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

dear hilary: gather the threads

Dear Hilary,All I ever see is the clock ticking. Time is always running out. There's never enough time to do it all. When this season ends, a new one will begin but what about when that one comes to an end? Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I'm so scared on missing out on things and losing those who are precious to me.Hilary, how do I live alive in the moment when all I can think about is how quickly the end is approaching? How do I deal with the clock that keeps ticking, and a heart that desires to live so fully, experience so much, and spend time with so many people? My heart feels ready to explode.Love,About-to-GraduateDear About to Graduate,Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I feel you on the edge of your seat with this question, maybe tapping a pencil on your desk, wondering, worried that the answer might be something trite like, "because that's the way things go," or "that's life," or even, "it will all be okay." I want to steer clear of those words, not because they are untrue (actually, I think they're terribly true), but because sometimes it helps to hear it sounding in different words. I want to tell you a story.I was sitting in a kayak in the middle of a French river. My friend and I were in floppy sunhats, my skin already a solid pink, our arm muscles so tired we couldn't even admit to ourselves that we didn't really know how to "feather" or "J-stroke" back to the group. It was early afternoon, just after lunch, and the group was eagerly paddling ahead while we floundered. It was summer, and in the south of France there is a sweetness to the air itself, a dull humming from all the things coming alive: lavender and bees and olives. We were in search of the Pont du Gard somewhere down the river, further into the afternoon. We were in search of ourselves, as soon-to-be seniors, in search of love at 17, in search of everything. I can almost taste that day, our laughter pealing out over the water to annoy a stray duck and a solo Frenchman, convinced that we had arrived at the beginning and this was, and must be, a kind of forever. We floated under the ancient Roman aqueduct singing a madrigal we had learned four years before - "All Ye Who Music," All ye who music love, and would its pleasures prove, O come to us, who cease not daily to warble gaily...As the days in France, and later that summer, meandered by me, I began to panic. It was senior year, I whispered, the end of high school. The end of the daily relationships, the walks to and from the Barn, the end of singing "Wade in the Water" and "I'll Fly Away" in voice lessons, the end of whispers and note passing and French. I stayed busy so I wouldn't see the end coming. I convinced myself it would be fine. Or that I wouldn't miss things. Or that time wasn't really moving at all.But, dear heart, time was moving. And I moved with it. And you, where you are, have moved with it too. We cannot hide in our feathers or in our schedules. We cannot convince ourselves that absence is a word without meaning or the life, so rich in front of us, is not going to change. We are not given permission to do that.I want to tell you that my story in France, which I type as if I am still in the kayak in the south of France, it was six years ago. All of its richness has entered the wider tapestry of my story and now, when I plucked the thread to show you, it brings with it a thousand others. Stories I didn't know about until four years ago, one year ago, Sunday afternoon. It's bound to the things that haven't happened yet in my life - just as your threads from high school, the people you love, the things you love, all that feels most alive in you - they are bound to your future. I promise you do not lose the things you love, and the good and beautiful things that go through the first ending now have a life beyond it.Gather the threads, sweet pea. Run your fingers through these stories of high school, of deep friendship, of strange awkward school dances and movies you didn't need to spend the money to see in theaters and essays and languages and family summers. Hold them in your hands, feel their weight and length. Write them down, or tell them on the phone late at night. Or relive them with your dearest friends.They have a life beyond this first ending.They live among the thousand threads of your one beautiful story.Love,hilary

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

in the church parking lot

"They don't tell you that being brave also means hurt." God and I are back in my car on a Sunday morning. It's before anything has happened in the day, but I'm dreading going in. "I don't want to talk to you. Just so you know."We sit in silence, and I imagine He is waiting next to me. He isn't impatient but we both know the clock moves its way forward and that soon, I have to hold sticky hands and smile."I don't want to talk to you," I begin again, but God is a bit too gentle this morning for me to keep my posture. "How could you do this to me? After all of it? How could you ask me to give that up? How could you ask so much of me all the time? It's too hard. I can't. And I know you say you're Alpha and Omega, that in you my heart is safe and all of that. But where have you taken me?"God frightens me out of talking. The silence in the car is so absolute I might have stopped breathing. My heartbeat has quieted to a dim metronome. The cars on the highway don't notice, but I wonder if the trees in front of me have softened their blossoming, just for a moment, to eavesdrop."I told you it would be costly, Hilary Joan." That voice. Always, that voice.I turn in my seat, knock my glasses off and begin to wail."But where are we? Where am I?"As if knowing that God and I have gone up to a mountaintop to look out over my life wasn't clear enough, he offers me the metaphor. I type this and the silence deafen."Hilary?"I keep typing, deciding that I will make this blog post about being brave and how it hurts, that I will make it about what I am doing, learning, how I have grown the wings and can fly now. I turn the radio on, and the sun creeps through the windows."Hilary."I pause in my typing, close my eyes."Remain in my love."I keep my eyes closed. The light tickles my eyelids and the birds have taken up a chorus about the coming morning.But nothing more comes. The voice is gone.remain in my love.I sit still.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the leap

Dear Hilary,I have loved the same boy for most of my life. We've been dating now for two months, and he's crazy about me and I can tell, but he's reluctant to get more serious in case there's somebody else who is "The One" for me down the road. I don't think there will be, but I don't know how to tell him so he'll believe me. I think this might be a forever kind of love. But when do we know for sure? When does it just become time to take the leap?Love,Cliff-DwellerDear Cliff-Dweller,When I was 17, the movie Enchanted came to the big screen. A sweet movie, one that cleverly and wonderfully plays with other Disney stories, a redheaded heroine, the city of New York... I loved it.At the very end of the movie Carrie Underwood sings this song, "Ever After." I used to imagine (I'll admit it, because this is a place to be real) that I was Carrie Underwood singing that song. I used to imagine that "The One" would sweep into my life and play opposite me in a slightly-more-but-not-that-much-more-realistic version of Enchanted. Haven't we all done that, somehow? We wait for the sign. We wait for the marvelous, the extravagant, the moment when there is nothing for it but to burst into song in the middle of a crowded street and hand out roses. We all want a One, and we all want to know for sure. We think that finding "the one" will give us the permission to be extravagant with our love. To proclaim and sing it, Carrie-style.But I wonder if we, in our waiting for the big sign, we end up more afraid than we should be. What if that wasn't the sign? we ask ourselves driving along country roads. Or what if there is someone else, in a different state/country/zip code, in a different college, with a different life story... we write in our journals. I wonder if he or she is really everything I think I want. I wonder if I should be as committed to this as I want to be... I wonder, I wonder. We could wonder ourselves to death waiting for someone to come in with a pot and a wooden spoon, clanging away, "The one is approximately 2.4 miles and 3 months away!"If you want to know anything, you have to leap.You've entrusted a big thing to me - this question about love - and I don't take it lightly. I don't think we are meant to be thoughtless or hasty before we leap. I don't want to tell you or your boyfriend to do that. Ask each other hard questions. Ponder together what this thing is between you, and what you think it might or could become. Fight, and laugh, and even spend some time worry and pleading and joking and explaining and listening... and a million verbs.All the million verbs point to the bigger point, though: live it. That's what the leap is about. You won't know before you go whether this is "the one." You won't know what kind of gift you are to each other. You won't know if it is a forever kind of love. I can't promise you that.But I can promise you that when it comes to love, the only learning is in living. I can promise you that if you leap, whether you are a forever love or a season of love, whatever the nature and shape of your story, it will be lived. We can wonder alone in a dark room with the "Enchanted" soundtrack playing, asking for the sign that will make us sure that we are right about who this person is and what they are meant to be. And I think there is a special kind of love I have for those days, in all of our stories.But I wish the fullness of leaping for the two of you. I wish the hearts that you'll help expand in each other. I wish the bigger story, the one of unknowns and discoveries and all those million lived verbs.There is a glorious kind of life in the leap together - wherever you land.Love,hilary

to boston, with love (with lisa-jo)

Lisa-Jo and I are Boston girls.We are deep in the love of this city. Our selves and our hearts are wrapped up in it, in all the old names and bricks and places.So when we heard about the bombs, we wrote out our love in a letter.Read with us? Pray with us?Dear Boston,Hilary and I have loved you a long time. We attended the same college on your North shore. Fourteen years apart. Her father was my favorite professor. And then one day when we’d all grown up my husband was one of hers. So when we heard the blood spattered news today, so many memories rose up between us. Like a too-small band-aid, like an anthem, like a prayer, like a plea to unsee this new one.Keep reading at Lisa-Jo's?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 

dear hilary: be braver

Dear Hilary,I just watched the Brené Brown video - the one about being vulnerable, people who live wholeheartedly? Do you know that one? Her Ted Talk? I want to know how you have learned about doing that in your life so far? How do you live vulnerably?Love,Un-vulnerable in SeattleDear Un-vulnerable,I've watched that video a bunch of times in the last few months. It was a suggestion from my counselor, and, like most of her suggestions, it was a good one. When I first saw it, I was sitting in my office at work and worrying about something (I'm a bit of a worrier, I'll confess). I was eating these really good cookie things I got in the grocery store, 2 boxes for $5, and they promised to be very nutritious and give me hours and hours of energy as well as fill me with the sweet taste of hydrogenated blueberry (I promise, actually, they're really good). As I munched, I worried, and Brené talked, and I thought about vulnerability and shame and courage and those words I'm so fond of and so very not good at living by.This year, the year of 22? I have learned that I am braver than I thought I was. I have also learned that being brave is more about being braver - about the growing from one kind of brave to another, far more than it is about the thing itself.I want to start with being braver than I thought I was. I go on runs sometimes - you probably know this from my blog - and when I run, I talk. I talk to God, I talk to the birds, I talk even a little bit to myself. And the things I say are brave not because they are difficult, but because they are gracious. "I love my body," I said one summer afternoon. "I have done a good job at work this week," I said as I rounded the muddy right turn in the path behind the college buildings, the one that leads to my favorite pond. "God, Your goodness is bigger than my idea of it," was the thought last week as I ran hands up through a cul-de-sac praying for a sign from Him. These things are brave: because they are words of love instead of judgment, words of a recovering good girl who now believes that her job is not to hurl condemnation at her legs or her work ethic or her relationship with God, but instead to say things in love. That's brave.Brave looks like wearing bright blue pants on a Friday night, like eating Ben & Jerry's from the carton, like whispering to your best friend that you do not know if you can believe that you are worthy. Yes, un-vulnerable, brave is in the work of admitting all the places where you ache. This year, my year of 22, I have learned that to be brave is to walk into a room and, for just a moment, believe that all things work together for the good.And then that oh-s0-much-more-important thing: in this, my 22nd year, I learned that it is not about achieving a level of brave all for its own sake. It's not about an arbitrary measurement, where you suddenly are brave enough, where you have arrived at a satisfactory level... Oh no. Being brave is for something else: for love, for the truth, for the sake of the bigger, richer life that you must seek. You must not seek it for merely self-actualization: you must seek it because to be alive is a great and grave privilege. But being brave is more about being brave in the direction of the other things you seek. Therefore, it is a movement, a blossoming. One day you manage to say to your abs that you love them. One day you pray and release. One day, in the middle of the day, you watch the Ted Talk again and you say to yourself, I want to live wholeheartedly, too. And that is brave. And that is braver.Living vulnerably is not a thing to be achieved, my dear friend. It is more a striving to live according to the great privilege it is to be alive, a striving to offer your fullest self because you believe that self is so radiant, so very real, that to offer less is to be less. It is a striving, a blossoming, a becoming.In this, my 22nd year, I am beginning to strive. I am beginning to hope that I will be braver now than I was three years ago and braver in twenty years than I am in ten years, and all the while, seeking not merely bravery or courage or vulnerability: seeking instead the good, wondrous life.That's what I know about being vulnerable, Un-vulnerable: yours is a good and wondrous life. Be brave in its direction.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

to be saved

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

to save you

It is too dark for me when I walk inside. I immediately regret that I have come into this stillness, my skirt with its ripped silk lining announcing my arrival with a soft rustle. I can't see who is in front or behind me. The twelve candles, the twelve flickering, bright disciple-symbols dance and snap to my right. I sink into the hard wood of the pew and wish I was driving home singing to country music.It is too quiet for me. I can hear every distracting thought rumbling towards my mind - that there is so much work to do when I get home, not enough time, that I've eaten not enough or too much, that this or that difficult question has been raised in a conversation with a friend. I shuffle my feet, feel my fingers clutching at the rim of the pew in front of me. The wood is worn smooth from the sweat of prayer and impatience; and I wonder how many hands before me have regretted coming heree, this place where a Spirit hovers over us, protecting, keeping watch.Tenebrae means darkening shadows, I read, and this service is about the disappearance of the light.I'm more afraid than I have been in a long time. We stand, think the Lord's Prayer in silence. I can feel myself close my ribcage, catching my breath over, and over. Tonight, One who was obedient goes up to be offered for me, the disobedient, and I am afraid. I am afraid of Him.The cantors begin. The notes are not sweet but searing. They land, each one, it seems, closer and closer to my pew. Their voices lament with Jeremiah and I try not to listen, but in the silence nothing else can be heard except these words - O Lord, nothing but these words -"You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you."Candle after candle is snuffed out. Light after light disappears from the altar, and still it is darker, and still, my soul clings to the idea that perhaps I am not one of these twelve bright, brief flames. Perhaps I am faithful to Him, perhaps I know better, perhaps, perhaps..."You will flee, Hilary."The Spirit whispers. A rib seems to snap, a fleeting, sharp pain in the middle of my chest. No, Lord. It couldn't be. More candles go out.And Jesus says again: "You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you."We stand. My heart pounds in my chest, and I am on the run from that voice - I am fleeing from the truth that I have been the first to flee from Him - but there is nowhere to go. Where can I go?They hide the Christ candle. The sanctuary is finally, utterly dark. Tenebrae means darkening shadows.A gun sounds behind the altar. A symbol, I know, of earth and heaven torn apart by this death, but I stop breathing and begin to cry.I sob through the silence. I sob through the slow return of the One candle. I sob and sob, tears in my hair and fogging up my glasses and I am breaking apart, because the same voice that said, "You will flee, Hilary," has just whispered,"And so, Hilary, I will tear earth and heaven apart to save you."A gun sounds, the Christ candle returns. A gun sounds, I sob and sob and sob, for my flight, for His salvation. I whisper back to Him - O Lord, I need saving. He tears heaven and earth apart to save us.To save me.I leave the church still in tears.Love,hilary

i am reminded about light

A photographer will tell you (probably) - it's about light. At the end and beginning, in the dusky red and the early white, in the grey from cloud cover and the blue off the harbor. Good pictures are about light.And not just about sun.They're also about our light. The kind that glows, that sings out, that is finally, fully, un-self-conscious because your self is a self you wrap up in love. The kind that promises to remind you. The kind of light that begins when you decide to twirl in a full yellow skirt and pirouette while staring at the afternoon reflected in the deep, glowing blue of the harbor. The kind that makes you laugh.I told you a while back that this is a year about light. And then, I must have said this a thousand times, that God turned off the lights. I'm fumbling blind, squinting into the miles of Sunday running prayer for a way forward. And He calmly keeps His hand on the light switch.But when I drove to Rockport on Saturday, when I flung out my real prayer - God, can I please feel beautiful today? - and worried it was selfish and unfair, and worried still that to say less was to lie, and then.God gifted light:

God said, light, dear one?

light?

And, somehow, between the green tea, the laughter, the not quite yet spring sun, 

where my winged prayer met my winged heart,

Right there, in the midst of it:

I could see.

Love,hilary

(Photos by Bob Delaney of Rockport)

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

dear hilary: this is called delight

Dear Hilary,So I'm reading the chapter "Artists, Mystics, and Clowns" in Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust and wondering: why do we act the way that we do, and how does this reflect God? What's so great about efficiency? Gravitas? Breast-beating? Sobriety? Somewhere along the line I leaned that these were more holy than extravagance, art, and levity. Somewhere alone the line I learned I must stifle effulgent passions, had no time for interruptions, mustn't laugh when there's so much suffering in the world and so much work to be done, must put away childish playfulness. Somewhere along the line I learned that God is begrudging and exasperated. What is God's disposition, anyways?Sincerely,Can't-Lighten-Up Dear Can't-Lighten-Up,In my high school, French was the only foreign language offered. We learned it playing "Tour du Monde" with vocabulary, drawing pictures of "fromage" and "papillon" for each other on the chalkboards in the House, wandering the streets of Angers and Paris and Aix ordering our first café au lait and pain au chocolat in giddy tones. I remember vividly one day after we had gotten out of class, I walked around the corner with my friend and we ducked our heads inside a patisserie, and we ordered in a rush two "religeuses." The woman behind the counter didn't look at my ratty hair in its pigtail braids and my very American purple winter coat (a hand-me-down from my sister, I think) and make a noise that meant, "American." She simply smiled and put the pastry in a small bag with a piece of tissue paper. "Bonne soirée" she called out after us. And I felt the rush of what the French call "joie" - joy.I was a junior the year that we sang Gabriel Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine." We used to rehearse the song in its delicate French in a crowded room with uneven and overly polished floorboards. I sat in a grey folding chair, tucked my feet under me, pushed that still-ratty hair behind my ears with my fingernails coated with blue sparkle. The song hushes in its final line to this - "Et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé." And may our praises return filled with Your gifts. It isn't the exact translation - I'm not even sure I could translate it well, if I'm honest - but the last, hushed line, has the word, "comblé" which, whether or not I understood the line right, is a French word for "overjoyed." The verb "combler" is about filling, being filled.I tell you these stories because you are asking something about who God is, and what His attitude is about us. And I learned this from singing "Cantique de Jean Racine," from the woman in the patisserie by the Lycée David d'Angers, from my years of unkempt hair and hand-me-down winter coats: God is delighted.Delighted, overjoyed - we so often mistake those words for happy, or, more honestly, for naively cheerful or optimistic. We think that if we name those adjectives, we're making it sound like we (or God or both) aren't taking hurt seriously. That we have missed suffering. That we have lost sight of the ache of the world and are applying a pink band-aid to the gaping wounds.But it is the work of delight and joy to come close to suffering, even closer than the so-called serious realism. It is through joy, not cynicism, that we approach the unspeakably difficult.Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. They are the choice to trust love triumphant. Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.If you do not practice laughter, you cannot know this joy. If you do not practice the playfulness, the levity, the extravagant gestures without reason, the shrieks of hide-and-seek games, you cannot walk with us to the places where love is most needed and most difficult.God is overjoyed with us. God is delighted. Because He is these things, because He is delighted in my moment in the patisserie, eating something truly good and laughing with my friend, and wishing the woman kneading bread a "bonne soirée" - He can enact such an extravagant and mysterious story of love triumphant. Because God is delighted, because His delight is not some blithe or silly perpetual good mood, but the serious weight of everlasting love, He is able to save us.This is the story we are going to tell the world. The story of love triumphant over darkness. The story of joy and reuniting, of harmony and whole, of laughter and extravagance. But to tell it, and to tell it in the places most needed, we must practice those things in ourselves.So, dear one, this is the work of delight. It will take everything you've got, to live the blurred lines between sorrow and weeping and joy and splitting your sides laughing. It will take your whole self and a self transformed to banish the categories we've so carefully constructed around what counts as "serious" and what counts as "light," to sing while we cry and rage while we laugh.But I think it can be done. I think it must be done. So that, in the mystery of love triumphant, we can sing:Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante;Que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix;Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace, O Lord,That all hell flees at the sound of Your voice.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