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 be saved

I am afraid of the dark after Tenebrae. I walk into the sanctuary after the sun has gone down, and I hear the shuffle of programs and the squirm of young children (was it so long ago I was one of them), as we wait for the new fire of Eastertide.The priests faces are masked in shadows. The fire leaps ahead, but it is not yet comfort, only a raw hope. I shrug off my coat and lean forward, trying to hear and see that this hope will soon be ablaze in our pews and in our hands, a live light among a hundred candles. But first, the priest must trace the sign of our victory and death's defeat, make the sign of the cross in the Paschal candle itself, so that it might be a sign to us. He must pray, dipping into the new fire for the light that will now never be extinguished:May the light of Christ, gloriously rising, dispel the darkness of heart and mind. I hear these words echo - and the shadows begin to flee. Even at these words, there is more light. The choir has lit its candles from the Paschal Candle, the acolytes - the light-bearers - are bringing into each pew a new flame that dispels the darkness. I can see people I know across the aisle; I can see my old headmaster and his wife standing near the organ. I can see and hear, feel and almost touch, the entrance of the light.When I receive my own small flame it burns so bright I can no longer be afraid. For the shadows are fleeing, even in the still-dark of our waiting, even in the not-yet of our expectation. The shadows that quickened and hid the Christ candle on Wednesday are already scattering, undone by the new light that is so gloriously rising. We are saved through nothing but the blood, Jesus said to me on Friday as I stared at the cross shrouded in black. Nothing but my blood, nothing but being entered into it and washed in it, nothing but this radical and frightening story, where I go to be offered up for you, and you see me offered up, you see and taste in the smallest of ways the grief that God pierced into Mary's heart. Nothing but you, Hil, and me, and my blood poured out. Nothing but the quickened shadows that make you afraid and my light hidden in the tomb. Nothing but your distracted mind, crying in your car over the things I have been teaching you, how hard it is to receive grace, how hard to be a receiver, and not a giver, of love.Nothing but my blood.That's what it means to be saved.And so, on the Holy Night, when I am spent with crying over my selfishness, over all everything I failed at during Lent, over the stupid blog posts and the mean words, over the ungracious dismissals and even less gracious longing?This is what it means to be saved: to hear prayer loud in the ever-lightening sanctuary: Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all the ages to him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen. Nothing but his blood will save me. But Christ is the Morning Star who knows no setting. In Him we light this candle. In Him we sing the first, breathless alleluia.I stand amid the shouts of Easter praising, silent, black dress and pink cardigan smudged with all my trying and striving and failing, my feet tired in their polished shoes, hands uplifted.To be saved through His blood. To be saved through the ever-burning Light. There are no more shadows this night.I can hear Him draw near to touch my face, in the strange silence between shouting church-people and bright lights in the sanctuary and though He is not touching my face, He is. Lord? I whisper. I close my eyes and feel Him smile. You have saved me. Love,hilary

you must be taught by your story

Everything can be a part of your becoming, if only you would allow it... I tell myself this as I sit at the computer, my face whitened by the empty page.I type and delete, type and delete.You don't have to abandon those stories at the side of the road, the stories of running in between patches of late winter ice, the nights in crowds with loud music and unnecessary Guinness, and the waitress who had cowboy boots like yours, and the questions that leave a person making promises to the stars that aren't really listening.I type, and delete.You can write your way into meaningfulness, tell your wonder and fear in characters who find themselves inside the clean glass of the hip bar on Dartmouth Street, discovering the hole in their jeans at the crease of their left knee, drinking something with gin and a sprig of rosemary in it. You can write the character as someone who wishes they knew why rosemary did anything to gin, but they don't, and when they look out the window and realize they put their sweater on inside out, it is a realization of how far they have yet to go.I type, and delete.You can't always write the stories that are at the forefront of your mind. You can't always sit on the dusty floorboards with your pen and make something beautiful out of what is happening around you. It doesn't make the stories untrue. It doesn't make you less of a writer. It doesn't mean you won't someday celebrate the book's birthday.I type, and delete.And the winds, and the spaces, and what was that phrase?O, Zarathustra, you are not yet ripe for your fruit. The story is inside you, but you are not ready to write it.The story belongs to you, but it is bigger than you. It hasn't asked to be written.The story is still in the winds,in the spaces,in between changing the sheets on your bed as the cold air leaks into the roomin between poetry, and the silence that comes after.The story, the one that is not this one, is still too vast to be held in a small vase of words. It is the field, and you are the seedling.I type, and then - I hear -Sometimes you have to be taught by your story before you can write it. I am a student again.Love,hilary

when it is all quiet

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

stay, American baby

"I brought this for you." "Oh." The blue plastic jewel case, the flecks of car dust from where it sat in the glove compartment, the smudged playlist taped to the front of the case. "I thought - I mean, I owed you one." He smiled, sheepish. My hands felt the edges of the kitchen table, tracing the chips and cracks from years of family and screeching joy and frustration at each other. He held it out to me, pushing the hair out of his eyes.They were such brown eyes. I'll never forget that - like all the things he hid from the world he stored up in that one, tender look. And I promised myself in my journals that year that I was the one he was saving those looks for, I was the one who caught the secrets hiding in his dilating pupils. So I held the CD case, suddenly more thoughtful than I wanted to be. I wanted to be anxious, heart racing inside its cage. I wanted to feel all that in-love-with-his-brown-eyes-and-secret-sweetness feeling. I wanted to be back to the girl of weeks before, who had declared in the girl's bathroom while poking at her eyelid with a pencil that I liked him. And I was going to tell him.The light was pink outside the window; it had rained earlier. And I sat, calm and quiet, holding his blue plastic CD case. I was still as we laughed about Carrie Underwood, played a song on my new iPod, sat on the fraying couch in the living room, as we pulled on spring coats and walked to the pond."It's not a real pond. I mean, it's just the second bridge from our house." We scuffed at the broken winter pavement, chasing the bits of asphalt with our eyes as we walked. "Yeah, no, that's cool." More silence, more strange calm. I asked him something about college; he asked me something about debate. We answered past each other, eyes fixed ahead. Past the horse farm - "I've always wanted to ride," I said. "Oh, really?" he looked at me - the sudden, sweet tenderness. "Yes." Past the houses of best friends and lost friends, of dogs who barked at bikes and the neighbors who refuse to take down Christmas decorations until March. Past the first bridge, the reeds waving at us from their hibernation. Past the Girl Scout camp, the hidden bend in the road where the cops hid their cars at night to catch speeding teenagers and the haggard father racing home."So this is it." We sat down, feet dangling, a bit of sun offering itself to us on the water. We squinted at it. We looked for the beavers, or a fish biting. "So, Hils..." and still, that calm. "I know what you want to say." "You do?" I did?"It's okay." This became the mantra, the refrain - it's okay. It's all okay. The prayer, the angry shout, the promise - "it's okay," I said. I nodded a lot, he nodded some, too - just to keep moving, to keep from being still enough to hear the world shifting between us. We threw sticks into the pond, catching them on the last bit of ice.We walked back to the house, to the world before it had shifted, before we had said nothing and too much, before the admission that this was it, the point beyond tenderness.He shrugged into his coat, tucked his hands into his sleeves to keep the cold out. I rubbed my arms, hopping up and down in the driveway as I waited for him to say goodbye. But he just looked at me, with that sweet tenderness I'd never see again, and said - "You'll like the first track. On the CD, I mean. It's DMB." And then he got into his car, smiled, and backed out the driveway.I put the CD on in silence, sat on my bed, closed my eyes. "Stay, beautiful, baby." I sounded the words in my head as Dave began to sing. "Stay, American baby." I let the world shift. This was his real secret, hidden in those brown eyes - that despite all of the things we imagine, we remain fixed as ourselves in a turning world. That, despite our wildness, the wonder is not in getting what we thought.It is in the gifts that go beyond the moment: the Dave Matthews song we played in the car and learned to love, apart from him. The gift of memory turned story, softened by time into something like beauty. The gift of silence in the midst of noise. The gift of holding fast and setting free.The gift of a CD on a March afternoon, a walk to the pond.Stay, American baby.Isn't it all gift?

the sisterhood

I wanted to be Lena. I didn't tell the other girls, who had already assigned themselves characters, and had been kind enough to include me in their imagining. One was most like Lena, because she had the hair and she was good at art. Bridget belonged to our own version of the tall soccer player, who waved her hands wildly as she ran and managed to score four goals in a game. And the third girl was Carmen, the writer, the one who kept the group together and built the home for their hearts and kept the secrets (most of the time) and always had the most beautiful things to say. But The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants has four characters, and they offered me one - Tibby - the mystery, the rebel, the girl with the camera who doesn't recognize herself, who loves fierce, but different. They offered it to me, one of my first invitations to be a part of them, to think of myself as belonging, even if for just the duration of the movie or the week when we cracked the orange cover open and raced through the third book.But I wanted to be Lena. I wanted the big love Kostos had for her - beaming out of the pages. How he radiated in her direction, how he took care of her, learned her quietness and her fear and her joy. I wanted her ability to see into the people she drew with her charcoal pencil. I wanted to be described with celery green eyes and effortless hair. I ached with it - this character I couldn't claim as my own - this fictional person who lived a life I thought I should have.When we drove across the country for the second time, in the darker green minivan, I reread all the books. My sister and I sat behind everyone else, each in the same world at different times. For eight hours, Tibby and Bridget and Lena and Carmen drove with us - stopping for Cokes and pretzels at the gas stations, poking our brothers and being smacked back with the plastic rifle from Wall Drug in South Dakota. We treated the books without care, assuming, like we almost always do, that they will wait for us to come back. That everything waits for us to come back.During those drives I reread the stories and wrapped my seat belt in strange loops around my waist so that I could have my torso free. My parents always told us not to do this. I ate Swedish fish out of a plastic bag stuffed into the cup holder. I was not yet fifteen, then, and I only had my top braces off, which made me self conscious when I smiled. My hair stuck to my head in sweaty summer clumps, and the pictures of that time remind me that I bought one pink shirt from American Eagle that said something about "bee-ing happy" with a picture of a bumblebee splashed across the front. I wore it as some kind of promise to myself that I could be one of the girls, who shopped at American Eagle and wore cute shirts and played soccer like Bridget and could write like Carmen and draw like Lena.I read, and we drove, and the country spilled out in front of us: an abundance of white in the sky, an emptiness on the roads. It must have been there that I gave up the dream of Lena. Somewhere in Nebraska or Iowa, staring at cornfields and hay that reached above my head, hearing nothing but wind through the bleached stalks and the bickering of my siblings and my parents debating buying ham at the next grocery store. I released the dream of her - her celery green eyes, her long effortless hair, her drawing, her love story. It floated out the window, between wishing I had a cowboy hat of my own and finding one in a Walmart in Colorado, and I turned fifteen later that summer.It must be that this is part of the way we learn about ourselves: that we release the dreams of who we might be, free ourselves of the clinging hope of someone else's beautiful self. We let the character we wanted to play float out the window under a Colorado sky, and we buy a cowboy hat and hug our brothers, and let our sister braid our non-effortless hair in two French braids when she asks. We reread the stories no longer anxious to fit ourselves into the small spaces of the words about Lena:because we know there she's only a dream.because we know that we are real.because we'd rather hug brothers and let someone french braid our hair and eat Swedish fish.because we'd rather turn fifteen as ourselves.

stop all the clocks

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

when there are no words (a letter to preston)

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

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

Love,hilary

on emma louise (and growing wings)

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

my own path (a guest post by fiona)

Oh, I'm so, so, SO excited to share Fiona's words with you today. She's one of the many talented writers out there that I enjoyed from afar for a while before braving the first email. Since then, it's been even more wonderful to get to know her a little bit. Today, she writes over here rich, beautiful words about the paths that stretch out before us.  You are my competition.I stood beside you, on that starting line and we started racinglimbs still chubby with baby fat, pigtails flying you with the prettiest hair clips and the enviable my little pony collectionyou with the neatest handwriting and the most gold starsyou with all the words and the right dance moves to the newest pop song. We run and run and I push every ounce of energy into theseyoung legs just to keep up with you the one who the boys want to hang around near, jostling for attentionyou with the perfect style perfectly poised between trendy and quirkyyou with the easy straight A’s, the assurance of an Oxbridge offer. We run on, my heart beating fast now, breath coming shorterharder, but I must keep pace with you the one dating the CU president and whispers of a ringyou the tutor’s favourite, the job offers already arrivingyou with the perfect smile in church and the easy way of praying out loud. We run and we run and we run until the sweatdrips into my eyes and my chest feels likeit will explodebut I must keep up, must keep pace, must prove I can do it until The path divides and I stumble to a stopin confusion. There you run ahead on my left, a new partner to run with, baby in the sling.And there you go on my right, career reaching new heights, another promotion on the horizon.And you, heading further away, with your church speaking schedule and the book contract signed. My chest heaves with the weight of exertion and competitiona tightness creeping with the promise of tearsmy breath comes fast and shallow.Which of you am I supposed to keep up with?How can I keep pace with you all?How am I supposed to know which path to take? And then a voiceunruffled and unworriedA word spoken over my shoulderin my ear This is the way, this is your wayWalk this wayRun this pathYou will run and not grow wearyyou will walk and not be faint. I lift my tired head and see a path stretchingforward from my worn out feetan empty path, my own pathno one to jostle with compete with keep up withthis is not a racetrack, nothis is a run to enjoyevery step ofthe way. And so I take that first step. A little bit about Fiona: I'm a British woman living in Luxembourg with my Danish husband. I love celebrating, gathering people together, seeing the new friendships and plans that emerge. I love seeing people find their role in God’s big story and I'm still trying to find mine. My one word for the year is “brave,” because I don’t want to let fear be the reason I miss out on all God has for me. I blog at fionalynne.com/blog and tweet at @fiona_lynne.

of Flannery O'Connor and calling, a letter to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share about mystery, wonder about faith and the long walk of obedience, tell stories about Gossip Girl and God's grace. We would love for you to join us in the comments. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,You would understand how the sight of the white farmhouse ripped the air from my lungs in a quick, sharp breath. There it was: the deep front porch with white rocking chairs, the red tin roof, a peacock peering from behind a wall of chicken wire. In front of me the grass, browned with Georgia summer, spilled down towards a pond. I thought of the Holy Spirit that descended like an icicle. I wandered towards the back, found the barn (the hayloft, you know?), and saw spread out before me the map of her wild, violent love of the world and her commitment to it.Flannery O'Connor lived here, I almost giggled as I watched my feet step onto the same floorboards, felt the air moving gently across the porch. This is where she wrote "Good Country People" and "The Enduring Chill" and "The Comforts of Home." It was better than strolling through a movie set or seeing Forrest Gump's bench in a square in Savannah. I saw the typewriter, imagined how she sat there, day after day, forcing herself to write even when she didn't want to. I imagined her bickering with her mother and feeding her peacocks. I imagined her watching the world. And I closed my eyes and ran down to the pond with my friends. And God said, "Here you are. I send you."I don't think he's going to send me to Andalusia to write short stories of violent grace. I don't think he necessarily wants me to write stories at all. But I know he sends me to echo back the unselfconscious love of learning. I know he sends me to commit myself to higher education, to making the space where students meet Flannery O'Connor and Heidegger and Wollstonecraft. He brings me to Andalusia to send me back filled with hours of discussing Parker's back and whether or not Mrs Turpin really understands the revelation. He sends me back home full of awe and shameless love of stories and this world.You wrote to me saying that cameras are shields, that you don't want to give it all up and follow Him. And I almost never want to. It's only when He catches me in those moments of unselfconscious, shameless love - when I'm caught up in what I'm doing and I've forgotten to be worried if someone is looking, if anyone else is impressed, if my comment was the most insightful or witty - in those moments Jesus whispers in my ear that I'm being sent out to do His will, not mine. In those moments, Jesus pushes me out towards the cliff and says, "I'm sending you across. Trust me and go."And standing in the porch at Andalusia, caught in a moment of shameless awe and wonder, He pushed. I wonder if you have those moments, too - the ones where you forget yourself, and realize only hours later that you are still you? The ones where it really is just about the discussion, or the story, or the long walk along the waterfront or the argument about public policy or climbing the mountain? Where does God catch you lingering in awe and push you?Love, and grace for the calling,hilary

an ode to hard things (poetic friday/saturday, week three)

Poetic Friday/Saturday means I must put different words to my thoughts - words carefully chosen, weeded out from their neighbors, words that sit in a strange order and meet each other in an unexpected rhythm. Poetry is the wondrous music of loving words. Won't you share your poetry too (I'd love to read it)?an ode to the hard things (by Hilary Sherratt)I love you:hearts I can’t understanddoors that lock and boltocean of time and separationwind shattering a window in a storm.It is winter,rain lashes at my face in early morning.My boots drip onto the new pavement.I carry youe questions in my wide eyes.Then I bless you: the hard things no one wishes for –you with your achesand bruises, with your wonderingand missingand cryingand forfeitingand defeat.You are the oyster shells of the world:I see your pearl.And one from a favorite poet of mine:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands,your throat filled with the silt of it.When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit for gills than lungs;when grief weights you like your own fleshonly more of it, an obesity of grief,you think, How can a body withstand this?Then you hold life like a facebetween your palms, a plain face,no charming smile, no violet eyes,and you say, yes, I will take youI will love you, again.

Love, hilary

where did you go (poetic friday, week two)

I want to send you off to the weekend in the joy of good words, and the better silence before and between and after them. I want to send you off with some of the sounds that paint the world in consonants and vowels. So on Fridays, I'll ramble a bit, and share a poem I've found and loved throughout the week.So, my rambling:Where did you go? Russia, in summer.I drank and prayed against cool marble, tattered flags rippled like ghosts.Kentucky in late May,stung by bees and swarmed by banjos.Antarctica in the heat of a broken heart,sweetly cold and quiet.A thousand places, and none.I am always and never here,flung through life, set freeto wander, lost, away.But if you asked, Russiaor Kentucky or Antarctica with my bleeding heartwere the same:here.And a poem for your weekend, from Theodore Roethke:

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;I hear my echo in the echoing wood--A lord of nature weeping to a tree,I live between the heron and the wren,Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.What's madness but nobility of soulAt odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!I know the purity of pure despair,My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,That place among the rocks--is it a cave,Or winding path? The edge is what I have.A steady storm of correspondences!A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,And in broad day the midnight come again!A man goes far to find out what he is--Death of the self in a long, tearless night,All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.The mind enters itself, and God the mind,And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

to my children (poetic friday, week one)

I think some of you might know how I love poetry. I love to sound it out, read it out loud in empty rooms, sit with it when sentences and paragraphs don't quite fit. so on Fridays around here, I'm going to write and share poetry with you. It will be poetry that's messy and raw, but the only way to be a poet is to listen close to poetry.First, a poem for your weekend:In the Month of May (Robert Bly)In the month of May when all leaves open,I see when I walk how well all thingslean on each other, how the bees work,the fish make their living the first day.Monarchs fly high; then I understandI love you with what in me is unfinished.I love you with what in me is stillchanging, what has no head or armsor legs, what has not found its body.And why shouldn't the miraculous,caught on this earth, visitthe old man alone in his hut?And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?And lovers, tough ones, how many there arewhose holy bodies are not yet born.Along the roads, I see so many placesI would like us to spend the night.And a poem from me, "to my children"I don't believe in you yet.You live in my fierce fever of love,and waiting.I imagine your faces upturned to mine,all eyes, all need.You terrify me.Some days I don’t want you.I’d rather the other dreams – the ones that float bylike jellyfish or balloons.But I see you, tear-streaked and soft,your shadow kicks against my skin.I don't know you yet, but stillI've named you a thousand times,when everything is departure and arrival and unknowing.Even from this great distance,you are the bright ones, the comets.The gifts.

and so we begin.

Welcome to this space, dear ones. It's strange and new for me, coming from over here. It's a beautiful thing, and I'm sure of its timeliness. But there is a strangeness to imagining blogging here instead of where I've always been.So for my first post (my first real, live, I'm-only-blogging-here-now post, anyway), I want to share a poem that I've been pondering for the past few days. I found it as I was reading my "A Year with Rainer Maria Rilke" entry for May 18. The excerpt is from the Ninth Duino Elegy ...A hunger drives us.We want to contain it all in our naked hands,our brimming senses, our speechless hearts.We want to become it, or offer it—but to whom?We could hold it forever—but, after all,what can we keep? Not the beholding,so slow to learn. Not anything that has happened here.Nothing. There are the hurts. And, always, the hardships.And there's the long knowing of love—all of itunsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:these are better unsaid.I'm not good at what is unsaid, to tell the truth. I love my scaffolding of words. I love to trace the shapes of letters and hear the clicking of the keys, to know that somehow I can share what's inside my heart through these small shapes and sounds. But tonight, as I settle into bed at home, taking a deep breath, realizing that I'm embarking on a new journey and I have no idea what it will contain, or where it will bring me, or who I will become, I see what Rilke meant. All of this beginning is unsayable - the hurts and hardships, the love and the trial of loving - and so it must simply be lived.Perhaps this year I will learn how to trust what is unsayable. Perhaps this is a year to learn how to let the silence between words be as powerful as the words themselves.I hope that as you begin this week, dear friends, you trust what is unsaid. I hope that you will hold what is in your hands and love it in the long knowing of love, and trust in it all.all my wild love,hilary