where are you speaking

"It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation." - George SteinerDear God,Pause. So, God.Pause, again, take more time, roll the name off your tongue, honeyed and sweet but sharp and knifing its way through the air. God.Pause. This is how I pray. I lose the words as quickly as they come, and for me, the word-smith, the hammerer of syllables, who watches words like owls at dusk, eyeing the next feast, the next shadow spilling over the ground. This is how I pray, stops and pauses, distracted by the name God, by the question of if I pray too much with "He" or "Father" because I'm listening too much to the sound of my own voice than I am to the silence where God speaks and sings. I pause and hear myself, preen my feathers in the righteousness of a bright sadness of Lent, which is a phrase from Alexander Schmemann in a book that I haven't been reading but said I would read this Lent, a fact I haven't told God in the midst of my pleased-self-reflection as I pray.God does not monologue; where did I learn it?In the hazy heat of the summers I stayed home and ran through my sprinklers, forgetting the provisions of the creation? In the midst of the chaos of the weeks that roll through my several synced calendars? Where did I learn the prayers of run-on sentences that begin and end with me and all the words are blurred not like poetry but like the overachieving grasp at something good to say to God breathless and always trying to beat my self at my own sense of piety?God does not monologue. Pause, the phrase on the page, alone, before these italicized words are added.  God.Where are you speaking?Because God does not monologue, I can use the second person, the "you" that in French has taught me formal and informal, friendship and lover and austere other, in those three letters looping through the prayer. Another pause, I've been writing and writing but the truth is I don't know anything more about prayer after writing this, even these very words I crave and love. If God does not monologue, God must want us to talk with him. He must like conversations, even the ones like this, the ones that are me pausing and asking myself if I know how to pray, the ones admitting, God, I don't know how to pray and I'm talking and talking and writing and the words have lost me.Where are you speaking, O God my God?I will claim you in the second person, human being to Creator.Where are you speaking, God?I will talk back to you, this intuition of what you must desire and ask of us, in the depths of the silence that is your speech.And I will fall silent too, to un-learn my monologues.Amen. Love,hilary

you are already alive

I tell her this as she sits in my office, my feet tucked up under me, a habit of mine that is designed for stillness but really just makes me fidget more, an unwelcome thing when I am trying to listen. I tell her how this past weekend, in between a flying back and forth and the worry that sat with me on the couch those mornings, my Bible open, my heart sounding a gong in my bones.I tell the story like it is something I came up with on the fly but the truth is I've been out there looking for it for years, this answer that finally comes to me, a gong to beat next to my heart, in time with it: you are already alive. You are already alive. You do not become alive when you get into grad school or when you get married. You do not become alive when you finally leave your hometown or when you make your way nervously forward to accept the Oscar or the Nobel Prize or the third grade spelling bee ribbon. You do not become alive at the next brush of hands or the next on your knees powerful prayer and you do not become alive at some distant moment in the future when the dishes are washed and the kids washed and the house washed with the light of some unattainable perfect.You are already alive.And me, too. I am alive, too. I am alive in the aching wondering unanswered. I am alive in the before vows, in the twist of the ring around my finger waiting in line at security, and I was alive before that, too. How gloriously alive was I, that last month of college when I named this space the wild love and when I sat in a bar and felt that I might be beautiful, those jeans and all? How gloriously alive was I driving home that night in the aftermath of it, listening to Bon Iver on repeat? How gloriously alive, in the still chapel reading me last May or the loud bright weddings where I watched love bloom or the times I sat here scribbling and asked God when my life would really begin?I am already alive. Not tomorrow, not when the email finally comes, not when there is something better I've earned or won or by luck or by work or by begging I have that I didn't have before. Not even the beautiful things, poems in crumpled pockets or sunlight after the longest winter or a move or a marriage or a child or a friend or a promotion. They do not make me alive, because I am already alive, and this life, this life is already moving, already a river is running through it, and the invitation is echoing across me, skin to bones to muscles in their gentleness:will you be already alive?This is the answer God gives me to the question I can't remember asking, or perhaps there doesn't always have to be a question for God to still give an answer.Hilary, be already alive.

advent 4 (how to delight)

The lights dim just as the couple and their two boys, bedecked in Fair Isle sweaters and tiny yellow rimmed glasses, settled next to us. The boys can't be over four or five years old, and they beam out their excitement when the first tiny dancers, the street urchins, appear onstage. The costumes are new this year, the set is new, the people, perhaps, are new too. Somehow, in this matinée theater, we are all being made new, made children again by this familiar music.I love the ballet for a thousand reasons. I love the delicacy and the strength it requires. I love how joy is captured in movement, but perhaps it is a gift of joy as much as the joy for the dancer, the knowledge that the audience behind the lights is receiving something from the watching. I love the way that the story is ours to imagine with the music, with those onstage. I love the way this story in particular is about so much and yet is so simple. I love how ballet reminds me about the truth of balance:everything pulling in the right direction, tension that produces harmony unlike any other, a stillness that, underneath, is held by tremendous strengthand how to desire it.And in this matinée, the day before the final Sunday in Advent, when the word is joy, when Christ is near to us, when we are anxious with the anticipation of what will come, I sit with  my mother and celebrate what it means to be childlike in our unabashed delight: the costumes, the Arabian section of the second act, the costumes, the Snow Queen and King, the Sugar Plum Fairy. We lean forward in our seats, marveling, and the boys next to us, our faces are mirrors of each other. We wonder what it would be like to be at the Boston Ballet School. We lose ourselves in the setting and the thousand pairs of shoes that the dancers go through each performance. We almost float out of the theater, humming and singing the melodies, now well-worn in our minds, but somehow, again, new.And isn't this the promise and work of Advent? That we must be ever more familiar with the coming of Jesus, and yet be as delighted as the first time we heard such news? We must learn the rhythms of a life lived before the Lord, and yet we must discover that such a life will make us as free to wonder and delight as the first time we ever hear God say, "I know you."And so I dance my way out of the Opera House, marveling at the ballet, making my posture straighter to mirror those dancers, moving a bit lighter on my feet all the way back to the car, and next to me, my mother does the same.What is truly good and beautiful must always make us new.Love,hilary

when I learn something about valor

Eshet chayil - woman of valor.I turn the question over this morning on my way through the frosted trees. The sun is slow to rise this morning, unruly, as if it, too, is tired after the snowfall last night. I sip the gingerbread latte - my nod to the season, to the red Starbucks cups, to the closeness of Christmas. I don't know why I'm wondering about this phrase in particular - woman of valor - but I know about it from the women that start to come to mind - Nish, and Sarah, Lisa-Jo, and Rachel, Ann, Antonia, Elora - and then I realize I know them from across my life, not just across the threads of connection, electricity firing across miles to bring our words to each other.I know them in my mother, wisdom spilling out as she leans back across the end of my bed and reminds me of the way that we are meant to trust God. I know them in my sister, who texts me to remind me she is here and loves me, who raises her son with such patience and grace that I am sometimes speechless at it. I know it in the women who have colored and changed my life by their knowing me - from breakfasts sophomore year to Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping at the Pentagon City Mall to a walk in the woods and tea on her couch to hours of talk about racial reconciliation and education and what it must mean to love God and to believe that we are to know Jesus by what we do with our hands.And I could not stop thinking about it, the words sounding over and over again in my head. Eshet chayil - woman of valor.How do you become a woman of valor? How do you become the fiercer truth-teller, the wiser grace-giver, the woman who spills out light wherever you walk because you cannot help but do that?Because she is brave, this woman of valor. She will wear red lipstick on a too-early morning and put on a blue puffer coat to shovel the walk. She will stand in front of the room and teach. She will preach the truth over coffee or wine, across the sale racks at the consignment shop or in her office with mugs of tea in front of you and rain outside. She will strike out on her own to chase down a dream in New York, in California. She will sing Sara Bareilles in the car and pull up next to a man in a large truck, who will stare at her and laugh, and she will be unashamed. She is brave. She takes the time with you, again and again, to work out the trembling bits, to ask every question or none at all, and she reminds you that there is nothing for it but to live deep and wide and full, wherever you are. She is unafraid of the truth and unafraid to chase it down, across the mountains and rivers, in the hardest moments, in the lightest ones.I know so many women of valor, I realize. I wonder if they know that they are. I wonder if they know, sitting at the table in Panera or drinking tea in my office or driving in my car on our way back from coffee. I wonder if they know, who have taught me the way grace feels and moves in a life, have taught me that being brave is worth it, in their questions and their laughter and the way they love.I pull my car into the parking space, cut the engine, let the song finish playing from the speakers. I wonder if becoming a woman of valor has something to do with hope, with singing along with Sara and reading the good words of the women who have taught me what valor looks like.Maybe I can begin in the hope to be more like them. To learn the shape of their kindness, their graciousness, their fierce love of the truth. Their courage.I  begin in the smaller prayer, just as I walk up the steps to begin my day. Lord, might you make me a woman of valor?Love,hilary

be taken care of

A few years ago, I fainted in an airport (I think I've told you all that story). I was afraid and in Cincinnati and away from my parents and a fresh almost 18, thinking I could be on my own. The first moment of panicked "what's wrong with me?" when I came to on the cool airport tiled floor was enough to convince me that I never wanted to feel so helpless again. I wanted to be able to sit up, drink water, get back on the plane and go home, without the soothing voices of the medics or the reassuring hand in the ambulance or any of the rest of it.But of course a few short years later, and I regain consciousness on the floor in the sacristy, the room where we gathered before the service, and I realize that once again, I'm panicking. I don't feel like I can breathe because I don't remember what happened, and the suddenness of losing control makes me feel like I am made of paper and might fold up, an origami crane, and fall down. I am surrounded by people and they offer orange juice, some says bring her a muffin or something to eat. They tell me to breathe, to inhale and exhale and follow a flashlight with my eyes and I'm scared, and my paper crane self wants to crumple at the sight of these people, care cradled in their hands, offering me the chance to need, to be taken care of.I am in the hospital bed in hallway 43, they take blood to run tests, they run an ECG/EKG (apparently the k is from the Greek kardia, meaning, heart, but that's a google search on a Monday night). I wonder, disconnected from the world, where home is. I think of my fiancé and the miles that still stretch between us and how there is a part of my heart that is never quite whole without him. I wonder about that picture of my heart's electricity.I wonder if it tells the story of how I've been trying to do this self-sufficient, emotions-in-their-alphabetical-non-offending-box thing for a while. I wonder if it shows how much of my heartbeat is caught up worrying that I'm not quite there yet, not spiritually or emotionally there, so much still in process like the scared crying almost 18 year old I was back in the Cincinnati airport. I've so wanted to be brave and strong and able to bear cheerfully what I've been given and not complain and not need...But then I think, would it be so wrong, to have my heartbeat whisper that I need taking care of, too? Would it be so wrong to lie in this hallway, waiting for blood test results and a saline drip to run its course, eating chicken salad out of a plastic carton while my brother, wise and steady man, makes me laugh quietly at the edge of the bed?Would it be so wrong to want to be taken care of, to want my fiancé's hand on my forehead and the marching orders to get back in bed, the call to check in and make sure that heart is okay? Would it be wrong to admit how much I need that?I faint in church on a Sunday morning, and they take a picture of my heart.For the first time, I hope it says how much I need.Love,hilary

when my mind wanders

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

fragments of glory

I tell him that it is like this: when you write, when you create, you carve out of the ordinary a sculpture, a story of the beauty of God, a story of the beauty of your own being that moves and shifts and desire and builds. We are meaning-seekers.You carve out with pen to paper, and fragments fall around you, dust swirls through the air. You don't always notice, how the pieces fall to the floor near your feet, because you are seeking and carving the big story, because you want to know the wildest version of it - the biggest vision, the brightest horizon.But I want to know the fragments.The fragments are glorious - the stories of the one afternoon of insignificance, where you ran along the same path you always run along, but perhaps, for a moment, you thought about how nature teaches you to sing of God. The stories of the coffee where you were ten minutes late and she forgave you, with the fullness that astounded you as you slid apologetically into the chair, as you listened to her, and as you realized that perhaps forgiveness is simple like bread, like manna, daily, quiet, and good.The fragments are glorious - the days driving along the highway alone, the seemingly unimportant and anonymous stories of how you sat in the library writing a paper for yet another class you don't totally understand the meaning of, the yet-again of school meetings and parent-teacher conferences and board rooms and emails.I tell him, that's what is beautiful about blogging, isn't it? That in the spaces we create online, we don't have to always seek a sculpture of the most beautiful, biggest story? That sometimes, we can pour out the fragments of our lives, watch them spill over the edges of the table, and see -they are fullness of glory. I used to want to quit blogging every other day, stepping half-in and half-out, convinced that without a big story how could I possibly be considered a writer. I spent so much time at the foot of my bed with this thought, that I didn't have a sculpture, a grand weaving together of things, a purpose in my words or in my tiny online home.But then it is years later, and somehow I have still promised that I would do this thing that I hardly know how to do, that I would still write, and I am sitting on Skype with him and feeling the ache of those miles, and I wonder, out loud, about the fragments of story that so often fall to our feet. I tell him that this is his gift - that he weaves back the fragment bits and reminds us of the glory that lies in them. That this is what he teaches me to do.And perhaps that is the beauty of these online spaces, that they are wide and broad and wild enough to show the light of our everyday, to reveal that our fragments are glorious.Light shines through fractured windows, doesn't it?Maybe these are all fractured windows with the fragments of our glorious, every day living.Maybe that's what makes them so beautiful.Love,hilary

the airport

I was scared out of my mind in the ten minutes before I met you in that airport. I paced in and out of one of those news stands that sells magazines I know I shouldn't buy but almost always do when I'm in airports on my way somewhere, that sells packages of peanut M&Ms and gum. Once I bought a pair of headphones for way too much money because I couldn't imagine flying all the way to Baltimore and then taking the train to DC without a soundtrack (I almost always imagine my life to a soundtrack, as if somewhere someone wants to capture scenes of me with my head against a train window listening to The Civil Wars). I paced in and out of it, over and over, running one hand over my shoulders in that gesture of comfort you've now seen a half dozen times and through my hair, which wouldn't be tamed no matter what I did, thinking about what I would do? The possibility of you, walking toward me in that airport terminal, the possibility of really seeing you...  I was so scared and so excited, and I paced in between packages of peanut M&Ms and People hoping that I'd figure out how to hide from you that my heart was beating a thousand times a minute, because I'd been waiting. And if I had known it, I'd have played "Dust to Dust" on repeat as I waited.Sometimes I think we're afraid of the beautiful.The airport is this place I'd always imagined I'd meet you. In between a few of the times I imagined flying to Scotland in March or driving to Texas (I imagined sitting in my car outside your driveway and just hoping you'd be curious who I was, that you'd walk outside barefoot or your garage door would be open and I would walk in, halfway, and you'd be there painting) - I've always kind of hoped it would be the airport. It carries the ache of leaving and the joy of arriving, the familiar and the new. Somehow, in the long hallways and the too-bright lights, in the incessant announcements of delays and baggage claim carousel numbers, that's where I always find myself again. It is the place where I cried about my sister getting married while eating a bagel from Dunkin' Donuts. It is where I first left home - flying on Air France as an awkward and gangly 9th grader. It is where I first came home - England and Boston, oh, how I remember sobbing my way home from DC in the Baltimore airport at 6am realizing that I left, no certainty, no promise of return to that place.The airport is where I meet that beautiful I am afraid of.That beautiful is living in the carry-on bags courtesy of Virgin Atlantic they used to make for us with crayons and coloring books of airplanes who had friendly faces, in eating too many Twizzlers looking at a bridal magazine in a Houston terminal. The beautiful is in how I pace waiting for you in the basement baggage claim, how I check my phone so often, how I played Horse Feathers in July and country in August, how I used to fly to DC on a whim because something in me was aching for friends and cupcakes and the memory of me, there, and how I would come home, confused and remade.The beautiful is here. Isn't that the point of this long winding post? That the beautiful is arriving, is closer than we think?That first time I found you running with my phone half out of my hand and losing track of the people I ran into on the way, searching for you in the crowds of late afternoon tourists and umbrellas, that was the beautiful.And now, I anchor myself to it again - the beautiful is close to us. Love,hilary

you free my heart, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,We're sitting in a Starbucks together, alternating putting our hands to our faces in excitement or frustration, as we try to shape our words just so, keep them honest and true, write theses and personal statements, work out this life in the way we have for so long - in the syllables sounded out silently by the reader, heard again and always for the first time.Your last letter to me. Can I say any more - but we both know it was something wondrous and I'll leave it at that.But your being is a better letter to me, always was and is - the way you look at people when you think I can't see you, when you smile at them gently, when you rage in the car about all the things but you soften, always, and you remember out loud for us both that there is good and we are to seek it.You're a seeing, and a seeking, man.You teach me. When you write to me, and I smile at you and we lock eyes over the screens and the white noise of this Starbucks, you ask me what it is, and I shake my head, and I tilt it just so and take a sip of my coffee and you return to your words, and me to this letter, and I know that you know I am still smiling over you - it's that you're teaching me something about the best story that we've been told that makes me want to tell it better. The way you tell our love story is the way we should all be telling His - fearless and free.You're a seeking, and a seeing, man.When I was in France the last time, just before senior year of high school, we had this one day at the musée Rodin, my favorite museum in Paris. We had a picnic, I think (there is a picture of us all in the grass, me in this grey and white striped shirt with sunglasses perched awkwardly on my head) before we spent time in front of the Bourgeois de Calais and were sent into the museum to draw. There is this sculpture there, The Kiss, and I remember walking by it, over and over, too afraid to stop in front of it for too long, because there was love deep and wild and true, there was love alive in the stone, as if Rodin had freed something, his creating work a work of revelation more than conjuring. Sharna drew it - she was always good at art - but I was too afraid to put my pencil to the paper. I drew instead a sculpture in the same room, called the Hand of God, and my shading was, as it always is, not true to life, and my pencil wobbled and so it's mangled on the page. I wasn't brave enough to draw The Kiss, to be near that kind of love (because it's there, alive, a gesture I think, towards the wildest love of all) but I longed to be Sharna that day, sitting at the feet of that moment writing it over and over as my pencil traced along a moleskin journal page.I've thought about that afternoon a lot in the space here, where we are together. I think if I were to find myself there, I would be brave enough to draw it. I would sit down at the feet of that sculpture, look at how the two lovers grow up from the stone itself. I would let my pencil hit the page and tilt, scratch the shadows and lines in the way I learned but never mastered, because though I will never draw like Sharna did, you free my heart to be in the midst of love like that. You free my heart to see it and to seek it.You're a seeking and a seeing man, and you're freeing me to see, and to seek, those things which years ago in a museum in Paris I learned I wanted, and was afraid to know."Mais cette transposition de ma restitus ne fait rien à mon amour car je t’aime à minuit comme à midi ; les heures, les jours, les mois, les années glissent sur lui sans le ralentir ni l’amoindrir. Au contraire, chaque minute qui s’écoule est un siècle d’amour de plus pour l’éternité, c’est ainsi que mon cœur thésaurise depuis le premier moment où il t’a aimé." - Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, 1 décembre 1860.Love, always,hilary

poetry is wonder (a guest post)

Hi y'all!You know something I love (while I'm sitting here in Waco, TX, with that guy who makes my heart stop)? Getting to hang out and share some words over at Hannah's space. I love her loud, wondering and curious heart - and it's a joy to share at her blog. I even got to write about poetry, and wonder, and tell a few stories. I'd so love for you to head over and check it out here.

In a night of soft rain, she lies on her bed, angled just so her feet dangle off one edge while her head rests on the lopsided pillows. She feels her stomach rise and fall with the work of breathing, the letter still resting in her hand. She wills gravity to bring it back to the floor, but it stays nestled in her fingers. She won’t let it go, because in it is the truth, the kind of truth that once you read it sears itself onto your skin, an endless repetition. So she holds the letter and she closes her eyes. There is no music playing, not fitting soundtrack, just the night of soft rain and the rise and fall of breathing.

Keep reading with me, over here?

Love,

hilary

the world rights itself, a letter to preston

Dear Preston, I started this letter as a blog post a couple of weeks ago, thinking I'd be able to somehow manage to make it work, say what I want it to say. But you got on a plane yesterday and my words keep tangling themselves up in the ache of leaving. So I'm just going to let my mind wander next to yours for a while, okay?"I feel weird, God." I crack open the prayer, feet finding their stride. Three minutes later there is a line of sweat down my spine, the sun has climbed high in the afternoon and I am nowhere closer to knowing what to say. "I feel out of place, standing here, wanting to be in the story that is not mine, wanting to be a part of things, always, a part of the center of things. What's wrong, Lord? Why can't I pray?"I kick at the ground and achieve a magnificent spray of gravel.When I was in England a few years ago, I remember suddenly, I walked across long empty fields in the afternoons. I have never quite understood what it was I kept looking for in the silences - perhaps it was simply the feeling of not being alone with my small muddied boots and big troubled heart. Or perhaps it was a feeling of trust again, that the world, so terrible and so beautiful, was not against us. I walked and walked, preaching myself a sermon for Palm Sunday about how deeply human the story is - how we can each, in every moment, shift our posture to Pilate, to Peter, to Mary. (I know I told you this story, on Skype, but bear with me) I don't know how to bear the distance other than to keep praying that somehow the field years ago in England is not so far away from the field where you were sophomore year of college in a late afternoon when you weren't sure what you were becoming or how. I don't know how to understand the separation other than to think of me running last week with the world tilting on its axis, Madeleine L'Engle and missing you and a wish for more beautiful words all happening at once, and to think of you, wherever you are when you read this, if it's in your kitchen or while you wait for coffee or somewhere else... to think that such moments are us in one big field and perhaps that is the secret to love reaching always across the miles -time and a meadow,a field somewhere and when before we knew each other,somehow, through the telling and retelling of our stories,in the chaos of arranging tables on Saturday and the quiet of driving home, holding hands the way we do now,when I was preaching a sermon to myself in England and you were in a field in Texas,and when a little boy of seven gives me free pink lemonade on my way home in the afternoon, the world rights itself.For a moment, a thin place on the backroads in the haze of summer: and again, the still, small voice, the one that whispers, calm your heart, that day He says, all shall be well. That's as much as my words can hold, I think. All shall be well. And perhaps time and distance are not such fearsome things as I once thought.Love, always,hilary

when i am twenty-three

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary OliverI end my work day fifteen minutes early so that I can go for a run in the woods. I'm so angry I think I can't quite see straight - angry at myself first, because I fell for a story that wasn't coming true, angry at how when I preached him as a wild gift to my closest friend in the car one afternoon at a red light, God was whispering the truth and I didn't believe it. But my feet move my heart. The prayer, anger to desperate to confused, finally makes it way to the still waters. "God," I pace before, palms opened skyward, "I promised You that this life was Yours. Here. So take it back from me, this life for You, take it back into the mystery of Your will.Tell me - --It is the first time any reader I didn't know from my college days ever emailed me a question for dear hilary. I am sitting on my bed thinking about how I need to probably try to write something again, because it has been weeks and didn't I say I would be better, and not get so discouraged, and not let the poems fall through my fingers because of my fear? They tap out the email with a gentleness, a trust, and in the blackened night blanketed with stars I hear a glimmer that maybe I shouldn't forsake writing - maybe I should just wait.What is it --She and I find five hours on her couch with tea not enough time, because the things that pass between us are so widely varied, journeying among us, our stories keeping us company as afternoons fade to evening, as I look at her in surprise, again and again, because her wisdom is gentler than most. We talked once about the space in conflict, how mediators must create the conversation's parameters but not participate, and we wonder together about what kind of heart you must have to do such work, and I tell her then, that a part of me is so hungry to do just that, but how could I begin? How could I be a builder of spaces and homes for conversations? She smiles, shakes her head, reaches for her teacup. "But of course you already do this."you plan to do --And somewhere, in April, in a bar where I stole a reserved seat at the bar from a couple who apparently decided to wait, or at least, I hope that's what they did, over the rim of my martini glass, I told her in hushed laughter and surprise that this man, I was falling for him, had been for a lot longer than I had admitted, and now what was I to do, feeling the way I did, him so far away and me here, drinking this, in this bar? And she laughed bright in the crowded space, her hand briefly closing over mine. "You tell the truth." We laughed and laughed that night, about the way that I brought Lizzy Bennet to life, about how love is always out ahead of us, beckoning us forward. In the car that night on my way home, I whispered, "I see a little better who you might want me to be, I think." And God said, "Hilary, you are Mine."with your one --There aren't words enough for the way this year has unfolded. Perhaps there will never be, and I cling to the older, better question because it is a kind of promise, on its own, that I don't ever stop asking or need to stop asking about this life, all tangled by belonging and wandering and returning. And I cannot stop wondering, not now a year later, about what we inherit from our former selves and what we give them in return, about how we love, and where, and untamed spaces we go running into all for the sake of love.wild and precious life? --Oh, it is a wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, and I'm grateful alongside you.Love,hilary

i offer us a memory, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girland all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,Do you remember our first Skype conversation two years ago? You had said it would be good to meet, I ran 7 miles I was so nervous, down the winding road we walked down a little ways your first afternoon here, two years later. You had said it was probably about time we met, given all that we had already shared, all the words that had tumbled out between us, that very long analogy I'd given you about my friends as doctors in a hospital (I still don't think we know what I am, actually, maybe that's something to ponder), the lists of books...Before I got on Skype to talk to you, I listened to "Tonight, Tonight" by Hot Chelle Rae. Yes. It's true. It had been a song of the summer up in the office where I worked, the way we cheered ourselves up for a long afternoon of answering questions about Orientation, the size of the mattresses from frantic moms in Target holding two different sets of sheets. I listened to it in my car loud on the way home sometimes, and something about it made me feel, for a second, foolish and completely unselfconscious. So I played it three times after that long run and then you called.We already know this story, but I think memory has a funny and beautiful way of moving between people, passed back and forth, and it is never quite the same memory. Maybe that means it always hid more than we thought it did. Each telling changes what it was; it isn't the same story. I don't know if you listened to music or if you ordered a special kind of coffee to impress me (I was drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup, so, nothing too fancy for me). And the details that we labor over as writers, the things we aim to pin down with our words - things like, the night here was a deeper blue than it normally is, the kind that inks the spaces between the stars, tracing their outlines in the sky maybe those are the things that escape us on purpose.Maybe as writers, we have to be bested by our stories, work as hard as we can to capture them on paper only to realize that they are already away, laughing a little as they tear up and off, into the field, into the future, into the retellings that we don't know how to enter just yet.I think when I am asked in a kitchen somewhere, with faces and eyes that are widened in surprise that I ever lived a different life than the one I'll be wrapped up in, when they (the crowd of them, whoever they are, whatever they are named) ask me, I will tell a new story. Every time. And it will be new to me in the telling and the retelling.Writing is good for us, Preston, probably more because of what it teaches us we know nothing about and cannot say and we have spun this tale around and around and around again, how it is good because it brings us nearer a better silence. But I think about it with memory - that memory of listening to "Tonight, Tonight" in my bedroom before that first Skype call, now as we round our way towards what must be dozens (dare I say it, hundreds? it feels like that), even now -the memory is a new story.I think about the Law God gave, how much was about the work of remembrance. Establish this as a memorial, He declares, knowing that in an old memory is new life.All of this because the song played on the radio, and I remembered two years and a handful of days ago. All this, because I think we must be a people who practice the work of remembrance, who make things new by their retelling, who are bested by the stories more alive than we think them.Love, always,hilary

it isn't a thunderstorm

I left him a message early in the morning yesterday, trapped as we are in this moment in the pull of telephone lines and frayed Internet cables. With all that we have to say to each other, with all the questions the pour out and the long pauses that pour back in, I wonder some days if we are causing power outages in hometowns somewhere along the highways that separate us. Town after town, momentarily offering up their electricity so that we can have just five more minutes, just one last smile on Skype.I keep thinking about this new season, after driving through the early, easy morning with my mother, talking about how we know the things we know, and how surprising it can be when we know more than we think we do, or think we should, and I think to myself that knowledge no more obeys me than you or anyone else.I shouldn't know so certainly as I type the tiny letters into the tiny box on the screen too small to carry the amount of love I need it to, should I? I shouldn't, because we live by a calendar of boxes of days, because we think there is always an acceptable line running through time, because for every story we have the one we think it is supposed to be.In my head love was always a thunderstorm, violent and wild and untamed. In my head it was like the ocean and you in a canoe, paddling until your sides ached and you let yourself be capsized, let yourself become lost, let yourself be overturned.The story I told myself about how love must work was that kind of hurricane weather and a purple sky and the smell of rain hurtling over the fields emptied of other people and with the wheat bending down in deference to a wind. That's how it would be real - a chaos of love and lightning.There isn't a thunderstorm.This unnerves me. So I go running, yell at the afternoon, where was the hurricane, by which I would know? Where was the thunder across this landscape, the wild and chaotic arrival of love? How did I miss it? Wasn't that how God would tell me?When I stop moving, the gentle breeze comes off the water with its early summer taste and there is the sun that last year reminded me that all time is about belonging to Jesus, and the water so wide and still my whole self grows small in its presence. No, it will not be in a thunderstorm. It will be in quiet. I look for God in fire and cloud. I look for clarification, for certainty, for a knowledge I could stand on, in a wild and obvious sign. Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire - no, but behold I am standing on the mountain before the Lord and I hear a still, small voice.Love is not in a thunderstorm or a bright, blinding hurricane: it is morning coffee and holding hands in the car just to be sure of each other and the pause before we apologize, and the way our conversations bend back towards grace even when neither of us want to, and how he asks me to pray and doesn't care if it rambles its way towards God in the Mexican restaurant with the girl's night out next to us and our food growing colder, how we let the kids that have become like nieces and nephews to me clamber over our nice Sunday clothes and try on our sunglasses, how we do dishes together, how he knows just when my voice is about to tremble and says into the phone, "Hil. Calm your heart."I stay by the still water for a long time. And then I call him, just once more, and we both hear peace.Love,hilary

this is where I learn something

A day is not a long time. 24 hours, minutes ticked by in neat regular fashion, so many of them already dressed in the colors of what we must do - emails that need writing, conferences that need planning, phone calls and food and sleep and sweating to Zumba routines in your brother's bedroom so you don't break the 200 year old floorboards of your upstairs hideaway. Not every minute is extraordinary. But sometimes a stretch of unextraordinary ones, sleek and swift, upend you.I am driving back to Berlin to fly home. I start thinking about my blog. The rows of trees along the autobahn are neater than the ones at home; the fields are bright yellow with an unidentified crop. The cars blur past our windows, a sky still swollen with rain that hasn't started falling. I've been in another country; it feels like going home is to travel somewhere unfamiliar again.I'm thinking some unpretty thoughts about my blog along the German highway. I'm defensive against this nagging worry about me and writing, and something someone who really matters said to me before I left, "Are you their Holy Spirit?" And he was right - that's the question to stop me short.But the defensive thoughts have lingered across the ocean and some days of separation from the online world, my lungs full of self-righteous air, so justified in what I think I do when I write about perfectionism and being "enough" and grace.And in the way of it, as it always is when you travel, you catch the eye of the land spread out before you and something looks back at you. Maybe it is just the gentleness of the horses in their pasture, but the one who makes eye contact with me has a fierceness about her that makes me momentarily afraid. She isyoung, stamping her foot impatiently at the green earth, and she tosses her mane just as we flyby. We stare at each other a while after.God tells me often that I ought not to imagine myself so wise and knowing. But I'm 22, and I assume that I can learn it on my own and teach it twice before my time.  I place my words around me like fenceposts and bricks, laying my comfort and security in them, but the true things I say, o dear foolish heart of mine?God gives them because I need saving.Maybe the mare who looked at me could see that I confuse the two, the why I write and the who I want to be and the real way of grace.Maybe she shook her mane at me because of that.Or maybe God has been speaking to me about this for weeks and it was only her look that stopped me in my brick piling fence laying defensiveness. God has been speaking.I don't have wisdom about being a perfectionist. I write about it, here and here and all over my heart, but I don't have it. What I bring is just this: that God sometimes lets us write out what we do not really know in order for us to learn it. What I bring is me, bricks and fence posts abandoned as I walk curious toward the truth that God saves me, and the most surprising thing is that is forever a one-way street. We set tables, that person with the right questions tells me.And we bring our words not as bricks but as bread, here for the breaking open and sharing, here because we are all hungry.Back on the road in Berlin, I am now thinking about the mare in the field. About the sleek and swift moments that upend us. About how traveling, however long and far, brings us home again.Love,hilary

be, still.

Tonight I walked back to the chapel, after the black caps and gowns had paraded past, had gone out to dinner, had found their way to celebrations and shouting and the I-can't-believe-it's-here that was my own just a year ago. I walked, and walked, feeling the blisters where my shoes don't quite fit my feet, feeling the dip and pull of my shoulders after carrying the day, feeling the weight of my body pulled towards the earth.Maybe my knees knew where they wanted to go before my heart did.I sat alone in the chapel, in a back pew. I stared at the empty chairs, the empty, echoing room. There were only a few chandeliers lazy and lit, swaying almost as an afterthought of wind. We breathed, the room and I. We waited each other out. I waited, what felt like an age in the sweetly dimming sunlight, for God or maybe just for some sense of something out there, some echo of yes, we see you, from the pews and benches, from the hymnals flung in piles or the ferns beckoning me with their long green fingers.Oh, God, love is hard.It is hard to want a thing so delicate, so very unsayable, that our words gesture at it almost helplessly. It is hard to walk in a thing that I barely know. It is hard to widen my heart past the length of the day and the ache in my feet and the steady drumbeat in my left temple. I slid off my shoes - a reflex - and I folded in on myself.God, love is hard.I sat and sat and sat and sat. And nothing changed. No whisper in the breeze through the single open window. No flame of hope or joy streaming over me. No promises or reminders resounding in the empty room. I could hear the fans whir themselves to sleep. I could hear a clock keep its time. I could almost hear the slight shake in my hands against the edge of the pew in front of me. But the house of worship was quiet.I'm the girl who always wants the voice from heaven reassurance. I'm the girl who expects Him to say it loud and say it obvious, a gold star on my forehead at the end of each day, an answer when I worry. And the stillness echoed so loud I was afraid I might drown in it. Be still and know... I've never know how to do that. Be still. My mother knows how to make silence with the littlest ones on Sunday mornings. With them, she weaves stillness through their hands and toes and flailing elbows and anxious knees. The youngest learn to listen to the silence, the hollow widened space where God walks. Again, they must teach me. Again, I know so little, sitting alone in the chapel in the middle of the sunset chasing away the afternoon. I know so little about a world hollowed and lit by silence. I know so little about how God sounds; I wonder how much I have lost in not listening.But it was still in the chapel tonight.Maybe that was Him.Love,hilary

myself, eighteen

I'm trapped in a heard of other freshmen in Boston all wearing matching tan tee-shirts with an orientation logo emblazoned on it, promising me that if anyone wanted to think I was a cool, sophisticated college student, they will see my t-shirt and sneakers and know better.I hold my phone in the palm of my hand inside my pocket, sweating against the keys. I wait, and wait. I spend the first three weeks waiting.It would have been better if I didn't have the evidence that I had spent the last ten days in the middle of the woods in upstate New York telling a group of people I had never met before that this boy, he and I were a thing. A thing I couldn't define, a thing I couldn't quite pin down, one Starbucks lemonade and one impulsive kiss against a car door the afternoon before I left, but a thing. I was sure of it.He doesn't write back. I keep myself away from the ten digits I'm sure I've memorized in tracing them over and over in my pocket, because I don't want to text him but I want to text him, and I promise I have to let one more hour go by where I'm silent, and the hour becomes two, becomes a week... and maybe I don't know the ten digits as well anymore, was it 7-8 or 8-7 and was there a 9? But I imagine what I'd say, in my first-year indignant heart, it is rageful and spiteful and angry. And I start to spin the story.I tell my roommate in hushed whispers at 4am while we're eating cookie dough straight from the tube how much experience I have with boys. I laugh to the girls on my floor as one of them puts a 5 day Garnier hair dye in my hair about the fact that if you kiss someone in the middle of the night on a beach you're going to find you are covered in sand, completely, the next morning. I proclaim that my love language is physical touch. And I wink.God catches up to me on a walk around the quad right before first semester finals. I don't notice Him at first, walking head bent to the concrete against the early-December drizzle. But I'm worn thin in trying to write that scene between Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Birmingham Jail and his wife. I'm thinking about stage directions when I realize God is there, too.Do you want to talk about what happened?I have said no a thousand times, I remind Him. I've told the story already. It's better the way I tell it. It's safer the way I tell it. I keep walking, repeating things about the Kings and the scene in the jail. I read over the words in my head.Do you want to talk about what happened? I still say no, but perhaps there is a crack, a pause, just small enough for a bit of the Spirit to slip inside my well-walled heart. I sit on a bench, damp from the rain that just stopped. I put my books next to me, not realizing until I hear the slap of paper on water that I put them in a puddle. I cringe, and put them on the wet concrete at my feet.You cared for someone. A pause.He didn't stay. Another pause.And this means something to your heart.I start to cry. I'm eighteen and in college and I had a thing that wasn't a thing and I told that group of people in the middle of the woods in New York that I had a thing that turned out not to be a thing, and now I've told everyone that I was pleased with myself, with all that I did and said and I made it this story, and that was going to make it feel better, was going to make it safe again, I was going to be safe inside the laughter and the knowing wink and the hair dying on the first floor bathroom.It can't be the kind of beautiful I want it to be, Hil, until you let it mean something in your heart. It can't be restored to you if you keep it. I stop crying.Let Me have this story. I don't want to give it back, and my version is safer, steered clear of it meaning something. Of it hurting. Of it aching, and healing.Let Me have it. The rest of eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and counting, I watched Him make more of this story - more healing, more peace, more delight, more laughter - maybe even something like wisdom.It began that first night. It began with the thing that wasn't a thing, that became an entirely different and more beautiful thing. I gave Him back the story.Love,hilary

myself, fourteen

"Dear Heavenly Father," I start the traditional way, the adjectives in a pleasing order, my list of requests and people at the ready. "I pray for..." I am lying on my side inside a thin sleeping bag in a youth center in Montgomery, Alabama. The boys are in a room next door, giggling to themselves. A block falls off a shelf, and they race into our room screeching that there are cockroaches in the room next door, and we screech back that we are all supposed to be asleep and if the teacher hears you he's going to come in here and be disappointed.

We can't stop laughing, though, under the thin sleeping bags and the humidity, I forget my prayer in an effort to scoot a little closer to the circle of people telling secrets and even though I don't know any secrets, I hover just near enough to listen.

This is the summer where I try to be too cool to pray. I sit in church unenthusiastic, thinking more about how I want to marry the boy two aisles up and how I scrawl his name across journal pages. I pretend that church is just this thing we have to do, my family and I, and really I am just like everyone else and I want all the same things and Sunday morning with Bread and Wine is just like the soccer and lacrosse practices at the field in the town. I wish to myself I was playing soccer and lacrosse on Sunday mornings. 

I have braces stretched across my smile, which makes me self-conscious about smiling, but it doesn't really stop me. In the pictures of this trip, you'll see me in clothes that don't quite fit but I wanted so desperately to seem like I was the kind of girl in the advertisements with the cutoff shorts and the long straight hair and the effortless tan. In the pictures you can see my trying.

Myself, at fourteen - the word is trying. There is a yearning that radiates from my pictures, my smile, my neatly three-hole-punched tests and papers. There is a hopefulness that enough makeup will turn the school dance at Halloween into something fun and me into someone who could be brave enough to dance without looking over her shoulder. I watched the people watching, and I was afraid. Who wants to be the girl who prays when there is music and racing heartbeats? Who wants to be the girl who worries over Sunday morning worship when there is adventure on a Saturday night? 

That June of cockroaches in Montgomery, the night we ate catfish from a local pond and I promised that I would come back to the South  - it feels like a forever ago. 

And then the other day I was her. She reappeared at the corner of my memories and my present, waved as if to remind me that in the summer of fourteen, I believed I could make my faith an add-on to my heart instead of its very blood and oxygen and beat. Because I wanted to curl up in the sleeping bag on the very inside of the circle and have the secrets and go to soccer practice instead of church. Maybe it had something to do with the harder things of daily life in faith, maybe it was just a day I didn't really want to kneel, pencil skirt to office rug, over the work week. Maybe it was just a yearning without another reason. 

I recognized her in me the other day, the girl who wanted to be too cool to pray that June and that whole summer. And I waved her nearer, so that perhaps in the mystery of knowing ourselves I could reassure her, though she is a past self, that it will be better to be on our knees for the world. It will be better to yearn after the Word made Flesh who comes to dwell inside and among us. It will be better, in the end, not to have been too cool for any of it. 

Only on our knees can we hear our heartbeat. 

Love,
hilary

if we were having coffee

I sometimes think about the girls I don't know. I think about their upturned faces against a May sky, their heavy backpacks and sense of responsibility. I think about everything that's hidden in their hearts (treasures and dangers alike). I think about the way we begin to become ourselves.

I want to take you all out to coffee. I want to buy you something with a lot of sugar in it, take the table by the window with the sunlight streaming through it something fierce. I want to ask you some advice about boys, about being a true friend, about how to swim in the water of who you are when everyone else seems like they have a better idea. (I know, by the way, that you know a lot about all these things.) I want to lean in close, smile at you with a little hint of rebellion and tell you that there is more to you than meets the eye.

Maybe you would ask me how I know this. Maybe you would lean back in your chair and drain your cup, look out the window at the striped tee shirts and cutoff jean shorts passing by, at the busy cars and the haggard shopkeeper sweeping outside her polished blue door. Maybe you would lock eyes with me, and tell me in your most honest voice that you're not so sure, some days.

Me too. Because I've heard a lot lately about the question of "enough." Are we, how could we be, what if my blog isn't, or is, what if my leadership isn't, my co-curricular extra-curricular, award-seeking-or-receiving or my friendships... I'd get serious right about here, push my glasses on top of my head, bend my whole posture forward, across the table, across the divide of what we believe about ourselves and this world - and say:

Enough of the word enough.

I don't know how to tell this any other way. I don't know how to bullet point it for you in logical argument, how to write you a story that carries this message like a pearl inside its oyster shell. I don't know how to cajole you or argue with you or do much of anything, but sound the same old few lines as often as possible here, and where you are, at coffee and at lunch and always, always, when I get on my knees for you: hearts are too beautiful to spend on a word like enough, on a measurement, on a tangled illusion.

I spent high school and college being enough which wasn't enough which was never good or beautiful or sexy or gracious or holy or poised or funny... enough. I did the ache in my closet among my mismatched shoes. I did the late nights skipping dinner, the later night disappointments. I did the look of dismay at myself over a less than perfect grade or comment or conversation.

And I say, enough of that.

If we were having coffee, you and I, I'd want to tell you that. I want to shore it up in us. I want to wedge it so firmly our ribcages that we walk around singing a freedom-song so loud we can't catch our breath. Free of the worry that comes with enough. Free of the fear. So gloriously free.

I come back here and I write to you and I write to us and I write to all the people who never hear me, and all the ones who do, that hearts are too extraordinary to be measured. Yours is beyond enough. It is bigger than enough. It is so much more than enough.

Maybe at the end of the coffee, when we've each had a brownie or three and it's time to go, I will hang on just one second longer, and catch your eye one more time. And I would lean in (because I always do) and I would smile. Your heart is far too extraordinary to live trapped in a word like enough.

I'm right here. I'm singing next to you. Together, we'll have done with enough.

Love,
hilary

last night, I almost quit

You wouldn't believe it, would you? That it should sound so easy, to leave words behind?To give them up.To give, them, up? How could I? Haven't words always been my bones, my bricks, my feathers and wings and roots? Haven't they been the way I learn and forget and learn again? Hasn't it always been writing, mine the quick answer to Rilke's lingering question - whether I must write, else die. Haven't I always said yes? But I almost quit last night.I imagined myself cutting loose the threads that moor me to a space in a corner of the world so much wider than I understand, or fathom; I imagined how it might be, to put away documents in folders, occupy my mind with the already-told stories, the things that are unique and breathtaking and here, in front of us.I imagined silence replacing comment counting. I imagined tucking up my words like quilts in attic boxes. I imagined no more bending and breaking beneath the words and their silence and their speaking.No stories that begin and end in the unfinished places, no more hitting "publish" on a post you're never quite sure resounds the way you  thought it would.No more desperate cherishing of lithe or luminescence or blessing, of caress and carries, of child for the way their sound looks as it finds an ear, the way they build up meaning, the way they are.It’s not the writing of it, it’s the reeling of the writing. It's what I think I could write, if only. But, yet, then, I plaster together words with commas and prayers and they flutter groundward, and there still isn't a good answer, or maybe any answer.I’m bravest and most afraid here.I imagined quitting to fold up inside a safer version of myself; I saw my years stretching out before me, word-less. I pressed my hands to my face, and thought I could see me, not undone by a poem or the way I cannot hear a character speak, not worried over the choice of light and illumine.Brave and afraid, I write still.Brave and afraid, I publish a post where I talk about the almost-quitting, the question of why someone would try this work of penning  glory into syllables and vowels.Brave, and afraid.Love,hilary