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.

on thomas newman (and growing wings)

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

a meadow, and time

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

dear hilary: the tuning fork

Dear Hilary,I want to please other people. I want to do whatever will make them happy. You want 100 photocopies in 3 minutes? Done. You want a strategic plan for the future of an organization at this college? Done. You want me to be there, run this errand, listen to this problem? I would love to. But then I run headlong into this wall. I really want to be a writer. I really want to be a counselor, of some kind. I really want to put writing and counseling together in some strange beautiful combination, and I don't want to lose threads of theology, or of my love of French, or my love of theater... When I ask people what I should do, they tell me that I would be a great PhD student, of history or political science or philosophy. They tell me I could run an organization, a school even. I want to please them, and I don't want to disappoint anyone's dreams. Help?Love,Afraid to DisappointDear Afraid to Disappoint,Our piano is out of tune at home. The keys clink strange half-tones, and I swear I can hear it groaning when someone asks it to sing one more rendition of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." Have you ever watched someone tune an instrument? They take that strange fork instrument and hit it against something - your knee, or a piece of plastic or wood, the door frame, or something. And then they hold it up to their ear to hear it ringing. The air moves between the two tines of the fork and the note - a middle C, or an A - becomes the foundation for the rest.I have been thinking in these last few months that certain loves in our lives are like a tuning fork. They give us the foundation for the rest, a measure against which we can understand how other things might fit into our lives.Sometimes it's terrifyingly clear that they don't sound the same. I do not love everything in the magnitude that I love writing. I do not breathe, and ache and live in biology; I do not yearn for one more hour with a potter's wheel or a linoleum block printing press. And why should we be afraid of this? We will never be able to do everything, anyway. In the small amount of time we are gifted, why shouldn't our hearts be caught up in the work we love most?I think you ache to write. I think your body physically feels the need to put words on paper. Why else would you write? I think you are beginning to tune the piano of your life by the writing tuning fork. So strike it and listen. Does counseling sound like that? Does teaching? Does directing plays or traveling to France? Does politics, or philosophy, or history?You write to me that you don't want to disappoint others in their ideas of what you should do. I can understand that. You don't want to say no to a career in history or political science or philosophy, partly because you love these professors and mentors. You want to honor their work, affirm the value of their field. That's admirable. But, Afraid to Disappoint, I have to tell you that the only sure disappointment in this life is living less of you. You are the unlikely combination of counseling, writing, French, history, politics, philosophy, and faith. You are the unlikely wedding planner meets chemical engineer. You are the unlike-everything-else musician turned playwright turned nanny turned environmental advocate...Being that, that strange impossible combination, takes everything you've got. It will cost you the security of pleasing others. It will cost you the comfort of a plan. It will cost you a life characterized by steps and guidelines and directions and each thing done right.It will pay you back with a heart that hurts so much sometimes you think that the person just stabbed you. It will give you back failed attempts to plan weddings and failed attempts to get a second interview and failed attempts to move to France. It will give you back uncertainty and breakups at two in the morning when it isn't said but unsaid, and you leave and lie on your bed thinking that for sure you are dead and there is no more and what else could there be, and you'll play country music and read Dear Sugar and throw the book across the room because this life will be so damn mysterious.But isn't that what you really want? To throw books across the room because of the damn mystery of it all, the deep love that roars, the brilliant failure, the moment of singular compassion, the breakup at 2am and the return flight from France and everything it teaches you?Strike the tuning fork. There isn't anything to be afraid of.Love,Hilary

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 dustin o'halloran (and growing wings)

I can't sleep.I have picked almost all the "fearless" nail polish off the edges of my fingertips, stared out into the familiar shadows of my room, heard the rain and its ceasing. I have gotten up for water, decided against it, taken a sip straight from the faucet. I've heard my floorboards creak as I pace, catch my toe against the edge of my bed, felt the sharp sting, yelped.I can't sleep because there is a ghost in my room.She sits down at the edge of my bed, takes in my twisted sleep positions, nudges me awake. I look at her, this ghost of all the things I should have been. She is the anxious ghost, who at 3am has kept me awake wondering if, in fact, I sent that grant in the right way. Wondering if, in fact, five or six months ago I should have played a different game, read a different set of signals, cared less and calculated more. Wondering if, in fact...all of it might have been meant to be otherwise. She is a Hilary I keep banishing. For how can any of us know what might have been? Wasn't that the first lesson Aslan taught those children in Narnia? "To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that." We are never told the stories that are not spun, the ghost ships that never sailed, the result of the left turn when we took the right.She is the ghost of control: the ghost who imagines she knows better. The ghost of if only I had thought before... The ghost of 3am and rain.So I sit up in bed, scattering a warm grey cat and a few pillows in my haste. I fumble with the passcode, fingers touching the screen in search of Dustin, click play, close my eyes.He tells me "We Move Lightly."He plays the repetition back to the ghost on the edge of my bed. The humble kind of piano: gentle and sure, questioning and yet steady. My best friend can always predict the parts of music I love best - the ones that sneak up to the very highest notes, played gently. The moment when strings enter, playing that long note, trembling and vulnerable. He plays, and I listen.Because our stories are thousands of threads woven and frayed, beginning and ending outside of us, and the ghosts that worry at 3am fall silent in the face of what is truly beautiful.Because we are never told what might have been, would have been. In this music, we grow the wings to carry us into what will happen. We become free: lost in something bigger than ourselves, found in the thousand threads.He plays the seventh time, and I fall asleep, winged.Love,hilary

come to me (on being confirmed)

The morning bursts into my bedroom too soon, and I feel my muscles groan and burrow under the comforter. I'm getting up early to help in the Atrium, the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd space at my church. I hide, just for a few extra moments, store the vivid dream away for pondering, and sit up. I pull on corduroys and wriggle my toes in their silver Toms. I close my eyes and wing a prayer out for the children I'm going to meet, and the hearts they have and their arms rushing towards God.They won't sit still, I whisper to myself as we wrangle six boys between 3 and 6 onto a small red fleece blanket. They escape our soft voices and our laughter, and our repeated requests to, "Come watch Miss Hilary show you how to do this." They laugh and squeal.But then one boy, bright blond and curious, stomps across the blanket and puts his warm small self next to me, and declares, "I want to do that." And I lean in and tell him, and the two girls in their bright pinks and purples, that if they watch close, they can learn how to do this, too. And their eyes grow round and they hold their breath as I carefully scoop a small pile of white beans from one jar to another.We walk slowly into the room, measuring our steps. We trade our shoes for fuzzy socks, speak in sweeter whispers, and even the squealing boys find themselves tracing candles and crosses, sweeping and pouring, setting a prayer table and folding their hands together to talk to God.I shiver, look down at my bare feet and chipping teal nail polish, and I wonder - when was the last time I ran to God like those hurricane boys and threw myself onto the floor and scrunched my eyes shut and burst with things to tell him - bee stings and scraped elbows and pulled hair?Friends - can I ask us a hard question? Are we too proud to get that close to Him? Are we pleased that we can be so composed in church, so calm and elegant, so lovely and presentable? Are we glad for our semblances of patience and performance, of how we do each step right? Whether we be Anglicans or Presbyterians or Evangelical Free, whether ours is a house church or a great cathedral, whether it's French or Portuguese or English, have we become so concerned to approach in just this way, with just these words, these gestures, this pretty prayer, that we can't look foolish throwing leaves in the air and holding up our scraped selves for healing?"This is a special place where we get to meet with God." Ms. Allie tells the wide-eyed, upturned faces. One girl picks at her fuzzy socks, a boy rocks back and forth, close to meltdown. They pray for their small wounds, sitting cross legged on wooden mats, a candle lit and an icon of the Good Shepherd watching over us.Jesus said, "let the little children come to me." I didn't realize He meant to teach us through their unbounded, delighted half-skip, half-run, always tumbling race into His arms. I didn't realize that sometimes their crashing, hurricane love for God is the fastest way to Him.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

dear hilary: you aren't alone

Dear Hilary,Help. Why am I here? I think I'm having a panic attack over what I have done, and haven't done, and the thing I promised God and the thing I promised myself and all of it is slipping away in the hard and new and I feel alone. Am I? Is anyone listening?Love,The-Silence-Is-DeafeningDear Silence,No.No, sweetheart. You aren't alone. Do you hear me? You aren't alone. You and all the thousands of other new college graduates who whisper these worries to their best friend on the phone late at night. You and all the many new employees in their new jobs counting the splotches on their ceilings as they worry about the morning. You and all the promisers, the rooted, the winged, the ones who got on airplanes and the ones who waved through glass tunnels as those airplanes left. You aren't alone.It feels that way because we live in a culture so afraid of silence we'll offer almost anything to avoid it. We make this funny link between solitude and loneliness, between the absence of crowds of people and being unwanted, unloved or unlovely. Don't make that mistake, dear one. Solitude is a gift, just like community. You don't have to feel lonely when you're alone. I don't blame you, love. I walked to my car just this past week, one late night after work, holding my breath to keep from wailing that the parking lot was empty, I was empty, my office was empty, my bed was empty, everything, everything was empty and alone.But the thing about living with wild gifts is that we don't get to choose their arrival or departure. We don't get to choose if wild gifts remain or not; if or when they come to us, if or when they go. You have a wild gift of solitude now. You might not have it forever. You might only have it for now. But I bet you're writing to me because you'd rather give it back, right? You want to trade it for the gift she got, the calling he has, the job or the friend group or the curly hair or the...And this is the same problem laced through a different story: we don't get to choose wild gifts. We only get to receive them. You don't have to spend yourself on loneliness because you've been given a gift of solitude. You don't have to be anxious or sad that you weren't given the gift of young marriage or young children or a PhD program or a cross-country move.I think that all those young college graduates, young professionals, the promisers, the rooted and winged, all of us waste time wishing we could trade lives with each other like lunchboxes. We all wish for a different wild gift. We all wish we had the kind of hard but beautiful someone else is living.John Watson wrote, "Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle." And he is right. I will say it a different way: Give love, for everyone is living a wild gift. Including you and your solitude.You are here because this life is your wild gift. You aren't alone. See? We are all right here, holding our gifts and lives out in front of each other.We need you to hold yours, too.Love,hilary

and humbly confess your sins (on being confirmed)

"The Lord be in your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.Oh no. I have to say something. This is the part where I say something. This is the part where I have to make words come out of my mouth. He is waiting for me, sitting in the rocking chair in the small prayer room. Oh, no. Why did I promise to do this? What do I even have to confess? What's this for, anyway? "I confess to Almighty God, to his Church, and to you, that I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word and deed, in things done and left undone; especially _______."That's all we are given in the small red book. Only that thin frame, those few words. What am I going to say? How do you begin to tell the God who already knows everything you've done and everything you've left undone anything? Why does He want me to do this? I mean, what have I done that's that bad, really? The priest waits, time left outside the door. It's only us and the rocking chairs and the cross hanging on the wall. I have to say something. I reach a hand out for my journal, clear my throat. I flip a few pages over, wondering if this was a terribly foolish idea."I have been jealous." That's the first one, and the words slip out like water from a pitcher, spilling over the room, over the sanctified silence. I have been angry at God, and resentful. I have been... Words pool around my hands as I talk to the ground, then to the ceiling, close my eyes and leave the journal pages unread. I catch my breath a few minutes later, look back at the cross hanging on the wall, bow my head again."For these and all other sins which I cannot now remember, I am truly sorry. I pray God to have mercy on me."The sacrament of confession is not popular. I see why, now. We are so used to giving justifications for things. We were so mad that night because... we lied to that person because... it wasn't really that bad. We hide behind these carefully sculpted excuses, reasons, our logic turned in to defend our hearts from the truth.In confession there isn't any space for those rationalizations. It isn't about the great reasons you have for everything you do; it's laying your life in front of God and whispering that most of it has been mess and much of it has been sin and all of it needs His love. In all that silence, the choir singing scales behind me, I pool my words, my life, my faults, at the feet of Christ. And I admit, for the first time in a long time, that I need Jesus to put away my sins. In the Anglican church (and in most liturgical traditions) we say that the sacraments are an visible sign of an invisible grace. They aren't magic, wish-fulfilling, emotionally-satisfying, problem-solving rituals. They are the heartbeat of the people of God who are saved by grace. They are reminders, bells that ring out, signposts on the road, lighthouses amid the tossing sea.The sacraments don't save us. But in every gesture, every word, every silent meditation, every blank space, they remind us of the One who did.I don't go to confession, I realize as we near the end of the Rite of the Penitent, because I believe it will make all things right with God. I don't go because it has special favor in the Kingdom. I don't go because good Christians do it. I don't go because it "works."I go to meet again the Son of Man who has already done the work for me. I go to hear Jesus say that already He has put my sin as far away as East is from West. I go because in the steady words and the sign of the cross, I mark in my heart His promise:Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.And I scuff my heels on the floor and wipe a tear or two from eyes at this marvelous grace poured out in old words and new buildings, in strangers who are pilgrims together, in heads bowed and fingertips bent in prayer."The Lord has put away all your sins." He says, strong and clear.Thanks be to God. Love,hilary

on holocene (and growing wings)

They played "Perth" first. We are almost as a second thought, as they look out at the thousands of plaid shirts and skinny jeans gathered under the white tent, almost surprised to see us there. They turn their heads back to drums, guitar, close their eyes to everything but this miraculous emerging sound.I hear the music, but I'm lost somewhere inside myself, inside my preppy clothes and self-consciousness. I scuff at the pavement, rub my hands up and down my striped cotton sweater, wish I had studied the lyrics or knew how to stand in the crowd with the music and the people and the cheap wine smell. Somewhere behind me I hear a couple giggle as they share a cigarette.Then they play "Beth/Rest", the song I love but don't really understand. The words wash over the crowd and the strobe lights ricochet off the white faces, the instruments, the water to our left. I can't see the moon but in the song, somehow, I hear the night, the landscape, the horizon line.I sway my hips from side to side, conscious, still a bit out of place. I can't quite shake the idea that I shouldn't be here. This music is for the cool kids - the ones who knew this band years ago and followed Justin Vernon before Bon Iver. This is for people who live braver, more on the edge, who can actually play a guitar and who can sit on the beach in late summer humming "Calgary" while drinking espresso.But then? Then they play Holocene.The pavilion of thousands empties. All I can hear is Justin singing, and the drums battering my ribcage. The people behind me are still smoking, whispering that this song is "so good" but they seem hundreds of miles away. I close my eyes. He sings that line, the one that always gets me: And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent.This is the song I played while I drove down side roads the night of graduation day, after all the leaving, before all the arriving.This is the song I played to wake up on cold February mornings.This is the song I played to sway babies to sleep in my apartment in the haze of the afternoon.This is the song I played to make promises, and, sometimes, when they are broken.He sings Holocene and I come back to myself. The guitar repeats its wandering journey up to that top note, the drums roll, and the night suddenly, wildly, is about growing wings.We all have a Holocene. Isn't that part of the reason we keep making music, even when we sing only to mirrors and each other, even when we try to hide our voices in the bigger swelling sound of a church choir, even when we only know how to play three chords on the guitar and the cello isn't yet a part of our body, but an awkward dance partner?We make music to remember the sounds of all the things we can't put words to. We make music to imprint ourselves, to make snow angels across history, to grow wings. Yes, that. We make (and hear) music to grow wings.Last Thursday I went to the Bon Iver concert. He played Holocene, and I grew wings. I stepped for a moment inside a bigger self, inside a self unafraid to be her self.Dear readers, could I ask you something? Could you play your Holocene today? Could you let it repeat itself over, and over, growing your courage? I keep dreaming that with all these small gifts of brave things, someday we'll all take flight together.all my wild and winged love,hilaryPS. Another one of those songs? This ("I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons)

to the brave voice

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

pray with me (on being confirmed)

I arrived to class late, having spilled the church lunch on both sleeves of my jacket, tried to listen to my favorite fifth grader tell me about her first day of school, and failed miserably at appearing elegant and refined to the three young girls sitting around me (all of whom managed not to spill lunch on themselves). I was looking forward to this class in particular, because I knew that it was the day for Anglican theology.I imagined we'd get into the detailed difficulties, the philosophical nuances, the dusty corners of complicated problems. What does it mean, really, to say that God is and is from the beginning without beginning? Is it possible for us to believe in a God who is all-knowing and yet who allows free will? What is the Eucharist, exactly?These are the problems that feed me. I want to sit in a pub somewhere in England and talk someone's ear off about the possibility that God's involvement with time is perhaps one of His most merciful and mysterious acts. I want to live in theological reflection, in the words about God and the systems of understanding how very little we can know about Him. And of course, I must confess - I love theological arguments. I love sitting in the same pub and fighting what feels like a fight to the death over the interpretation of Jesus' phrase, "I am the Truth." I like the heat and thrill of fighting. "If you want to know what we believe, pray with us."I looked up as Fr. Brian spoke, my eyes widening in surprise. A drop of ink splotched onto my journal page. He smiled at the group gathered at the same small table, books and papers strewn across our laps. "Theology is worked out best in prayer." I gulped. What about the arguments? What about the long academic papers I spent all that time writing? What about the rush of winning a point? What about all of that?I could feel my stomach twist and turn as we turned to the Thirty Nine Articles (a historical document in the Anglican Church outlining some points of faith), as we followed the old language down the twisted paths of election and free will and grace, as we sorted out where we believe church authority comes from and what we think of the sufficiency of Scripture for teaching about salvation. Even as we read, I couldn't get that first phrase out of my mind. "If you want to know what we believe, pray with us."To know what we claim as true, you have to listen to us talk to the Truth. To know our doctrines, listen to our pleading, to our thanksgiving, to our intercession. All my beautiful arguments, the long maze of points and subpoints, of countering, and modifying go out the window if the heart of my belief is in how I pray.Because if you pray with me, it's not with arguments. I don't prove God to Himself in five points, or neatly weave together two distinct definitions of the word "sufficient" to reveal the true mean of Christ on the cross.No, I ramble. I pray in the car on the way to work and interrupt myself with a second thought and a wistful remembering. I pray for people and two seconds in I'm asking about whether He will let me have what I want. I pray while I run, my palms skyward, and over and over I repeat the simplicity: I love you, Lord. Will you stay with me?To know what I believe, you have to pray with me. To know the heart of the Church, you have to get on your knees with her. We are so ready to stay safe in our books, in our academic critiques, in our theological possibilities - when all along, He is calling us to the more radical theology revealed in the rain and wind of prayer.So I pray: I love you, Jesus. Your Name is salvation. Can I stay near you?Love,hilary

the wild gifts

It's late on a Saturday night. Our bare toes trace the wood, listening to the tide come in. She puts her hand on my knee. "Do you remember what you said before? That people are wild gifts?"I nod, my hands linking and unlinking, making knots of each other in my lap. If you spend time with me, you'll soon discover that my hands reveal almost as much about my heart as my eyes do, these small windows our bodies offer inside ourselves. I can't help it - the harder I try to hide, bury myself inside sweaters and stiff posture, the more my heart flashes across my face, my hands, my eyes. Our bodies carry messages for us, and tonight, mine whispers, "Yeah, I remember. What about it?""Hil. It isn't that you couldn't. It isn't that you're less, not enough, none of that." I nod, still squirming. "It's just that I know you. And I know that you care. That heart of yours cares even when you don't notice it. But you don't get to keep a wild gift forever."I put my hand on top of her hand. "I know. I know, I do that." She smiles, and through the dark I can see her eyes twinkling back the porch lights. I sigh, put my head on her shoulder. "I just so wanted to give that kind of care and attention. Is that wrong?"She settles into our shared posture, sighing herself. "No, love. It's not wrong. But you said yourself, it isn't what the story holds." She lets those words hang there, between the laughter next door and the cello humming in the house. We sit like that, silent, our eyes on the ocean.People are gifts. Oh, they are difficult gifts. They come with no instructions, all fragile and beautiful and broken. They come alive with questions and possibilities. People change their minds, send a thousand messages, tug at our roots and stretch us.But I hear it again: People are gifts. I sometimes want to hold onto these wonderful, wild gifts. We want to keep things just as they are. We want to write the story so that they always stay just as they are, just as we are, just as it is. I know how to welcome them, but I don't know how to give them back.But if people are gifts, if they arrive in our lives in unexpected ways, and transform us, if they bring us right to the edge of who we are, if they leave us and burn bridges and make promises and seek us... if they are gifts, we must not pretend they belong to us. We must not act as though we know best what they need, who they are, where they should go and what they should do. We must not try to write their stories according to what we wish they'd do.For people are wild gifts from a God with wildly good purposes.And the story belongs to Him.Love,hilary

all loves excelling (on being confirmed)

Jesus, Thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love thou art; visit us with Thy salvation, enter every trembling heart.I love the hymn. The sound swells over His name, and the melody - something called Hyfrydol, trips lightly through the sanctuary, playing with our voices. I love the music, the sweetness in it, the tenderness.But, still. Enter every trembling heart. I know what that means, I think to myself. That means hard.It means forgiving the unkind words.It means keeping my mouth shut when I really want to say exactly what I think about that.It means giving up the things I want to spend an era in a desert, wandering around with no water.I list these to God this Sunday, heaving a pious sigh. Well, alright then. Let's get this over with - I'm getting confirmed after all. I guess the hardship begins now. God laughs. I can feel Him laughing at me and my idea of piety: a long face set towards a hard road, the assumption that if I'm confused and in agony over something, I must be seeking harder, waiting more carefully, discerning with more wisdom. If I look like I am really struggling, I tell myself, people will think I'm really deep.There it is. People will think I'm really deep.In the midst of my confirmation journey, I find myself stuck on this. I want you to think I'm deep. I want you to think that I walk near to Him, that I listen close, that I love with a big wild love. And there are so many foolish things about that. It isn't about what anyone else thinks, first of all. It never is. I can't convince any of you by anything I write or say or do that I love Him - because my love for Him is only really visible when I'm not rushing around trying to prove it to anyone. Love is like that - the harder we try to prove it, the more it slips away, to be made known outside our efforts.But the most foolish (and maybe the funniest) is this: that I thought to be deep, I had to be gut-wrenching. There is depth there. There is depth in the gut-wrenchingly difficult things we face. There is a unique kind of life there, a well of wisdom... But, still. God laughs at my feeble attempts to show off to Him, and to you. Look, look at how hard I'm making this! Look, look! I'm walking the difficult way! God answers me with the words of Elder Prophyrios. In Wounded By Love, he wrote: "There are two paths that lead to God: the hard and debilitating path with fierce assaults against evil and the easy path with love. There are many who chose the hard path and "shed blood in order to receive the Spirit" until they attained great virtue. I find that the shorter and safer route is the path with love."Oh, how I have devoted myself to the hard path, all while the easier path has been at my feet. "That is, you can make a different kind of effort: to study and pray and have as your aim to advance in the love of God and of the Church. Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Open a tiny aperture for light to enter, and the darkness will disappear. The same holds for our passions and our weaknesses."We reach the end of the hymn, and a smile brighter than any I have worn this long week spreads over my face. God keeps laughing, as He offers the easier way: the way of love. Open a tiny aperture for light, and the darkness begins to disappear.I drive home singing. Love,hilary

be alert (I am getting confirmed)

I am in church, halfway through a sermon about Solomon and wisdom. It's a sight to behold, me and my long face, secretly hating being there, tapping my feet against the floor, imagining I am in Italy walking along the corso at night with beautiful flowing hair. In my head, I'm finishing a lemon gelato and watching the stars as I swing hands with an unidentifiable but very handsome man. I am complaining to God that all this is boring, I know it already, and when will church be glamorous again? The man and I ride a tandem bicycle through the streets of Rome. Much more interesting, isn't it?"Get confirmed."What? The day dream dissolves and I'm looking into the face of Christ in the icon of the Mother and Child to the left of the crucifix."Get confirmed."I can't. I can't get confirmed- I am still exploring orthodoxy. I am still only 22! I am still young in faith and I still only really want to be with Jesus some of the time!"Hilary Joan."It's his voice from Italy, his voice from the museum with Botticelli and Mary and the lion's roar of love and desire for me, me, who now sits in church complaining. I go silent. This is not the Italy of the bicycle and the gelato and the swinging hands and the stars. This is the Italy of self given over to God almost without even realizing it, a promise made sitting on a bench in the Uffizzi, heart bursting, the rest of the group scattered through the long hallways. I think the priest is still talking, something about Solomon and wisdom, but all I can hear is his voice."I want you to get confirmed."I start to cry, my resistant self trying to make it a conversation, an argument, my heart already saying yes and knowing that this must be. For how could it be otherwise?It's the next Sunday. I thought about skipping confirmation class. I thought about hiding. Or being sick. Or just not having time. But I slide onto the edge of the chair and whisper a prayer - why am I here again, Lord? and write the date in my notebook.He answers me with the Kenyan Book of Common Prayer: "Will you be alert and watchful, and firmly resist your enemy the devil?"Fr. Brian asks us which will be the hardest promise - the ones about justice and feeding the hungry and preaching Christ to our neighbors and loving others and seeking reconciliation?In a tremulous voice, I say - "That last one - be alert and watchful, and firmly resist your enemy the devil. That one will be hardest for me."Be alert, it says in 1 Peter. Your adversary the devil prowls outside your door like a lion. He waits for us to become lazy, to start daydreaming about mysterious boys on bicycles in Italy, about how boring everything is, about how we have the short end of the stick in almost everything. He waits for us to forget who God is, who we are... He has his own kind of patience, this enemy who prowls like a lion. Suddenly I understand - how this confirmation, this moment of commissioning and prayer, the hands of the bishop on my head with prayers for the Spirit to come upon me?This is the grace to be alert.This is the preparation to keep these big promises.This is asking for a heart to hear the Lord, to watch for Him.So I journey these next four weeks, deeper into the grace of renewed baptismal promises, deeper into prayer for the Holy Spirit's presence, deeper into watchfulness. Perhaps you'll come with me, as I reflect on this new path I'm trembling down?Be alert, I whisper to my heart. Be alert, for He will do marvelous things. Love,Hilary

when you tell your abs you love them

"You're good to me, abs." I pant around the corner of the lane, 4 miles from home. The sun doesn't seem to move across the sky at all, and I run in and out of the shadows of the trees lining the sidewalk. They're gnarled and old, full of stories, branches climbed by eager children. They've shed thousands of leaves in the few seasons I have been alive, and there is a steadiness to them I wish I had. Perhaps they have their own small jealousies, seedlings wishing they could become trees faster, a maple that wants nothing more than to be a cherry tree or a redwood. Perhaps oak trees are jealous of the cool white birches, and some days all trees want to burst into the fiery flames of tiger lilies. But in the midst of the quiet afternoon, I somehow doubt that these steady limbs and leaves long to be something else.But I do. In miles one and two I told my body it should be smaller, easier to carry around, more like a gazelle than a zebra. When I hit mile three, I got quiet for a little bit, but the voice in my head said that all of it would be easier if I just ate less and ran more, that I could solve all the disappointment on this earth if I wasn't a disappointment (that they wouldn't leave if I was something else). And the good girl in me, the one who believes in grace for the rest but not for her, felt the sun on her sweaty neck and said, "if you were more beautiful, Hilary, you'd know more, love more, be more graceful, less impatient... if only you were all those things. You'd even run faster."In these moments I usually resign myself, agree with the voice. After all, she talks so matter-of-factly, so practically. She tells me that I could just stretch my arms a bit father and I would be there, I would make it, I could become all those many things I wish I was. She gives me what I hear as good advice.But on this Sabbath day, I hear my voice creep out of my mouth, right out into the street where those long limbs cast their shadows, where I can hear pool filters running and the squeals of children chasing the late afternoon. "I love you, feet." A strange silence as I hear my words caught by the wind and then gone again. I exhale, push my way up the hill. "I love you, knees and hamstring muscles. I love you, abs. I love you, arms. I love you, I love you, I love you."My voice grows louder, my footsteps clanging on the pavement. This is not the day where I tell my body one more time that it should be better than it is. This is not the day where I ask it to run faster or farther, to go without, to have brighter skin and bluer eyes and curlier hair. This is not the day when I accept that cool, matter-of-fact voice in my head that whispers to push just a little bit more and things would heal."I love you, abs." Now I'm laughing at how ridiculous I must look, all sweat and hair falling out from its bobby-pinned obedience, limbs waving in the breeze and lungs gulping air. "I love you, body."On this day I won't ask it to be anything else. I won't demand the stride of the gazelle. I won't say, "be smaller, be taller, be more beautiful.""I love you."I will feed it those rare, sweet words of satisfaction, and hold it out before the world: one among the many miracles that sing His praise.Love, hilary

oh my stars (the terribly funny day)

I have never felt more like myself than today.It started with the bright pink skirt. When I wonder about beauty and attraction and whether or not I am, will be... all of that, I put on the bright pink skirt. It makes me brave. I wear it proudly to the office, make my early morning splash in all my exuberance. I decided, today's the day I'll work in my new office. Perfect. I scampered up the stairs, settled in, laughed a little as I answered emails from my very own desk...But today is the day they were putting new carpet down in the hallway. And at 10am, just as I'm feeling the coffee wear off, I remember that it's time for a meeting. I rush out of my office... and step straight into carpet glue. Yes, I am serious. I skid, and leap to safety on the other side, just as the guy says, "No! Don't touch the carpet!" Oh no! I'm touching the carpet, I think to myself.And so I try to get back to the other side of the hallway... but you see, my legs aren't long enough to span the space. And so instead my other foot lands in the glue, trips me, and I fall flat on my face into carpet glue. I am not even slightly kidding.I stand up, looking sheepish, and look down. The beautiful bright pink skirt, the symbol of my brave, I-believe-in-beauty-and-life! skirt? Covered in the stickiest glue known to man. The guy runs off for mineral spirits, which I have to mix with water while standing with my skirt on backwards in the ladies' room on the first floor. I was late to the meeting, and I arrived smelling strongly of nasty, poisonous chemicals. I had to wear that skirt backwards to another staff meeting, and halfway through that? I realized that crossing on leg over the other meant that my legs were stuck together. I had to rip them apart in utter embarassment.My brother came to the rescue with a couple different substitute dresses. aha! I thought. Things are looking up.But this afternoon, after scrambling to run an errand during lunch and parking in a forbidden spot on campus, I looked down at my substitute dress number one, and realized... I had spilled a mysterious substance on it. I don't know what it is, but it looked terrible and so in my car, praying nobody could see me, I changed again. Outfit number three had spaghetti straps, and I had lost my cute sweater, so yours truly had to run up the stairs before anyone could see me and question my professional attire. I hid in my office, consoling myself with very quiet country music, attempting to put a fan together, and drinking iced coffee.And you know? I felt like me. I am the girl who trips in high heels, who is about as elegant as a duckling learning to walk, who manages to fall into carpet glue and down stairs at a wedding and into a puddle in public and who walks into a revolving door... I am that girl, who stands in the bathroom bemoaning her fate, wiping her skirt with mineral spirits. Jo March and Anne of Green Gables, and Lizzy Bennet, and all the rest - these heroines are clumsy too, running through fields, their hems in mud, chasing cows or picking wildflowers.Maybe today was a funny showing of grace - that I'll get to be like those girls who I love in more ways than one.And maybe it was about time I had a good laugh at myself (promise me that if you read this, you'll laugh too? Because I really did fall into carpet glue today).Love,hilary