embarrassed or ashamed of loving, but the truth which is that you dared and even so it is complicated, and no blame or unkindness will clarify that paradox.There is an impossible brightness to love: that paradox of daring and fear, of deep connection and also things not working out every time. That kind of love, falling in it, falling out of it, that is where you tell me you learned things about grace and forgiveness and love. I believe you did learn about those things. I believe now is the time to hold them in your hands and offer them back to yourself, not as warning for what not to do, not as judgment for how long you stayed or what you were or were not willing to do for this person, but as the gifts of that time. As the gifts of daring greatly. As the gifts of the impossible brightness of love.You are already out here in the brightness, love. You don't need the cocoon. You're far too strong.Love,hilary

an unnecessary letter of love

Dear you,These are the long days, aren't they? These ones at the beginning of another month of winter, whatever the groundhog says with his ancient conversation partner, the shadow. This year, I don't know what he told us. It was a Sunday and I was late for church, and I arrived in this half breathing whirlwind clutching car keys but wondering if I had remembered to drive with my license in my wallet. I know you must have those days too, days of too much forgetting, days that you tell the wall that it cannot go on like this as you throw clean socks into a dirty laundry basket just so that you can see the floor again.I don't know what made me think of it tonight, maybe the feeling that this blog was always supposed to be about love, and the lingering squint-eyed gaze in the dance studio mirror tonight at my hip shaking body made me realize it had been a while since I offered some love unbidden and unnecessary and unbounded by a reason.I'm playing Nashville Cast music on Spotify right now. I'm singing it to the screen as I type. This, too, unbidden and unbounded.We don't spend our words on each other enough. I'm so sad about that, when I let myself. I'm so sad that there are millions of words flung into the ecosystem of us and not nearly enough of them have been about this work of loving each other. Not nearly enough for you. We've spent ourselves on the theology on the policy on the philosophy on the worry on the big church and the small and the medium-sized and what we think and must think and should not think about it all. We've spent words like water on all the ideas, thin bridges in the storm, stretched across the miles.What do I even think the work is? But there I go, almost writing about what I think about the work, almost spending more words trying to describe what I want the work to be or how I think maybe this letter is the work. I don't really know, to tell you the truth. I stared in that dance studio mirror and I thought, I want to tell someone the stray thought. I want a bridge of words towards another person's heart tonight, however thin it feels against the storms. I come to the empty screen and I start to write. What do I tell you? What do I say?I'm singing "Believing." This song. I'm singing about how you keep me believing. And it's true. That simple. Writing to you keeps me near to King Jesus, as my dad has been teaching me to call him, and I'm crying while I write it and I'm trying to sing at the same time. Unbidden, and maybe only a little bounded.I don't know if you know how much I love to sing. It's the kind of love I have for writing some days, the good days, where it is the doing of it, the creation of sound and the way I imagine my voice moving through the air, how it might look or feel if you came across it. Do you have something you love that much? Would you tell me about it? Do you sing, too?I was telling you something, I think, about loving and words and this letter. But maybe, unbidden and unbounded and unnecessary though these words seem in the moment when I'm playing the song again - it's all just that loving this, the words, the hope that maybe when you read this you feel like someone saw you today and wanted you to know it, maybe that's the letter.And the love.Love,hilary

when this is a thought about marriage

Preston starts his posts with that word, "when" - an invitation, I think, to realize the passing of time and the not-passing-of-time, the way when you sit to read his words you remember that you are exactly where you are, reading, in your kitchen or on your iPad. It's funny how the vocabulary of the one you love begins to seep into your own, their words swirled next to yours, the way tea steeps in a mug on an early morning.I've been thinking about marriage - maybe that's not so surprising - and when I think about it, inevitably, I start thinking about the ways we talk about marriage. I think about the advice blogs, the story-becoming-advice blogs, the blogs that remind us that this a great big work, different from anything we've tried before, blogs that remind us that this is also the most normal unfolding of life, the most apparently inevitable thing, the way that they hold your hand or kiss you good morning is the only thing that could be.And my head fills with other people's thoughts faster than its own sometimes, trying to think my way into wisdom about marriage, sewing a patchwork quilt of what other people have done and thought and tweeted and posted and shared. But my stitches fumble, and when I look over at him in the quiet of the morning, the pieces slip to the floor. I can't read my way into being good at marriage. I can't repost or borrow or sew together thoughts to cover us in the moments when we don't understand each other, or those moments, even more surprising, when we understand better than anyone else ever has.And maybe, before journeying down the road of what someone here and there says will make this work, I must close my eyes, lean into what is right in front of me. The way he says hi on Skype, ties his tie when we are going out to dinner, the way we laugh or curl up to watch Game of Thrones together or the way that we  both know when it's a night to stay in, instead of go out, a night to pray, a drive where we will talk about deep things in the church or a drive where we will ask about our favorite praise songs growing up.Once, before Preston and I got together, before the full unfolding that would be this love story, I went for a walk with a friend. It was warm, the end of May in New England, when the world bursts green and the sun plays with the trees, throwing its light on everyone who passes by. We walked, talking about marriage, talking about love, and I remember so desperately wanting to store up everything she said, learn and memorize her words until they sang out from me as if they were mine. But as she talked, and we wandered out of the woods, back into a small cluster of houses around a pond, the afternoon stretched long and we leaned into it.She didn't want me to memorize her stories. She was telling me as a way to push me towards discovering my own. She was sharing about her life, her marriage, not as blueprint but as beautiful, as the wonder of how God led her and her husband into and out of each thing. She was telling me, not because she knew best, but because she knew how much of the story we must write on our own.I don't know if I believed her at the time. But I do believe her, now, in the months that still stretch out before our wedding, in the nights in and out, the jeans and sweatshirts and the salsa dancing club and all the wonder of the in-between every day learning each other.It isn't a blueprint. It's just all, always, beautiful.Love,hilary

love on a sunday afternoon

It's Sunday afternoon and the haze of sleep is settling over us both. I feel my limbs heavy, asking for a moment or two to close eyes and breathe deeper and rest, find a moment in the chaotic joy of seeing him again to sleep. At first I fight it - we only get so many days, and I want to be awake for them, I want every moment with this man who in the airport late on a Friday night makes my whole heart swell in my chest at the sight of him, who catches me and kisses me in baggage claim, in front of everyone, and pulls away only to hug me closer to him. Because that embrace is home.But two days later and the cold I've been trying to ward off won't budge, wants time to move through and around my body, and my body politely insists on sleep. We sit on the couch on the porch, in the cold October sunshine, and I put my feet across his lap and he sits reading a commentary on Genesis and he piles more blankets on me to be sure I'm not cold, to be sure I'm peaceful. I feel his steady breathing, the rise and fall of it. There is a silent joy among the birds and branches, the leaves descend towards their winter resting place and a car pulls in the driveway and someone goes to the grocery store and someone else comes home from a different church activity, and we sit on the porch and I fall asleep.I think this must be the look of care - how we become unhurried with each other. How there is enough time to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon in October, despite my protest that long distance makes every moment of closeness to him seem impossibly short (so why would I sleep it away). How it is his voice that tells me, tickling my ear, that I am, in fact, tired, and I do, in fact, need to sleep. And it is his hand that drifts across my ankles in the gesture of care. Reminding me of his presence, reminding me that there is enough time in the long journey together.I don't know how to describe it, or why I would try to fill words with the unutterably beautiful feeling of falling asleep next to him on a Sunday afternoon late in the day when the sun is dripping gold across the tops of the trees. Perhaps all I wanted this to say was that the look of care, the way care moves, is not what I expected before I met him. Before I might have told you that care was bold and grand and sweep-you-off-your-feet, that it was a wild trumpeting kind of thing, that everyone saw and noticed and gaped at. And I do run towards him and kiss him in the airport and we do laugh and cry and hug each other -and then on a Sunday two days later he astounds me by sitting on the porch with me and reading while I take a nap. He astounds me with the gentleness of care, with the simplicity of it, with the way that love moves, unhurried, from one to another and back again.Care is quiet and full and this morning, I close my eyes and miss him and remember the slow Sunday afternoon. How this must have been what I was longing for:  such astonishing every day love.Love,hilary

when my mind wanders

on a Sunday late morning, mid-day, really, we're driving home together, music or no music, around the winding roads and past the farmstands and apple orchards, fall around us. I think about how the leaves are like flames now, licking up the sides of the trees,how the wind lies in wait to surprise the scattered seeds of the last of the dandelions,how all of this should make a beautiful poem, the ordinariness of nature, how it goes on and on harvesting the expected and the surprising in one fell swoop of the calendar.This year the word was light, I remember, as I see the sun peek through the trees and catch the edge of his glasses. I glance at him, a second longer than I look at anyone else.I remember that God turned all the lights off, suddenly. I remember how last October I cried and cried about being among the ones who never strayed from the crowd, when God told me at a stoplight how He leaves the rest of the world to come after me, in search of me the way no one else ever has been, ever will be.Last year the fall was golden, and now it turns red, and again and again the harvest returns, offers something to us.I think about Rilke and poetry and how there are now 45 poems in my computer that weren't there before. How it must be an act of obedience.And then I think about you.I drive and I think about you, writer, reader, lover of leaving - that's Rumi, a long quote about ours not being a caravan of despair - I think about how you have watched this year, in a way, watched the light dawn and fade, watch me wonder about stillness, peace, watched me try to write wisdom into a space where more often than not I am the one who must learn from you.I think about how I could not write, but that you, you, read this. And you give me space to write it wrong, write it with questions hanging on branches, write about silence and presence and God's wild love... Rilke is right, always, but as I drive and think about you I want to tell us - tell you -the reading of it matters.The reading of the poetry,or the blog posts,the half-my-heart-intact prayers,the reading of it is important.It makes a difference to me to think about you when I think about writing down the leaves have turned to flames on the trees. It makes a difference to know that I can clang pots and pans in a field somewhere about the Kingdom and midwives and Shakespeare, about silence and ache and courage, about not knowing where to find God and sitting in a chapel all alone at the end of a long day.My mind wanders as I look at the world on a Sunday afternoon driving home, and it takes me to you. I'm so grateful.Love,hilary

dear hilary: a revolving door

Dear Hilary,Every one around me seems to be falling in love. The older I get the more I realize I'm not sure what being in love means. Each person I ask how they know it's the love and not some other shade of love they never answer the same. And yet somehow it's the same. The person always finishes with, "You'll just know." But I don't know. How did you know it was love?Sincerely,Is It Love?Dear Is it Love?,I think I asked myself that question every night before I fell asleep in the days leading up to meeting Preston for the first time. Is it love? I asked a group of ducks that wandered across the road on my way to Starbucks one morning. Is it love? I asked my bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror. Is it love, is it love - and behind the question was this fear about myself. I had asked people, just like you have, about love. I had heard the many answers: that you know because they will order the Chinese food on the night you need it without being told, that you know because they'll offer to do the laundry and the dishes in the same day, because they catch you around your waist on the street, with people watching, and kiss you. Because they'll tell you things that you've longed to believe about yourself but you couldn't before, give you a pair of hands to help you hold all that you are and desperately hope to become.I had heard it.And then I met Preston in that airport.I'd tell you that I just knew, too, but the truth is that I think knowing about love is more like a revolving door. You walk around and around inside love, see the outside world in one instance, the inside world (the world of you and the person you love) in another. You ponder them both in the same moment. You spiral in and out of knowing, in and out of certainty.What keeps you afloat is trust.What keeps us all afloat is a trust that even if we don't know, if we have moments when we wake up and it is a question, when everyone tells us "you'll just know" and we think that there is no way that can be true - because I hardly know myself some days - that's when you trust that you can still walk forward, still walk around and around inside the love, and somehow see your next step.I could tell you the stories of falling in love with Preston, small moments when I felt it moving in my heart: the time we ate Chinese food on the floor watching Company (the Sondheim musical), or the time we made my family dinner in the kitchen and I was singing Alison Krauss songs and he was searing lamb chops in something I couldn't even probably pronounce, or the time that we sat side-by-side in the midst of something really hard, and prayed our way through it...But the truth is, though I knew in those moments I was in love with him, part of the joy is realizing it new every time - a moment of being surprised by the in-love-ness. It takes me asking, "is it love?" to answer yes. On days when all I want is to sit across from him in a Starbucks somewhere and write on our blogs and be in our own worlds, together and yet distinct, when all I wonder is whether this gift is really what I have now dared to dream it is...I guess a part of me likes asking, "is it love?" not because I want to doubt, but because there is something to saying yes. To choosing the answer to that question every day. To walking through the revolving door, the worlds never the same when I circle back around to them.I knew it a long time ago; and I learn it again every day.I want to wrap everyone up in the safe and beautiful words of, "you'll just know." But I also want to wrap around you the words that love is a many-splendored, ever-moving, choose-it-again-and-again kind of thing. Maybe the knowing must and should move with us, too.Is it love? We wonder in the world.There is a beauty to trusting the question as a way towards the answer.Love,hilary

dear heart, love hilary

Dear little one,I already lost count of the ways I love you. Mom sent me pictures of how you grew inside her, for months and months, we waited for those brief glimpses of the two of you together, and I would yell every time and stop what I'm doing and stare at the two of you (because that's the funny thing about pregnancy - a picture of Mom is also a picture of you for nine months). Your mom is a gently beautiful person, full of joy, full of life, and now that you are here, I know that flows into you too, with the physical life she offers. She gave you a special kind of life from her heart and her body these long nine months, and now, you are here. We are beyond excited - we are out in the field of wild joy. We are out dancing in our kitchen and we are outside under the bright summer sun, laughing and praying and trying to find the right days and times to fly out to meet you.When your parents got married I fell down the stairs at the reception. Not all the way, not dangerously, just in enough of a way to be completely embarrassed and wish that I was safe from the memory. But we are a long remembering family, and so your uncles on our side and your parents and grandparents won't let me forget it - and trust me, your soon-to-be Uncle Preston won't let me forget either (he'll love telling you all kinds of stories about me). But their wedding day was a day about your parents, about two becoming one, about love. And these are the roots of love you grow from. I can promise you, little one, they are deep roots. You will grow in a richer love than you know.That day, the reading was from 1 John 4 - about how we love because He first loved us. How we know love at all because it has been shown to us by another, by He who is love. You will be fed on love that is rooted in His love. You will be loved, in the midnights and the hurried mornings, in the laughter and the snow, in the every moment, by parents whose love is anchored and rooted to God's love.And I remember that day knowing your mom - my sister - and your dad, my brother-in-law, became a family. And now you are here, and you are a part of our family, and we are jumping up and down with joy over it and I might fall down a hallway or an airport or an escalator as I run towards you when I meet you.But we anchor each other in a deeper love.We will - this whole family of yours, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents - promise in our own ways and times, to love you wild and deep and forever. There is so much I don't know about you, dear one, so much I cannot wait to discover. But I promise you a deep and wild and forever love in this family.I promise you all of my love, too. I promise you all of it, anchored in His.Love,Aunt Hilary

when I hate long-distance

This morning all I feel is the ache of distance.I wake up to it in the bed with me, this familiar stranger of being apart from the person I love. I hear the fan blowing the already-fall wind across the room, rustling the papers I haven't put away. I look around with a wide-eyed wild hope that maybe I'm back where he is, or where he is is downstairs with a Sharpie pen and a journal and a prayer book and his Bible, and when I walk down the stairs he'll smile up at me from behind his glasses in the way that I have traced over and over, an inked tattoo in my heart of that first look, that realization of how he must see me, how maybe I must be beautiful because he has that look on his face.The ache walks me in and out of Starbucks, through my trouble choosing music in the car, in my half-hearted greeting to God at the right turn by the brick house I used to love. The ache is somewhere in my ribcage, but it moves. The ache is somewhere behind my heart, and it anchors.I wrote once that it is beautiful. Our selves, strong in our breathing, in our standing, can soften our hearts and our eyes past the miles. We still find each other. We still sit down, unwrap our days to the quiet hum of our computer fans.And it is agonizing.And it is peaceful.And it is terrible.I hear the words of others about how the distance is good, how it builds something good, how the time is something to be cherished. I hold a paper plate in the lobby and stare at her blankly, feel my feet on the stones in the floor, tell myself that I should soften my heart. But for all the words about how distance stretches and grows us, I want the words for how it also aches in places you didn't know you had, how I close my eyes at my desk and I think about him and I think about me and I see the miles that move between us, and the ache lives somewhere behind my heart.I don't want the words that the time will go by fast, that it will move, that this will be something that I miss and wish I could get back. I don't want the words that all this purposes together for good (oh, I know it does, I say that to myself), but maybe I want the words that just know it is an anchored ache behind the heart, and that it is so much better to be near to each other, that the laundry on Saturday days, that the order Chinese and eat it on the porch watching Netflix days, that the days when you walk through a field in a sundress holding hands days, that those days are so good and lovely that the ache is part of how you know how good it is.But it is a hard way to know that. And it would be better, will be better, just to be in the field together.What was the poem?Your absence has gone through melike thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its color. - "Separation," W.S. MerwinThe anchored ache behind my heart.It will be better to be together.love,hilary