when you can't go back to sleep

I've been waking up every morning at 3am, then again at 5, and then, finally, at 6:20 when I'm supposed to roll out of bed and open the day.But some mornings, I can't go back to sleep. I lie and look at the grey sky - the sun must be rising somewhere, I know, but I can't see it yet - and I stare up at the ceiling. I like to imagine that if I could read it right, my story would be written in neat and beautiful cursive above my head. I want to believe that if I looked for the clues to the mystery of who I am and what I am supposed to do, I could solve it.Solve the not-going-back-to-sleep, I mean, which is solving the I-don't-understand-God, which is solving the what-is-this-life, solving the find-your-place-in-the-world.When I can't go back to sleep I do math equations in my head, add and subtract and subdivide by unknown quantity "n" looking for a way out of the grey. I wrote them on a piece of paper once:Fear and hope about job - (trust in God / WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE) + a boy who must exist in the universe somewhere / messy relationships (people hurt! + people are wonderful!) ^ the power of deep friendship - how do any of us even know what friendship means! + N, unknown = the meaning of life. This problem, I think, should go on the secret mathematician's list of "the world's greatest unsolved problems." They call them the Millenium Prize Problems: P v. NP, Riemann hypothesis, Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness... and then me, with "The Life Problem."On Sunday a girl in our Sunday school asked about the word "mystery" as the teacher presented on the Eucharist. "You mean like Sherlock Holmes?" She asked. The teacher, moving the clay figure of Jesus to the middle of the table, his arms frozen in outstretched blessing over his clay disciples, paused. "Do we solve it?" The little girl asked. I nodded with her, me and my life."Actually, this isn't a mystery that we solve." The girl wasn't buying it, shot the teacher a knowing, I-bet-you-say-this-to-everyone look. I mimicked her. "This is a mystery we wonder about."We wonder about how Jesus in his outstretched embrace loves the world and moves in it. We wonder about our lives and the people we cherish and the people we hurt and the love that moves  freely. We wonder. And perhaps it is better unsolved.

Mysteries, Yesby Mary Oliver from Evidence (Beacon Press)Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelousto be understood.How grass can be nourishing in themouths of the lambs.How rivers and stones are foreverin allegiance with gravitywhile we ourselves dream of rising.How two hands touch and the bonds willnever be broken.How people come, from delight or thescars of damage,to the comfort of a poem.Let me keep my distance, always, from thosewho think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,and bow their heads.

Love,hilary

why love must be wild

I named this blog almost a year ago - the wild love.I imagined that we would, that I would, live that way. I remember finding the name as I sat at work on a Friday afternoon, in the middle of the ending, with only a few weeks left before everything changed. I remember trying it out, running the syllables over my tongue like water. The wild love. It sounded right.When I was born, my dad named me. I've heard the story told a thousand ways, and there is something precious and funny about it. My name, Hilary, means cheerful. My middle name, Joan, comes from John, and it means, God is gracious.When you ask my dad how he came up with this name, he'll tell you that Hilary just seemed right. He'd always loved the name - but it was decided almost like a lightning strike: this was what I was going to be called, and that was it. Joan is for a dear friend of my parents, and because, I think at the time, Hilary Joan sounded just right to them.Hilary Joan. Cheerful, God is gracious.If ever names might help us imagine who we are meant to become...And now, my blog is just shy of a year old, taking its baby steps into the world. There have been a few posts that have made their mark on me, perhaps on you, dear readers. There has been a lot of pondering. There was been a lot of asking God in the midst of this, the hard of 22, how and why things are as they are. There has been hunger, and fulfillment, a confirmation, a wedding. There has been the loud voice of the Holy Spirit across the waters and my own timid replies.But here I am, with this, the space that I have named, and I wanted to ask again - why must love be wild? Because we are a people too desperate to love only inside the conventional, accepted boundaries. We are a people too hungry, too alive, too beautiful, too broken.Love is wild because we are wild. Because we are made in the image of Someone Wild, Someone who sang out for freedom, who defied logic, who broke his Body and poured out his Blood and saved us once and every day.Love is wild because there is a bird sitting inside our ribcage, like Emily Dickinson said, the thing with feathers perched in us, and the only way to hear it sing is to start singing.I'm only just about a year into this blog and I named it something before I could have known how deeply I would want to become the very thing I had named.I want to live with a wild love: a wild love for words, for readers, for strangers who I pass on the sidewalk and dear friends who stay up late on Sunday nights just to make sure I'm okay. I want to live with a wild love that hopes and forgives and says that "no" is sometimes a beautiful word and that "wait" is sometimes a promise and that "why?" is sometimes the answer itself.I'm Hilary Joan - a name with meaning that still feels a little too big for me. And the blog still feels like that some days. But I want to link hands with you across these words, across these miles and time zones and ages, and love wild.Love,hilary

to the girls in my college classrooms

Dear girls who walk along the pathways and hallways at my college,Dear women who fill these walls and ceilings with your ideas and questions,Dear hearts that are so full they feel like bursting,I see you. Right where you are. I catch these glimpses of you on my way to and from the student dining hall. I see you scrunched over papers. I see you holding back tears in tight-lipped smiles to the many people who you pass on your way to chemistry. I see you stray a glance in my direction, see me in all my appearing-put-together-as-a-young-professional, and sigh a little in your shoulders. I see you blink and brush past your day, all worried, always worried that there isn't enough of you, enough of time, enough of effort or fullness or beauty.Right where you are? It's all kinds of hard. Before you tell me that if you only worked harder, if you only sucked it up more, if you only tried to be more cheerful, more in shape, less complaining. Before you tell me you need to get into the Word more, spend more quiet time or homework time or something else, or something else...Before that - it is hard.The hard that it is cannot be measured or calculated, cannot be judged, cannot be lined up next to everyone else and compared. It is all its own, it is aching, and it is raw, and it is real. And some days you forget that it is hard; and some days everything you do is a reminder.If I can tell you anything, as the girl you think is put together, as the person you're not sure even knows what you're talking about -oh love, I just want to wrap you up in a little extra love for yourself today. I want to tell you that the answer is not in trying harder to be better or to be perfect or to fit into the space you worry you don't fit into.The answer isn't in more activities or more to-do lists, more reprimands for yourself, more scolding. The answer isn't in staying up later to finish that paper or study as hard as you think you should study for that test.Can I just give you a hug? Because you, right where you are, right in the middle of the hard, you are wildly lovely and to be cherished. Someone told me the other day that I am intimidating, because it always seems like I have it together. So here are a few confessions, from me, the girl who wants you to believe that she is perfect and the girl who knows she isn't, the girl who deeper down than her perfect, wants you to know she is real:I cry in my office at work when I realize there is a typo in something I just handed in.Some days I drive into work thinking about all the mean things I want to say to people.Sometimes I lie in bed watching Castle or Hart of Dixie instead of reading books that would make me intellectually sophisticated, because I really just want to lie in bed watching TV.I cry in my car after a long run. I avoid mirrors because of the way I'm convinced my stomach looks. I'd rather eat a cupcake and a cheeseburger than a salad. I have gotten into trouble with boys, trouble without boys, trouble about boys. I've done stupid. I've done selfish. More than I admit.I get mad at God. I don't spend all that much time in the Word. I went to church last week and cried the whole way through and didn't sing the hymns and went home and moped around.I haven't got it all together. I'm a mess sitting here writing this to you, but when I see you on campus, with your brightness and your beautiful heart and the way you listen and the way you love, I have to write to you. I have to tell you, dear hearts, that it is okay to be in the hard. It's okay not to know where to go from here.I even think it's okay to sit down right in the middle of it, and whisper, "I have been spent."I'll come sit next to you and give you a hug. And in the middle of it all, where we sit, I think God will come sit down with us. Because He wants to be with the real us. Because He loves the real.Love,hilary 

i go running

It's been almost a year - a long while, a longer journey, when I wrote a letter to my friend Preston about a run I went on. In that post, I wondered about how God is glorious. How God gets right near us, and asks us, "What are you doing here, Hilary?" and how on that particular run I responded, arms flung wide in front of people passing me by, "I'm here for You."It's been a winding road since that blog post, since that run. When I stepped onto the trail yesterday afternoon, I couldn't feel the glory. I willed myself to praise Him - to say thank you for sun and warmth, to sing out next to birds and crickets, to imagine that all the beauty, it is a sign of the brightness. Of the light.But I didn't really want to do it, and so I gave way to a smaller heart and even smaller thoughts. All of this is unfair, you know, God. I don't see your plan for me. What happened to that promise I made you all those months ago?I might have said thank you to God, but I think my heart said a lot more of, but still... I felt, suddenly, how I must be caught in the thicket of my own heart, tangled in its desire, lost in its fear. I felt the way it must look to God: me chasing around after thoughts, trying to follow them to their logical or beautiful conclusion, following plans until they disappear back beyond my horizon line, running in circles hoping that I'd free myself of the confusion and the mess.And His gift to me was a run. A real, physical, sweaty, sun-beaming down on my oh-so-pale skin run. A run behind the woods I've become almost so familiar with I miss how extraordinarily beautiful they are. A run around the ponds, past the water, past the white ducks, past the trembling, tentative green leaves. A run up hills and over tree stumps. A run that asked me to pour out my real physical effort, to strive and challenge, to waste no more breath on thoughts but instead drink in the oxygen for the basic, beautiful purpose of breathing.His gift was that I went on a run. And as I ran, my voice quieted. I didn't have the physical breath to complain... I couldn't tell Him just what I think of this, just what I worry about, just what He hasn't answered and how it's been year and didn't you promise me that if I became yours I would have... and do... and be understood...I went on a run that put real ache in my muscles and real air in my lungs. It made everything physical again, and I heard that it is a gift to have bodies. A gift, to get tired and sweaty. A gift, to be pushing yourself up a long hill breathing in the scent of almost spring, a gift that all we think, all we yearn for, lives inside a body. A body that can run. A body that can carry me when I caught in the thicket of my heart.Yesterday, my body could sing louder praise than my words. Yesterday, it was my muscles and lungs that held onto His promises far more than anything I could think or feel or speak.And His gift was that I went running.Love,hilary 

dear lizzy bennet (on grace)

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

dear hilary: the bass notes

Dear Hilary,I know that my life is littered with problems only a privileged few could complain about. I know that I'm not really complaining about what is worth complaining - and I tell myself as I peel the parsnips and chop onions for some vegetarian thing I am convinced I should eat because it would be good for me, that I shouldn't be feeling so confused and lonely and irritated as I do. But I want to know - I'm hungry to know - what is the point of the sadness? Is it okay to feel sad, even if there isn't a good reason?Love,Peeling the parsnipsDear Peeling,Hey there, hon. Before we go any further down this road, I need to tell you first just a yes. A yes as you chop and peel and worry and scream to loud or soft music or kiss random strangers in a subway car or wish you were kissing them or eat vegetarian or Five Guys burgers. Yes. It is okay to feel what you feel.Permission is not a thing we should seek for our emotions. That's a lie that we've been taught - that we need to ask first before we allow our hearts to keel over with the things they're already carrying. They are what they carry; permission is irrelevant. So you, rich in love or money or college degrees, poor in clarity or money or college degrees, mixed up between them all, you must give yourself more breathing room. Chuck permission - the question of "is it okay to feel..." right out the window.Let's start where you are: you feel sad.You peel the parsnips - a beautiful sounding phrase, love - and you are lonely. And it simply does not matter one bit if I tell you that I am peeling potatoes, another person is chopping lettuce, and three other people are eating ice cream straight from the carton - and that we are all, in our own ways, feeling the pull and dip and gravity of sadness. That we, too, wonder about what is ahead, or what we have just emerged from, or what we are sitting in right now. When you feel loneliness, I do not think that you can comfort yourself out of it. No amount of "solidarity!" or "we're in it with you!" or "buck up it's not that bad!" will help.What will help is to keep peeling the parsnips.What will help is to ask your lonely, your confusion, your unidentified emotions, to pull up a chair as you work. Don't ask them to say everything - just allow them to accompany you in the midst of your daily life. Invite them to sit with you in a coffee shop or gaze at a sunset on your drive home. Ask them to play Switchfoot's "Where I Belong" on repeat. Wander up and down the grocery store aisles with them. They are not against you.They are, instead, the bass notes. In good music, we listen first for the melody - for the soaring notes, for the lingering treble. We pick out the main theme and wait for it as it darts between other notes. We think of the song, and we hum that line.But in most music, love, there are the bass notes. These are sometimes sweet and soft, sometimes insistent, sometimes fiery, sometimes desperate, sometimes lonely. The bass notes hold the melody. They deepen it and give it a new shape.I think that this is what your sadness, the things that you complain about but wish you didn't - is, at its root. It is the bass line of your song. It is deepening work, these nights of peeling parsnips and sitting with loneliness. It makes your melody a fuller story, in a way that nothing else could.That is the miracle of the bass notes: though they go often unnoticed, they do remarkable things. So I urge you - wherever your days take you, remind yourself: some days I will sing the bass notes. Some days I will build the song of my life in the deep and difficult things. Peel the parsnips, and love the bass notes.The song could not be so good without them. Love,hilary

when you catch a glimpse

It's late on a Thursday - the ordinary, almost-but-n0t-quite-the-weekend day - and I'm lying diagonally on my bed, thinking about working out. I don't really want to, if I am honest. I'd much rather lie there, in my outdoor coat and my favorite brown boots, the ones from the store that closed in Union Station two years ago. I don't want to jump around at 10pm to music that I feel like I know too well. I don't want to run on a treadmill going nowhere.I'm moping, and I'm tired, and the lonely hits me deep after the long week. I remember that once I whispered to a dear friend, almost a year ago now, over cocktails at a jazz bar near campus - that I was tired of learning about myself alone. I want to do all that good work of figuring out who we are, who we want to be, together. I don't want to do it alone anymore. And those thoughts dont' seem to be banished by the lump in my throat. They don't disappear by crying - or by yelling, or by praying the same question, of how long, how long, how long O Lord.So I pull on shorts and a ratty T-shirt. I pull on socks. I find the Zumba YouTube video (yes, I am that girl). I click play. I halfheartedly jump up and down to the first song. I stuff my hair into an elastic and hope for the best. My bangs, which are outgrown by at least three months, flop helplessly around until I force them into bobby pinned submission. I'm still half-hearted, still unwilling to say that okay, fine, it's fine to be me, to be in this skin, to be bouncing around with insecurities at 10pm.But a few more songs in, and I can start to catch a rhythm. I can even (barely) see something like flexibility or strength in my muscles. I can feel my body cherish the work - it is something to do, anything, and it is something more concrete than lying on a bed feeling all over the "how long how long how long" question.By the time the video finished, I was ready:this is the moment I play, "22" and "Kiss You" on repeat at 10:40pm and dance around in gym shorts. This is the moment when I choose to laugh with my body. This is the moment when, looking at myself, I catch a glimpse.It's not a perfect picture, oh, but can I tell you what I saw?I saw a heart filled with stories to be poured out on the people who wander across my path.I saw my laughter - how it can fill a room and go before me down a hallway at work.I saw lonely that became lovely, loveable, even something that I cherish.I saw me, ten years from now, remembering "22" and "Kiss You" and chopping red onion and pregnant or not or in Italy or not or married or not or with a PhD or not, still promising God that I wouldn't forget how much He loves the things He made.I saw a glimpse of me, radiant.And I saw us - fierce, independent and free, each following the wild call of love.Because though these weeks are filled with that, "how long, O Lord?" and that, "why not me, Lord?" and that, "but what about, Lord?" - though we might know so little, though we might doubt ourselves, though we might be disappointed and angry and overjoyed and tired and anxious and gracious -I can see our wild love. I can see it in you. I can catch a glimpse of it, gym shorts and all.a love so wild, so fierce, so free - I almost can't bear it. how radiant we are. how transformed. how lovely. 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

to the musicians

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

dear man on the metro

Dear man on the Metro in DC last weekend,I noticed you because of the suit. It was a dangerously well cut suit. And I think you knew it from the way you held yourself, standing up against the rumbling of the car, against the forces and the inertia pulling against the rest of us with our tired arms and suitcases wedged between our knees.I saw you and you saw me. We made the awkward kind of eye contact that you make when you've noticed someone because of their dangerously well cut suit or their unique red-gold hair. We looked away again. We looked back, and then away, and then you leaned in to the very lovely woman sitting to your left and whispered something to her.We didn't make eye contact after that - you made the gesture, the signal, that though perhaps you and I had acknowledged our striking selves, you were with the effortlessly lovely woman to your left.Thank you. Thank you for smiling at her so completely, for your well-polished shoes pointed in her direction. Thank you for laughing just loud enough to tell us that the thing she had said was sweet and you enjoyed it. Thank you for holding her hand oh-so-briefly as we pulled away from Dupont Circle.You see, sir, when I noticed that suit on a Sunday morning on the red line of the metro in my favorite city, when I was lost in the frustration that I was not that lovely woman on your left, my imagination ran away from me. I thought, hey, that guy just looked at me. And a second look, too. I wonder whether he is getting off at Metro Center, or if we're both headed to the airport, and maybe he's headed back... You know what I mean. I thought all the thoughts that a twenty-something in a metro car thinks when she's faced with a second look and her heart is already three months past drained of emotional confidence.But you didn't look again. You instead offered the woman you were with another gesture of your care for her. You told us that there was a story between the two of you, somewhere between her hand in its dark grey glove, and your aviators dangling out of your pocket. Something is alive, you were telling us, and it belongs to the two of you, and whether a girl with curly red-gold hair wonders if you're headed to the airport, or not, whether you are wearing a dangerously well cut suit, or not, you are wholeheartedly somewhere else.Thank you for loving the lovely woman on your left in just the way we all ought to love those people in our lives. Sometimes I think the biggest lessons in love I could learn riding a metro and watching the people who ride it next to me. Because in all the gestures you probably don't even remember making, you wrote your love. You wrote a note to us - as if on a napkin at a restaurant or on the back of an extra customs declaration form just before landing - and that this person, next to you, she was particular and compelling and you were in it.I don't know, sir, stranger, where you fall in the midst of your story with her. I don't know if you two are the novel, or the short story, or even the haiku of love. I don't know if I will see you riding the metro again, someday when we're both in DC again and you will be with her, or someone else, or no one.But I don't need to know the ending of the whole story to appreciate the sentence you just wrote. I just wanted to thank you, that in a moment when I could have sat back on the ugly orange seats, and run away in my imagination with who you could have been, instead, you offered me a glimpse at the kind of real intimacy I hope I someday have.You gave me - and all of us sitting in that metro car on our way to Metro Center or the airport or Arlington National Cemetery - a reminder that love in its best and brightest is often (and maybe always) the simplicity of drawing the other person near to you. Love, real love, is you on the metro not looking back at anyone, but only leaning in closer to her.Thank you, sir, for not looking back.Love,hilary

when 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

it is simpler than you think

That is the funny thing about the mornings you wake up in a cold sweat from the fever that broke in the watches of the night: you lie there, and it is simple. Startlingly clear on the outskirts of your mind, in that just-before-fully-waking feeling, and you remember:You remember all the nights you lay in your bed in your small cramped second floor apartment, crying into your pillow that there was no clarity, no plan, no guidance for what "after college" looked like.You remember fighting God on runs around the pond, fighting the hope and the doubt, fighting the talking about the future and the avoiding of talking about it, and how the sunshine and the dirt and the water gathered by wind was beautiful, but you couldn't pay enough attention to it.You remember how when graduation had reached its sweet tearful conclusion, you took your parents' car, the one you'd learned to drive on, and drove in circles listening to Holocene over, and over, watching Rt. 22 go by your windows, silent and fleeting, and you thought of how much, and how little, you understood about yourself.Your remember how even then you didn't totally believe that God had a good plan for you, and how you crept into bed amid piles of half-packed boxes and selfishly, you tried to insist to yourself that you could make it on your own, that you could find a better plan, or make one.You remember how on July weekend days you ran away from your house into the stickiness along the quieter suburban hills, and God told you to trust Him and you didn't know how.But then, in the watches of the night, in February, in waiting for your fever to break, you also remember: You remember all the mornings you woke up and the sun shone through your window and the birds chirruped to each other a song that you just enjoyed, because it meant only that nature was beautiful and worth it.You remember that He gave you a job at the time and walked you down the path towards it, and blessed you by keeping you closer to Him in the months that followed.You remember that on the long drives and walks and not trusting rants in the woods last year, when at 21 you didn't know if you could believe His plan was a good one, He still kept you in His grace. He still gave you wind gathering water and cool breezes and cupcakes on Sundays. He still gave you the words late on a Thursday night from an unexpected person that you saved and wondered over, about being saved as through a fire, and about the wonder that is His grace.You remember that you still knew all the words to sing with you and your mom on Sunday afternoons.It is simple: all of it because He loves you. It is simple: all of it, because He has a plan to draw you nearer to Him.It is simpler than you think, as the morning wind greets you through the rickety panes of glass: all of it, because of Him.Love,hilary

when we grow up together

Dear younger self,You are not so much younger. You're a fresh nineteen, scurrying back from studying in the student center on a February night. You're wearing a dark green puffer coat that you regretted almost instantly after you bought it because you don't think green is a flattering color and the other girls that winter had sleek black wool coats and chestnut brown Uggs and walked through the world with a poise to rival Grace Kelly (or so you tell yourself).But you're marching back to your room holding onto a hot chocolate and shouldering a bag full of political philosophies and Pascal. Just behind you, two boys are laughing in low voices as they carry a pizza box and hunch forward against the wind. You can hear their voices, and you're wondering what you should do or say if you know them.And then you're staring at the stars.You see, your boots flew out from under you on a patch of black ice and your hot chocolate flew up around you and when you realize what's happening (that you're wiping out in public on a Tuesday evening), it's from the ground, looking up at the night sky.The two guys pass you by. They laugh - you chuckle weakly, try to get to your feet... fall again. They pause to ask you if you "need help."You think, Let me think. I've fallen twice by myself, spilled hot chocolate onto this coat I wish I wasn't wearing, and am sitting in a pile of books, in front of some first floor windows in FULL VIEW of anyone inside or outside, and would like to die. Right now. You say, "I'm good. Thanks."And you creep inside mortified, face flushed like the tulips that mysteriously promise to bloom in spring. You sit on your bed and pull off your wet clothes and throw Pascal and politics onto your bed and barely muster the energy to laugh with your roommate who thinks you're the funniest thing.And as you lie in bed, you cry because today was the day I fell on my butt in that ugly coat in front of people who don't know me but now know me as "that girl who fell on her butt and spilled hot chocolate on her head." Honey bun, three years later, you're going to think of this story as you and your mom shovel the lower driveway free of two feet of snow. You will haul on boots and fleece pants that match hers and rain pants from 1980 and your dad's Patriots hat with earflaps and walk into the white stillness. You will make silly faces into your iPhone camera and work out an elaborate but not wholly efficient system of moving snow. This will involve you standing in a hip-deep drift and scraping snow ONTO yourself so she can shovel a clearing for the cars to get out.You will remember how we cannot always be so hard on ourselves. You will remember that it is our ridiculous moments - girl on fire, digging snow in rain pants from the 80s moments - that draw us further into the world. Because who does not long to be a little ridiculous sometimes? Who doesn't want to make a silly face in the snow drifts?Oh, sweet younger self, I'm so glad you and I grow up together. I'm so glad you fell on the way back to your room three years ago. I'm so glad you teach yourself to laugh at these moments, because I think someday the older Hilary, the one yet to come, she will be wiser because of you and me together. She will have a long letter of memories of snow falls and shoveling, moments of crying in her bed for her awkward duckling self and moments of that self, laughing like this:

(the amazing mandie sodoma)

And it will all be a part of the most beautiful growing up.

Love,hilary

on living water

It was a year ago this day that I wrote about living water. I told you in my college-aged space with my rushing, hopeful words, that I longed for us to carry this living water to each other. I wanted us to bring each other cupped hands filled with that mighty Ezekiel stream. I wanted us to love the people we didn't yet love with a wild and living water.Because, I typed, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my hair wet from the post-run shower, "Every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live."Do you ever think, while you sit next to the strangers on the bus on the way to work, that they hunger and thirst for a wilder love? That as they walk through their day, they might drink an iced tea and write emails and go to spinning class, all the while wistful for something bigger?And you, do you ever do that? Do you ever walk along a street in what feels like the middle of the night, against the silence of stars and flickering stoplights, kicking the sidewalk with your longing? Do you ever find yourself staring out of a window, almost in tears, for no reason other than you don't know what's next but you wish it to be big and brave and wild and beautiful?And do you ever stop in front of your door, frozen to the sidewalk, frozen in all that you think about admitting, but don't want to? All that you would tell that person, or write in a letter, or sing out to the sky if only you believed you could?Oh, me too.Me, too.In this, my twenty-second year, I stand outside my door. I scuff sidewalks alone after a cocktail or a coffee and think about the possibilities that terrify me. In this, my twenty-second year, I cannot leave church without crying hysterically on the strip of road between the initial right turn and the dangerous narrow left. In this, my twenty-second year, I whisper, "counseling" and "writing" and cross them off and rewrite "history" and "provost" and cross them off again and rewrite, "?" and leave it.And now I sit, leaning late into the afternoon - and I hear His command: Hilary, give away My water. Maybe it is that simple. We are weary travelers all, searching for a drink of water. We thirst for the living water flowing from the temple. We look at each other longingly, wondering, where is the drink of water for my weariness?Maybe it is as simple and as difficult as you and me, traveling along the road, offering each other a drink of living water. In quiet prayers in a cold parking lot. In twenty minutes of laughter in our offices. In dinners and drinks and blog posts and daring greatly for each other. In telling you, dear reader, as scared as I am, that I am vulnerable and new to everything and afraid. In telling each other that some days, you just need to drink deep from a well of living water. That's all.Give away my water. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."Love,hilary

when galaxies overwhelm you

They said thank you for outer space. For stars in their many explosive elements, for the chaos of the cosmos. They said thank you, and then asked what the stain was on the table cloth - a white bit of wax from a candle as equally compelling as the rapidly expanding universe.She told me that the we can map things on DNA. That from Shakespeare to binary code to the ATGC of our beings and back, and it's perfect. Someday, maybe, scientists will figure out how to store information inside DNA and synthesize it. More flexible than computer chips, more durable, evolved over the billions of years to be something that lasts.I read that the galaxies are racing apart at rates we can't understand. That equations are the only way we can describe those first few moments of universe ignition, where a hair of difference at a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond holds the potential for life. I read and read, all these stories about how vast it is. I close my computer. Because our bones are calcium carbonate which is what makes shells and the white cliffs of Dover, because we are water and so is the ocean, because we are material, and so is this world, and yet it is a thumbprint among billions of others.When we are overwhelmed by our smallness, we rush to extravagant declarations of our importance. We whisper that we have been singled out as a people. We hug ourselves in the dark and proclaim that we are unique, particular, singular being with singular purpose. We often pray prayers loud and defiant, hoping that our voices will drown out the startling recognition that we do not know the purposes of our God in the other corners of His world. That we do not know why he made a world at once intelligible and elusive, what he is working in the far-flung hiding places in galaxy NGC 6872. It bothers us not to know, doesn't it? It bothers us to imagine that God has mysterious and infinite purposes outside our understanding. What if that means we will not know everything? What if that means we are not the center of the universe?And God laughs at these flares of our temper and continues to delight in His laws and their mysterious, glorious revelations. And the whole heavens declare His glory, while we stare up at them and still wonder if we can chase down the knowledge, outrun God's creativity, gain control for ourselves.But the children are right, aren't they? We should instead say thank you. We should fling prayers of gratitude out from ourselves into this vastness, wing a prayer in praise of NGC 6872 and all that we cannot know about it.  Because in the moments we doubt our significance we must be caught up in Him who made all things, and all things good.When galaxies overwhelm you, give thanks. Because He is that infinitely creative. Because He is that beautiful, that real, that present. Stand under His sky. Sing out with all your being. Echo all the wonder you hear.Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? And echo back the wonder.Love,hilary

the photograph of my mother

I stole a picture from my parent's mantelpiece in August. It's a rough, 4x6 kind of frame, bent at corners from years of being flung into a suitcase or a box, dust glued to its glass. The back stand of the frame is bent, so it can never stand by itself, solitary against the clean white of a wall or the cherry wood coffee tables of the houses I cut out pictures of in my spare time.I stole it at first because I wanted to fill my office with the evidence that I belonged to something. I wanted picture frames, books on shelves, cute mismatched lamps, a bulletin board with postcards of Van Gogh paintings. I told myself that the old frames would give it a classic, unstudied elegance. I put tea on my shelf and all the mementos of a life still at the beginning: books from my law and ethics class sophomore year next to granola for the days I forget to pack my lunch, glossy prints of faculty art exhibits, my diploma sandwiched between Thirst by Mary Oliver and a bag of Port City Java coffee. I put this picture on my desk next to the larger, shinier one of me hugging my dad at graduation. I almost forgot it.One day when I reached for the phone I knocked it over. It made a sweet, quiet clink onto my desk, a polite cry of dismay. And when I went to pick it up again, I looked at it.And I saw my mother.In this photo she is standing outside in the garden in England, the climbing roses flushed with early spring. The windows behind her are cracked open a bit, to let in the smell of wet, renewed earth - a smell that my dad has always said is in our blood, is good for us. Her arms are folded against her chest in a cable sweater and a pink checked shirt peeks out near her throat.It is the softness that startles me - my mother smiling in such gentle delight, her head tilted and leaning forward, her eyes laughing, but looking through you. She can see me in this picture, even though she doesn't know my name. She can see all the years unfolding between her and Dad, and her gaze has a bigger love than the beginning love of romance. It is mother love and friend love; the love of God and her three year old students in Sunday School. It is the love the house we make as home. It is on your knees love, doing the dishes again love, walking the dog with her twenty-two year old on a Sunday afternoon.There, on my desk, between roses and white windows, between the phone that doesn't ring and a graduation hug, is my mother.The woman I am searching to be already in front of me, smiling at the me that does not yet exist, with a smile that the winery owner will tell me on a Saturday night unites us."I knew right away who you were," he will say, leading me over to where my mom and our guests are sampling reds. "You're the spitting image of your mother."And you will smile, realizing for the first time, that is the biggest compliment someone could pay you.Love,hilary

He made you this promise

Feet shuffle quietly in the pews around me as I walk towards the lectern. I can feel my the soles of my feet touching the carpet through my thin shoes, and as I walk, I suddenly pray, desperate: O Lord don't let me mess this up. This is Your word. Please don't let me mess up. I'm reading for Lessons and Carols, a service where we journey through the story of God's redemptive love in nine Scripture readings and choir music and old hymns. It's the kind of service where you want to leave your mouth hanging open, that God teaches us His story through words, and music, through sound and light and air waves moving back and forth. And somehow, He's given us the chance to tell each other the story again. He's letting His Word go forth from human hands and human mouths and human minds. Because He loves what He has made. Because He became incarnate to live among us. Because He, too, was a human who wrote and thought and spoke.My passage is Isaiah 11. The peace that Christ will bring is foreshown. I stand at the lectern, look at the page, look up at the faces twinkling from the candles lining the aisles.I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and suddenly, I hear His reminder: I make these promises to all my people. You, tonight, are my people. You, tonight, are the messenger for this promise. Won't you tell these bright faces what I have promised them? I begin to read. I feel my voice grow inside my chest as I hear the words echo around and around the wide sanctuary. The candles dance on the altar. Someone opens the back door and I feel the rush of winter wind on my face. And I am struck by this sudden richness, this service of festival and prayer, this journeying even again to Bethlehem at the beginning of Epiphany, the feast of light, to meet the Light.His promises are to all His people. To His people who heard the words of the prophet crying in the wilderness and on the streets and in the temple. To His people in the pew in front of me, with their blue and tan coats and weary faces. To His people who have been scattered across the globe - in poverty and fear, in hunger and thirst, in injustice, in need. To His people who have been grieving. To His people who have lonely hearts. To His people who I know and don't know, who I see every morning in Starbucks but never recognize, and to His people who I have yet to know.These promises I read tonight - these are the light He shines on our path as we journey towards Him. These promises, that one day no one shall kill or destroy on all His holy mountain, that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the seas:these are for you.He made this promise for you, in this singular, remarkable, irreplaceable way.This is what I hear as I tremble back towards my parents in our pew. This is what I hear as we bend knees and hearts.He made you this promise.Isn't it miraculous, that a love so vast as to cover the earth with the knowledge of the Lord, is also the love that makes you promises of peace and life everlasting?I cry a little on the long drive home. For the bright faces, and the brighter promise.Love,hilary 

the day of the blue moon socks

If you ever wondered what it's like to walk around inside my shoes on a typical day?You go to work in the morning, bleary eyed because you don't get coffee until 7:37 at your Starbucks, the one whose baristas know your name and give you extra tea bags and honey when you're sick and sneezing all over their counter and who sometimes slip an extra shot into your morning latte.You arrive at work, do your thing. A few times during the day you'll put your head in your hands and wonder, why am I doing this? Is this even the place I am supposed to be? You'll eat 7 crackers from the whole gran TLC cracker box, then 7 more, then worry for a few seconds about whether that was the right portion size because it's still January and you might want to make this year the year of food awareness or eating right or something... then you'll forget, and eat another 10 crackers while you type furiously because typing fast makes you feel more productive.You'll drive home. You'll pray out loud as you go, rambling prayers, prayers of woods and left turns where you almost forget to put your blinker on. You'll pray that God explain Himself and His plans. You'll pray to see yourself more truthfully, see others more graciously, see God more clearly. You'll pray some things that go deep into your heart and rest there and others that you forget just as you drive through the intersection before your intersection when you're distracted wondering what Dad is making for dinner.You'll work out to Zumba by yourself in your room on the second floor and occasionally wonder if the floorboards might give under your enthusiasm for "Bollywood style" dance routines. You will wear ballet slippers you got sophomore year of college for the ballet class you took. You'll wear these with socks because the toes on each slipper have worn almost through. You'll have your hair in a sweaty bun and you won't really care that you are shaking all your bedroom furniture to music you wouldn't listen to with your grandmother because no one can see you.And then, oh, and then: then you will walk into the grocery store wearing yoga shorts, red TOMS with "Blue Moon" logo socks, a long wool coat, and a T-shirt. I am not kidding. You'll look down in the vegetable aisle and realize this, realize that your coat length plus shorts plus beer factory souvenir socks your mom bought for you when she visited said factory plus hair in its messy bun = disaster.There you are.There, indeed, I was. Not only did I wear that outfit into a public place, but I proceeded to walk around the grocery store holding, now wait for it:grapefruits, iced tea, toothpaste, granola bars , razorsThis assortment of items practically screamed, "LOOK! LOOK! I'm a twenty something! I live at home! I have no clue what my life holds! I cry in my car sometimes to country music radio!"I thought, this can't get any better. Here I am wearing beer logo socks and yoga shorts, lugging around a bag of grapefruits and new razors, looking for my mother...When of course, it does get better.The cute guy from Driver's Ed several years ago, the one who used to (I think, kind of) flirt with me on occasion under the guise of making fun of me? The one who I proceeded to see whenever I went to the local ice cream store or CVS? Oh yes, friends.He works at this grocery store. He works, in fact, directly in front of the Greek yogurts that I was furtively trying to stash under my chin until I could wobble towards the checkout because I hadn't thought to get a basket or a cart.There was that pause. The, "Oh, CRAP." pause. The pause of does-he-see-me-where-is-the-exit-shoot-he-saw-me-too-late pause. I smiled. He smiled. I moved my hand away from the Chobani yogurt. He took in my outfit, my arms full of groceries, said a vague "hey, good to see you," and went back to unpacking boxes.There are these days. These days of blue moon socks and counting TLC crackers in your office. These days of not enough pretty words shared or said to you and by you, and these days of yoga shorts and old ballet slippers and Zumba in your room to a YouTube video and buying grapefruits. Wearing TOMS. With socks. With a long coat and shorts. And the cute guy looking you up and down like he has never seen anything like it (probably true).And you know what? I love these days. They're what make us real. They're what make us gracious, graceful. They're what make us loveable.Love,hilary

when I remember Canada

We crossed the border thirty-odd times on that trip. I know because we counted - that was part of our work, part of our questioning - and because of the hours I remember we sat bored in the van thinking about how long our customs conversation would be. It was a trip about borders, Jim told us, a trip about the liminal space between, this funny line that creates two nations instead of one wilderness. At the time, I had signed up for the trip because I was a bird on the wing, anxious to feel the air against my face. I wanted movement, change, a stepping outside myself. I also loved traveling with Jim and all of his rituals. I loved how we sat next to different people in the van every day, waited to eat until we all had our food at a restaurant, stopped to sketch and write, shared our journals, saved ticket stubs and matchbooks and rarely took pictures, but always talked to strangers.We started in the upper reaches of Vermont that June, while the mosquitos, early in their hatching, kissed our bare knees and skinny arms. One of the girls on the trip wanted us to insist on doing ab workouts every night. She would time us, thirty seconds on each side, in planks and crunches, in strange contortions of high school bodies already too worried about the wrong things. I collapsed every night we did this, exhausted with the fear that they'd figure out that I wasn't really an athlete.We drove through towns built with that invisible line drawn through the houses, along the streets - half in Canada, half in the US - and took a long ferry out to Campobello Island, owned by both countries. We walked along the beach for hours, picking up trash and scuffing our sandals against bits of driftwood. I caught a piece of seaweed on my shoe, and the sky rippled grey and it started to rain. We sat on benches to eat homemade sandwiches, ham and mustard on stale wheat bread, apples. I drank water out of the Gatorade bottle I had saved for the whole length of the trip, because we were supposed to bring water bottles with us and I didn't have a Nalgene.I remember lying in a dark basement bedroom in a home in New Brunswick one night. We were staying with someone who knew someone who knew Jim, the threads of kindness stretching tight over miles and friendships. The older couple we were with spoke French, and I tried mine on them, feeble though it was, making the noises with my mouth, the Parisian "r" perfected but not understood in their simpler Canadian lilt. I felt foolish, trying to sound French in their sweet yellow and green kitchen, as they fed us blueberry muffins and asked us about our hopes and dreams after high school. They didn't need impressing, only to hear the echo of their kindness coming back in our "bonne nuit" and "merci beaucoup, beaucoup." I lay in bed, looking at a small framed picture of the sweet faced Jesus with lambs and children. I looked at the outline of the girl lying in the bed next to mine, asleep in the strange room, and never before have I felt so sure that the lines between strangers and friends is line, dissolving ever andWhen I remember Canada, I hear myself reading Robert Frost's poem to the sweaty sun-kissed faces of my classmates who had not traveled, who had spent their time planting seeds and bike riding to Boston and sculpting or sewing or glass-blowing or putting on a play in three weeks.Something there is that does not love a wall,that wants it down. I hear myself and those words and think - what walls do we carry with us as we go, dear Frost? Where are those invisible lines between the country of our selves, between you and me, between all that we wonder about and all the questions it would take to learn it?Something there is in me, those long days and nights journeying between those countries, asking strangers and friends about border culture, eating sandy sandwiches and listening to Citizen Cope's "Son's Gonna Rise" on repeat, in the becoming of ten high schoolers, in the traveling and the return, that ceased to love a wall.Something there is in me that wonders, even now,must we have such walls?Love,hilary

to the moms

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