dear hilary: what lives on

Dear Hilary,Have you ever been unkind to your body, or yourself?Love,judgmentalDear judgmental,I never thought I'd write anything about this story on this blog. To be honest, I never wanted to tell anyone. For a while in college, not all that long ago, I waged a silent, prim, polite war against my body.I stood at a cabinet looking at a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread and dared myself to walk away, to be braver and better than food, to not need the comfort that comes with being full, feeling full.I dared myself to go for days like that, to run every morning (that was the permission to eat, you know, if I had run). I dared myself, sly and quiet, to master desire.I think all this was around the time that I realized I wasn't ready to go to graduate school, and that I didn't know what to do with my life after, right around the night I wore a brown sweater dress and scrawled an inscription in a book of poetry I gave him for his birthday, scrawled something about how Edward Hirsch writes beauty into the world, and so should he, but I wrote it while we drove back from a conversation that changed us forever, with the light on in the car along the back roads, an ending kind of conversation.I think all this had begun a long time before that, too.I'm scared to write it here, to admit out loud that there are these days when there is still a voice in my head that tells me I would better thinner. I'm scared to tell you that the girl you look at, with her smile widening at the sight of you, with all the good she has been given, she still has a bit of glass edging its way out of her heart, too.I'm hopelessly tangled in my own story, which has wild love and this silent war so knit together they're both mine. They're both me.But I titled this what lives on. Because something always does.What lives on in me is the hope, that the patient repetition of the words, "I am beautiful," in the mirror, in the driveway, in the desperate too-long runs in the woods, they were healing words. I had to speak my way into believing them. I still have to do that. But I have hope.What lives on in me, almost two years later, is the time I sat in the parking lot with my mother who is wiser than all the rest, and let her love me back, back from this polite war against fullness, back from the rage at the lack of control we have over our days, back over my fight with my present. What lives on in me is the radical notion that there is something good alive in me, something I have made, or am making, of this time when I was unkind to my body, my self.Because what lives on is what we breathe into being, what we keep, what we cherish.So dear heart, because you will breathe life into something, let it be hopeful. Let it be beautiful, let it not be bittered by all that it was in its ache but let it be beautified by what it became, as your story always holds more than you imagine it does.I whisper to you that the things most beautiful are often first, and somehow, continuing, most broken. Wild love and a polite war. Talent and jealousy, wisdom and pride, a thousand peacekeeping and another thousand battling moments, all inside us.To me, what lives on is how wondrous we are, to contain such things - and how much more wondrous, that we can make beauty from it.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

dear heart, love hilary

Dear little one,I already lost count of the ways I love you. Mom sent me pictures of how you grew inside her, for months and months, we waited for those brief glimpses of the two of you together, and I would yell every time and stop what I'm doing and stare at the two of you (because that's the funny thing about pregnancy - a picture of Mom is also a picture of you for nine months). Your mom is a gently beautiful person, full of joy, full of life, and now that you are here, I know that flows into you too, with the physical life she offers. She gave you a special kind of life from her heart and her body these long nine months, and now, you are here. We are beyond excited - we are out in the field of wild joy. We are out dancing in our kitchen and we are outside under the bright summer sun, laughing and praying and trying to find the right days and times to fly out to meet you.When your parents got married I fell down the stairs at the reception. Not all the way, not dangerously, just in enough of a way to be completely embarrassed and wish that I was safe from the memory. But we are a long remembering family, and so your uncles on our side and your parents and grandparents won't let me forget it - and trust me, your soon-to-be Uncle Preston won't let me forget either (he'll love telling you all kinds of stories about me). But their wedding day was a day about your parents, about two becoming one, about love. And these are the roots of love you grow from. I can promise you, little one, they are deep roots. You will grow in a richer love than you know.That day, the reading was from 1 John 4 - about how we love because He first loved us. How we know love at all because it has been shown to us by another, by He who is love. You will be fed on love that is rooted in His love. You will be loved, in the midnights and the hurried mornings, in the laughter and the snow, in the every moment, by parents whose love is anchored and rooted to God's love.And I remember that day knowing your mom - my sister - and your dad, my brother-in-law, became a family. And now you are here, and you are a part of our family, and we are jumping up and down with joy over it and I might fall down a hallway or an airport or an escalator as I run towards you when I meet you.But we anchor each other in a deeper love.We will - this whole family of yours, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents - promise in our own ways and times, to love you wild and deep and forever. There is so much I don't know about you, dear one, so much I cannot wait to discover. But I promise you a deep and wild and forever love in this family.I promise you all of my love, too. I promise you all of it, anchored in His.Love,Aunt Hilary

when I hate long-distance

This morning all I feel is the ache of distance.I wake up to it in the bed with me, this familiar stranger of being apart from the person I love. I hear the fan blowing the already-fall wind across the room, rustling the papers I haven't put away. I look around with a wide-eyed wild hope that maybe I'm back where he is, or where he is is downstairs with a Sharpie pen and a journal and a prayer book and his Bible, and when I walk down the stairs he'll smile up at me from behind his glasses in the way that I have traced over and over, an inked tattoo in my heart of that first look, that realization of how he must see me, how maybe I must be beautiful because he has that look on his face.The ache walks me in and out of Starbucks, through my trouble choosing music in the car, in my half-hearted greeting to God at the right turn by the brick house I used to love. The ache is somewhere in my ribcage, but it moves. The ache is somewhere behind my heart, and it anchors.I wrote once that it is beautiful. Our selves, strong in our breathing, in our standing, can soften our hearts and our eyes past the miles. We still find each other. We still sit down, unwrap our days to the quiet hum of our computer fans.And it is agonizing.And it is peaceful.And it is terrible.I hear the words of others about how the distance is good, how it builds something good, how the time is something to be cherished. I hold a paper plate in the lobby and stare at her blankly, feel my feet on the stones in the floor, tell myself that I should soften my heart. But for all the words about how distance stretches and grows us, I want the words for how it also aches in places you didn't know you had, how I close my eyes at my desk and I think about him and I think about me and I see the miles that move between us, and the ache lives somewhere behind my heart.I don't want the words that the time will go by fast, that it will move, that this will be something that I miss and wish I could get back. I don't want the words that all this purposes together for good (oh, I know it does, I say that to myself), but maybe I want the words that just know it is an anchored ache behind the heart, and that it is so much better to be near to each other, that the laundry on Saturday days, that the order Chinese and eat it on the porch watching Netflix days, that the days when you walk through a field in a sundress holding hands days, that those days are so good and lovely that the ache is part of how you know how good it is.But it is a hard way to know that. And it would be better, will be better, just to be in the field together.What was the poem?Your absence has gone through melike thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its color. - "Separation," W.S. MerwinThe anchored ache behind my heart.It will be better to be together.love,hilary

a poem is still

There was no reason for me to fall in love with poetry that first semester in high school. We sat around a fireplace, notebooks ready, pens hopeful. But we didn't write anything right away.  Charles told us that to write poetry you must read good poetry. He told us to read poems twice, once for sound, once for meaning, that the better question is always, how does this poem mean? and not the elusive "what" or "why" that the poet so often slides by you, unconscious as water, so that it isn't until you read the poem years later that you realize it must have meant something about faith, or something about how humans hide from each other, and in hiding, are revealed. Charles told us we would read much more than we would write that semester, that to be a poet you must be a listener to the beauty and weight of words.Oh, I want to be a poet.Preston sends me prompts in the morning, ideas and quotes and snippets of things he must have overheard or imagined while he drinks a dry cappuccino before work. He doesn't give me more than a sentence, a moment, a question, but he tells me quiet in the afternoon where we sit side by side in the ordinary, he says, you are a poet, Hilary Joan. But being a poet is stillness incarnate, wild enough to sing freedom to a shuttered heart, soft enough to whisper over you in the desperation of another morning of unknown. Being a poet is love. Being a poet is listening.I've been trying to write this post for so long, to confess the dream, that I want to be a poet -and maybe I need the stillness first.Maybe being quiet here, on this blog, is about learning to listen again for the good words of others. Maybe it is not just the poems that must be still -maybe it must be me.So I will write - words on the page like this - and pray.Childhood Friend,It was a happenstance morninglooking out my windowwhile coffee dripped behind me.My husband slept to the quickrhythm of water. You ranpast - a ghost? A memory.I am no longer young enoughto drink from the well in your backyard,to prance in white dresses, splash pink floweredselves along a sloping hill behind your house,but remember with me oncehow we whispered to each otherclutching teacups in the forbidden living room,grownup ladies dressed as children,children dressed as they someday dreamed.You wore lace beforewe knew its name.Our friendship grew barefoot and wild,your mother planted roses the yearwe forgot.Seeing you again, out my windowas it rained, your figure cutting throughthe road, the morning,no longer young.I'll be listening. I'll be still.Love,hilary 

a midwife in heaven

She will go before Shakespeare.She will go before Shakespeare in the wild parade of the blessed, after the striving, after the yearning ache or the clambering up mountains to see something (was it just ourselves we wanted to see, after all?).She will come forward, who labored two new beings into the world - the mother, the child - kneeling on a cold bedroom floor in countless houses in the town, kneeling to watch that which God made, new and new again.She will be known among the crowds of the heavenly, and Shakespeare, laughing, will sweep his words aside to make room to praise her.Because this is the kingdom of God, where love is too wild to be measured, where the parade is laughing and ever laughing, at the knots we tangled ourselves in thinking if only we had the recognition or the security of it, the words embossed in prizes or publications, the fame, the knowing.But this is the Kingdom of the anonymous faithful named for all that was glorious in their calling, where the hierarchies are scattered in our abundance of eagerness, where we leave behind how we have named one another - famous or critically acclaimed or somehow not quite enough yet (oh, how often have I named myself that?) -where we leave it behind because the Kingdom is coming, and our joy sees its fullness, and so we abandon decorum and procession and we run, children again, to the throne.This is the Kingdom where a midwife marches in step with a poet, where the bankers and bakers and those who mothered and fathered six children walk through the streets, unknown by accomplishment but known by calling.And some days I sit in a train car with a man whose calling I can hear sounding in me as fierce as my own heartbeat, and I write these words on the back of a receipt from a coffee shop where I met someone two months ago and told us both what I want to write here, what I want to shout to everyone: in the Kingdom of God there is too much joy and too much wonder and too much life abundant that our ladders will be unraveled by the power of the river of living water. I write that the midwife will go before Shakespeare, and laughing, they will praise each other. She will whisper how she saw Twelfth Night once, and he will whisper that he ought to have written ten sonnets in praise of her hands.I sit in a train car in a green dress in summer, remembering how my friend, she first told me this truth: that a midwife will go before Shakespeare, that in a Kingdom where last is first, our measurements fall to pieces, and this will be joy to us.Thy Kingdom come. 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

dear hilary: a gradual slope

Dear Hilary,There was a boy, a wild and free and brave boy who did the best he could to hurt me as little as possible. and he really made me braver, trusting God more, and less selfish than i thought possible. regardless of whether or not i would've chosen him as husband - i, undoubtedly, still love him. essentially, though, he had to say 'i like you, alot. but not always.' and now that we've both had about a month off work, we're back in the same office - not simply completing the same tasks in separate cubicles, but a part of the same ministry - planting and growing the Word, in a community that's washing each other's feet kind of family. we're not afforded the opportunity to 'have space.'How do i help my heart mend, not simply from being hurt, but from being hurt that his eyes are light and as sparkling as ever; he talks to me without regret or sadness, and that seems to have been the case from day one. i'm learning to let go, but what do i do about the lump in my throat that comes when i see how easily his fingers let loose?Love,I still notice itDear I still notice,It must have been winter, because there was ice on the sidewalk during our three minute meander to the theater. It must have been almost spring though, too, because I almost fell once or twice as the ice melted under our feet, a hopeful kind of melting, as if the ground itself wanted to be free of the long months of February and March. I'd known him more than a year. I'd passed notes for a few months. Once I tied one with some blue ribbon I found in an unused classroom during lunch and I impulsively wrote, "love hilary" on the outside of the note, creased it again and again in my pocket before I gave it to him.So it must have been the end of winter when he told me that "he liked me too much" to have ever wanted a relationship. He told me almost laughing, a joke we were sharing that I couldn't catch the punchline of. I remember vaguely that he wore the same jacket to school every day, a brown frayed corduroy one that made me wonder if he was cold walking to and from his car every morning across the frozen parking lot. He said so many things in that walk to theater, his laughter moving so swiftly to confusion and then something that sounded like pity. Because he liked me too much, we'd make an amazing power couple, but you see, as friends.I saw him at school every day for the next four months. We had lunch in a group together every week, his brown corduroy jacket and his old sneakers and all I could think when it was happening was how could he laugh like that, tell stories about his guitar or the rival high school debate team, how could he be so whole, while I sat and thought my life would surely end and it could never be the same and it was never and always and everything, and I was heartbroken.So I wanted to tell you and me both, me that girl not all that long ago, who longed for him to long for her, who wondered (and still wonders) about the wholeness we think we understand in other people - I wanted to tell us that hearts mend on a gradual slope. You walk through each day and notice one hundred things. You walk through the next, and perhaps you only notice 97, perhaps there are three things, the way he holds a coffee cup, the laugh he has when he heard something that makes him nervous as well as happy, the sound of his fingers against a keyboard, that somehow fade. And the next day, maybe something comes back, and something else leaves, and time is the healer not because time makes anyone less the wonder that you always knew them to be, but because we move in the slow swirl of the months and days, and we are freed by the movement. You don't know how he is healing - and I say it in the present tense because even if he ended things, he must also heal, mend, build back together his self from the threads and pieces of what's come before. How he moves along the gradual slope is hidden from you. How he heals in the midst of seeing your lovely self, and all the hundred small things he knows about you - how you hold a coffee cup and laugh in the morning and sign your name on an office birthday card - is his. Yours is yours. If you can, try not to compare how it looks like he feels to how you know yourself to feel.You mend by moving in the swirl of those months, by sharing the space you must share but not looking too long or too worried in his direction at the conference table.We are freed by the movement. We are freed by the way time so gently journeys us back and away and yes, at the pace it must be, you will find yourself looking again - and you have let go.Love,hilary

I pray with the animals

I'm at a loss for the words this early in the morning, sitting as I am at the gate waiting for a plane to bring me home and away. Those lines have blurred, God, I think half-heartedly, and I am impatient for the days when it is no longer the slow waltz of leaving and arriving, the dance outside terminals and in airport parking lots and along the back roads of Newburyport and The Woodlands. I am impatient for the hands clasped, for the dishes drying in my hands and the soft hum as we waltz through the night laced in each other's arms. Impatient, I grip the pen tighter, ask for the right words, ask for the prayer. But I don't know how to put this in words flung up to God this morning as August begins, and my words flee from me the moment I lower my eyelids in the ordinary, obedient way. The fear of leaving, the joy of arriving, they crowd in and I hesitate.I remember that I brought the book with me at just this moment - a ghost of a whisper to remember that Carmen Bernos de Gasztold offered prayers, those of the lark and the bee and the old, tired camel. I crack the spine slightly in my haste, smooth the pages with my fingertips. The flight attendants call those who need to board with small children - but aren't I just such a child? - and I read. The Prayer of the FoalO God! the grass is so young!My hooves are full of capers.Thenwhy does this terror start up in me?I raceand my mane catches the wind.I raceand Your scents beat on my heart.I race,falling over my own feet in my joy,because my eyes are too bigand I am their prisoner:eyes too quick to seizeon the uneasiness that runs through the whole world.Dear God,when the strange nightprowls round the edge of day,let Yourself be moved by my plaintive whinny;set a star to watch over meand hush my fear.Amen.--I was only seven or eight when I first wanted a horse. My grandfather in England gave me The Very Best Book of Horses and I read it so much my fingers smudged the ink of the headings, wore the pictures to almost nothing with my fingers tracing the outline of the girls in their riding outfits and English saddles. I met a pony once in a field in England, an old white one with grey spots scattered on her body, more from age than a dappled beginning. I fed her sweet grass slowly from the palm of my hand, and just once, Dad let me touch her nose. I startled as I felt her breathe, my hand calmed by her slowness, my heart hushed by her deep eyes.--When I was trying to explain my fear to her in the dark of the upstairs in the student center, on the chairs we always sat in when it was that kind of conversation, I told her I was like a horse. Steady and skittish, born at once with gravity and with wild movement. I was afraid, and eager. I felt God ripple through my heart like the zephyrs in late spring here, which trace the edge of the water, but I was scared, running for the hills, afraid of such closeness. I was always eager and afraid.--And then, that winter night I wandered through the bookcases in the attic, searching for the old story, for "If it's a colt you want, I'll give you Starlight" - for Almanzo and Eliza Jane and Royal, for the Christmas and the schoolyard and the year that Dad first read me the story out loud. I found our hardcopy sitting in between other old and musty books, remembering how I, like Almanzo, had always wanted a colt, how I had wanted a farm like his and to build a sled and train two cows, Star and Bright, and plow my way through waist-deep snow into school. I remember being lost in the story, in the somehow realness of it, just because I knew how much Almanzo had wanted a horse, for I wanted one too.--I read the prayer on the plane again and again, closing my eyes only to open them again. I remember how God cherishes the creation of the animals, how He teaches us to love them in Adam's naming. I remember how it is good to imagine the conversations they must have with God, for this whole earth is bursting with songs back to the Creator. Right before we land, I write:Dear Lord, may I ever remember how Your creatures, wild and tamed, young and old, yield their life as praise of their being, of Your creating. May I give the same praise lark-like and with the canter of the horse, for all that You give. For Yours is the world. And Yours the glory. Amen. 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

one year ago (to my sister)

Dear sister,A year ago, right now, we were standing in the hot summer Colorado sun, standing and posing and laughing and trying to jump in the air while not landing badly on three inch silver heels (and yes, I managed to still trip in them, but at least it wasn't while walking down the aisle). We were in the midst of this good day that God had made, our hair neatly curled and our makeup spotless, and when you walked outside in that dress I knew no one had ever looked that beautiful before.You have always been the one to go first, the one with braces first and a car first, the one who got to be in a marching band and the one who went to school dances and proms. I remember sneaking into your room when you weren't around during your senior year of high school and trying on the dress from your junior prom. Do you remember it - you'd gotten it from Filene's, I think, and I had seen you come out of the dressing room and I had thought, no one was as beautiful. I never had a prom; but I remember sitting in the cramped auditorium seats that year to watch you walk across the stage - the Grand March, they called it - my face eager for just a glimpse of you.And I remember the time that Mom and Dad traveled away, and the boys went with them - to England, I think - and it was just you and me at home. You picked me up from school and we ate dinner together at the kitchen table and then went to Starbucks (something we wish we could do more than we do now), and I told you about the boy I liked, and you smiled at me and told me to wait and see, that God would bring the best thing at the right time. You told me that boys are complicated. You told me that hearts hurt but that they also heal. I still think about that now.And then I remember, smiling and laughing as I write this, that phone call when he proposed, and it was midnight our time but I waited up for you. We crowded in the hallway just by the linen closet between my room and our parents', and we could all hear how your joy spilled over the phone line and time change, how surprised you were, how good it was. I carry that memory with me, too, and I can remember the feel of the floorboards creaking as I paced back and forth, listening to the story, overwhelmed and overjoyed.And then last year, when I walked down the aisle before you, when I turned, finally at my place, and saw you and Dad walking together, I thought then, too, that no one was as beautiful as you were. And then you married the man whose heart is wide and honest and faithful. You married the man who makes you laugh and smile quiet, the man who builds a home with you and prays with you and loves you.One year ago, we were in the middle of your wedding day, silver shoes and a blue dress, and I carry those memories with me as I sit in a Starbucks in Texas, while the afternoon rolls on and the sky outside is the same blue as that Colorado sky.You teach me the way of love is a long journey, a daily obeying, a moment by moment cherishing. You teach me that there is more to it than high school boys and the Friday nights without someone to take us to the movies. You teach me that it is built in the ordinary, in the every day, in all the small things that turn beautiful in their time.You were the most beautiful bride I have ever seen, one year ago -but you are more beautiful now,and every year forward, because you keep teaching us to love. Because you keep loving.Love,your sister

the ache is still beautiful, 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,I will never, ever, ever, EVER do long-distance.Was that what I said? Did I say that to you once, in a conversation, in passing, probably tilting my head the way I do when I'm not sure what I'm saying is true, but I want to convince you that I'm being really thoughtful? I imagine you were painting in your garage at the time, and I could hear the paint hit the canvas with some kind of fierceness that I didn't understand. You paint forcefully, and sometimes I think maybe that's the way of making beauty; a little forceful, the way that brightness asks for strength to bear it. Sometimes, when we're on Skype and you can't see me, I close my eyes, and listen to you painting, and the silence says more than my words will.But me and that long distance. My vehemence when I said those words seems to grow in my memory, a defiance to it I'm not sure was there, but makes a story somehow wilder, so I tell it that way. I was stamping my feet against the old hardwood of my bedroom floor, or something like that, insisting that the way of love must be just something daily, something clear and easy and full of Friday nights barefoot on a beach or along a boardwalk somewhere and that attempting to build across miles and continents and time changes was the worst idea, ever.Never mind the stories I have been told my whole life. Never mind the long walk through the woods behind campus that sunlit afternoon when my dear friend told me that our choices weren't ever about distance, but about steadfastness in the face of it. That distance could be agonizingly hard but that the space created between those two distinct places, and those two distinct people, would be nearer and closer, a mystery closed to those who watch it. And of course that afternoon, when my mother opened the pages of her own writing to me, the binding frayed and worn by love and how she, like me, said she'd never do long distance.But I knew the ache already, I said. I knew the work. I knew the uncertainty. I would never give it a try.I knew so little, P. I knew so little of the ache.Because this? This ache is beautiful.This is the ache of remembering how we sit side by side at that kitchen table and make worlds with our words, offering each other living water for the journey. This is the ache of how I can hear how you laugh with me, almost falling off your chair, how I can feel your hand brush the small of my back as we go up for Eucharist, how I remember the way you look at me sometimes, this look of wonder that just takes my breath away.This is the ache of how our hearts whisper loud across time zones but gentle when we're in the same room. This is the ache of wanting to tell you when I burst in the door out of breath from running with God that I realized, just then, the radical grace that is when God and I are quiet, together, how I can feel Him running with me but how sometimes, when I complain to Him (like I did the other day) that He feels far away His words are sharp and quick about the reason He runs with me (love, and sanctification, and my feeble heart). I'm longing to tell you, not in messages or typed words, but in the look on my face and the unspoken question I know you'll ask me, and how I will answer just by nodding and smiling. And we will have said a thousand things without saying them.I knew nothing about the wild love of long distance. I knew nothing about how the bridges it builds withstand the longest days and heaviest hearts, how the spaces of Skype and these two blogs and how you write my name on an envelope, they are spaces that are gifts, too. And I am the first to say, to you, to whoever might read this, that the distance aches and hurts and the dip and sway of it sometimes knocks me over.But I'd not be me if I didn't admit to you, that more truly, I knew so little of this, how beautiful it is. How wondrous they seem now, the people I thought foolish for trying something I called impossible. How beautiful, how brave. How I now want to call each of them up and say, "I need you to know I see your courage and your strength, how you wove the threads that kept you, cocooned in love." How I want to tell them that the ache is agonizing and how I miss you,but how their ache, and ours, is still beautiful.Love, always,hilary

the words of living water

My knees  knock together when I step out of the pew and walk forward. I've read in church before, but I clutch the printout tightly, creasing it in my hands before I bow at the altar, in the way I've been trying to show the youngest among us, - we bow because this is a holy place - and I step up to the lectern."A reading from the Book of Genesis, chapter 18." This is the story of Abraham, who dares to stand before the Lord Almighty, who speaks - Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? - and whom God answers - if I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. This is the story of Abraham, who dares again and again to stand and draw near, and whom God answers, again and again revealing His justice, so wildly compassionate - that even for the sake of forty-five, of forty, thirty, twenty, ten, He will not destroy it. --It is Fr. Patrick's ordination to the priesthood in Boston - I'm not quite a teenager, I think, but he has asked me to read the Old Testament lesson, to speak it out into the crowds gathered in clean whites and blues. I'm scared to move in the space, because the holiness of the incense and the quiet as we wait for the processional is too much for my still-young heart. I'm scared to read, scared to hear my voice carrying out His message. I'm not quite a teenager, but I know I'm not a vessel worthy of this Word."A reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 6." I take deep breaths, and I close my eyes. Dad taught me to speak in church, slow, looking out over the lectern into the faces of those who receive these words, because these are the people hungry for the Word. This is the vision where the seraphim call to one another - holy, holy, holy is the Lord  of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory!  - and as I peer out, my hands white at the knuckles against the sides of the carefully carved lectern, I see that I am not alone in the rapture of this moment, not alone, after all, because we all together must be whispering what I say next - I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!. And then, just as I realize that I am not alone - Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, Behold,  this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for." I tell out that promise to the crowds of faces, these words that we too, who are a people of unclean lips, we too can be touched.--I wear the dress on purpose in case he'd be there - one shoulder, black, and I wear the leopard printed flats that I always think make my feet look smaller, more delicate. I straightened my hair and circled eyeshadow across my eyelids in my parent's mirror.  I'm reading the Fourth Lesson tonight, and I pray suddenly, in my pew, that somehow, the words will sound new to me, too."The peace that Christ will bring is foreshown." I close my eyes. When I open them again, I hear a voice, which must be mine, but it's stronger and it's richer and it is saying words of living water. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. I forget the boy I dressed for, though I see him in the back of the church, though our eyes pass each other, because when I hear that voice, which must be mine, reading these, the better words of living water, I am returned back into the mystery of these words who bear to us the Word, this mystery that by our sounding out the words to each other -we meet the Lord, the King, the Judge of all the Earth who does what is just, the shoot from the stump of Jesse whose delight is in the fear of the Lord.--I still knock my knees together every time I walk up the aisle to read. I still feel the twelve year old worried that everyone will see that I am still too young to stand before the congregation. I still take deep breaths to steady myself -and ever, always, I drink the living water of the Word.Love,hilary

dear hilary: keep a vigil

Dear Hilary,How do you love your friends when something happens - something hard or scary or sad or all of the above? How do you say something when everything is unsayable? When you're thrown for a loop, when someone moves and the other stays, when someone is changing and it all seems to go so fast you can't get your mind to wrap around it, and it feels like everything is on the brink of being lost? How do you love them when you don't even know yourself what it is you should say, or all the words dry up like sawdust in your mouth the second you think to speak them?Love,A worried friendDear A worried friend,A friend loves at all times. That's Proverbs. I heard it first on a promotional video at a conference full of women older than me, women with children and husbands and dreams I sometimes had trouble understanding, we were in such different places. I heard it, the words lilting out over a full audience while I held a seven month old girl as she whimpered for her mother, who was the one speaking those words, her South African accent adding a dip and pull to the syllables. I stored it up, those words in her voice in that crowded hotel ballroom, stored it up for a moment like yours, when the telephone lines of friendship get tangled and we fear, desperately, that we have lost a connection.A friend loves at all times.You have to keep a vigil now. It is a deep and difficult practice, one that will test your ability to forgive and be the forgiven. You have to walk the long road in the middle of the night, the daily work of loving in the midst of change, the daily work of accepting that perhaps you do not understand but you love, and understanding is not needed before we love, it is a gift we receive in the midst of love.You have to keep a vigil, because when we are fragile creatures of bones and skin and heart muscle beating out of time with itself and when we live in a world where everything that we thought we knew we did not know, and all that we assumed we could never face until we were grown up we face today. Keep a vigil over this friend, from whatever distance or proximity, from whatever time of day or night.The same night I heard that message I remember not sleeping. It might have been the pullout couch mattress in the hotel room, or it just might have been my heart, sore and tired from asking those hungry and impatient questions. I crept out of bed, and into the tiny hotel bathroom, and stared at myself in the mirror. My face was pale, my freckles like tiny stars sprinkled over the bridge of my nose. I was so tired, and I wanted to sleep, and I stood with the cold bathroom tile against my feet and then I lay down on the floor, curled into a ball, and cried and cried and cried. I stopped only to worry that I was waking the woman sleeping peaceful in her bed next to me. I stopped to listen for the baby, and her steady breathing. But oh, how I cried that night, that hotel bathroom in Hershey, Pennsylvania keeping watch over me and the people I was holding onto and the people who, I knew, I must set free.That was a vigil.It's sometimes like that.Be unafraid to keep it messy. Be unafraid to have days when you don't want to watch, when you run and your hands brush your face and you wonder why you have been called to this. Be unafraid of how your heart is fragile and is breaking, always breaking, because in breaking it is freed again and again for that refrain, which I know you can hear echoing - a friend loves at all times. Keep a vigil over it. And look out over the night - can you see us all, our thousand tiny flames lit beside you? You are not alone.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

dear hilary: honor is not in a tan line

Dear Hilary,Beach season is a self-conscious time for most girls, but sometimes as a Christian I find it especially stressful.  On the one hand, I have society and the media telling me that my body is hideous and that I'll never be considered attractive unless I can live up to an unreachable standard.  On the other hand, I have church culture telling me that as a girl, my body is TOO attractive, to the point where I need to be ashamed of it and keep it covered up at all costs to "protect" the men folk, and I get raised eyebrows from church friends when I say that I'm thinking about buying a bikini for the first time this summer.  As a Christian, how can I learn to be comfortable in my own skin without being improper?  And how can I shut out the noise long enough to just relax and enjoy a summer day by the ocean?Love,Modestly PerplexedDear Modestly Perplexed,I love you in the midst of this question. I love how you grapple with it, the wonder about the line that doesn't really exist in the ways we want it to - the line between feeling not attractive enough about ourselves and feeling too attractive towards other people. I want to tell you loud and bright in the midst of this, if I can put my two cents in, since you've asked?buy the bikini.don't forget sunscreen (my upper back will testify to the pain that comes with sunburn...), and take a book from the library with its crinkling plastic protector that creaks slightly as you turn the pages.I don't tell you because buying or wearing a bikini is the only stamp of approval or a self who sees her self well. I don't tell you because I think everyone should, or because I think that by putting it on you will answer the question about modesty and attraction and the whole mess of expectations and cultural norms that come with them. Modesty is about honor, not tan lines.  Modesty is about an attitude towards your body and others, not about a mystery ledger of rules that say, hemlines of this length or longer or shirts of this material but not that, or dresses that swivel with your hips slightly, but not extremely...So truthfully, I think our choices about what to wear follow from our other choices about how we want to walk through the day, how we want to approach one another, how we want to see one another. We can't buy a bikini and hope that it will make us brave or fearless on its own - we have to choose the brave and fearless when we're wearing two sweaters and a pair of jeans. And we can't hope those two sweaters and a pair of jeans will make us magically modest - we have to choose the attitude of modesty and honor when we're wearing the bikini.Maybe it's a wild hope of mine that we can gather back from the stray corners of this or that book or blog post or church conversation or pinup calendar a better sense of what it means to live inside these beautiful bones. Maybe it's wishful thinking that you and I can take the questions tumbling from you about being free and beautiful and alive, and lay them next to questions about being thoughtful and attentive and sensitive - and do that free of the chaos of voices with loud opinions and tape measures.But I'm going to hope for that. I'm going to go ahead and say you won't come up with the same answers that I will, or that your next-door neighbor will, because we live and move with different communities and so our choices, in seeking to honor others and ourselves, will be different. We needn't fear that. We need to listen to each other. If the girl in the pew next to you makes different choices about modesty and her body, listen first. Why does she choose that? And listen without feeling that her choice is a secret expectation on you to choose the same - honor is in listening and upholding one another in how we learn to live out these questions in our own skin.I can see you wanting to run along the ocean at the turn of the tide,  build a sandcastle in the middle of the afternoon for hours, turrets and a moat and a driftwood drawbridge, chase after the joy of summer and let the sun warm your shoulders.Buy the bikini. I know it's beautiful.Love,hilary

the greater work, 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,

She asked me while the rest of the congregation was singing the third verse of the hymn, which I can't remember in this moment, why I was so nice. She smiled up at me as she said it, flung her arms around my neck and hugged me as if she might never see me again. Her hair was in two braids, which she proudly swung from side to side to show me - "do you like my braids? Mommy did them!" And I held her close, feeling the small weight that is somehow cosmic, that in this small person there are more wonders than in all the world, because she is fearfully made, because she is. That wonder of being - that you talk about in your letter, that simple and terrifying complicated wonder of being. She is, and as I hold her, and she says, in her outdoor voice, "I love you so much!" I close my eyes.

But before I really pray, before I really get to the moment of something deep and beautiful whispered over her, before any of that, she crawls off my lap and runs back to her pew, flings her arms around her brother and waves to me, before they both take each other's hands and go to Sunday School.

I think that's the way of the world, Preston, the way that I have trouble with - that what we cherish we must somehow release.

I got to hold her for a few minutes, but as she wriggled free and tumbled off my lap and ran back to her family, her lavender dress billowing from the fan and the wind that always moves through the sanctuary, I remembered that the act of holding is, must be, an act of release.

I want to hold onto her forever. I want to hold onto people and places, hold the whole wide world in my hands (I played that for you on the backroads, your hand in mine). I used to think that was the great work: to hold fast, to hold people secure in your heart and your arms and your thoughts about them. I used to think it was the great work to stay close with your arms encircled and your eyes closed, praying over the little girl while she nestled against you.

But the truth is the greater work is to hold one another, hold this world that we want, as you say, through the threaded grace of wanting it because of God, who is the first mover and the first lover of the world - hold all that, and then release it.

And I think about the Cross, how those arms outstretched are at the same moment holding us close to the heart of a God who is too terrifying to be understood, and releasing us into the water that flows from the right side of the temple, releasing us into the life that He came to give fully, releasing us from the embrace of the world into the embrace of God. Offering and release. They're connected, I think.

If we close our selves, even around the things we love most, arms encircled around the little girl and her braids or around the best friend or around even the moments of walking through fields of shocking red and purple in Southern France -

if we hold them too closely, we cannot make the gesture of offering. Our bodies which mirror our hearts cannot do the greater work: the work of loving so fiercely and so wildly that we do, in fact, release our hold on that which we love - 

if we hold them too closely, we lose the moment to see them as gift, to offer back praise to the Giver - 

if we hold them too closely, we miss the greater work of love. 

Love, always, 
hilary