when this is two months of gratitude

There are long days. The days where you wake up full of your own self, your own thoughts, your own worries - and there is the other person, the one whom you love, awaiting you.And you brush your teeth and think about what clothes to wear and what work needs to be done that day, and you think you'll fall behind if you don't spend every ounce of yourself in your new work, in school, in all the big bold things God brought you here to do.And you'll eat your yogurt and say something you don't even think twice about, which is the problem, of course, that you didn't even think about it, and then you are caught, not just by this person whom you love - no, you are caught too by that description of Jesus from Philippians 2 -

"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:Who, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with Godas something to be exploited;but emptied himselftaking the form of a slave,being born in human likeness.And being found in human form,he humbled himselfand became obedient to the point of death -even death on a cross."

And it goes on, this kenotic hymn of such clarifying, terrifying beauty, you know that moment you hear something you keep wishing you wouldn't hear?  Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed - not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence - continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2.4-8 above, then 12-13)Most of the time, my husband goes first in the self-emptying.I am grateful that marriage is a self-emptying work. One that I fail at, more often than I can accurately describe. Because the work isn't a trick of convention or a sudden blaze of glory. It is smallness made holy, an unbecoming of so much of what we grow accustomed to being - caught in our own worlds, however beautiful they are, however good, however purposeful. We grow used to our largeness, the hero-of-our-own-life-ness, the safety of being wrapped up in ourselves.And then we are charged to work out our salvation, to self-empty, to loosen our grasp of the secure circular thoughts and to love one another. To love another.My husband so often goes first. So often, he asks the first question, calls out for me, insists on knowing what's behind the sigh or the half smile or the look-away or the hopeful side glance. And in the long days, when even your two-months-of-gratitude post is late, that calling out is an aching kind of love.I don't know if gratitude can truly capture it, how it makes me see him, see myself, how often I forget that we live and move in tandem with each other, how it is such work, such hard, gratifying, knees in the dirt work, to love each other.He reminds me to cherish the work that is love.The longest days, when it takes self-emptying, you sense that you are at the very beginning of the work. You eat your yogurt and you hear God tell you again -This work of love is the coming alive of you.To have this mindset, as was in Christ Jesus,to empty, to become small again, to rememberthe terrifying and beautiful fear and trembling,and God, who works in us.Love,hilary 

dear hilary: shun that bulls**

Dear Hilary,What do you do with the "what if's"? What do you do when you're smiling, writing him a letter, confident of the love you have for him--and then that nasty little "what if" crawls its way into the back of your skull? What do you do when you want to believe that you'll be a good wife and mother and student and friend and God-seeker-follower-lover but that "what if" comes and tells you that you will mangle and destroy and harm everything you touch and that the sin and fear you hate so utterly will tie you down and win?love,doubting thomasinaDear doubting thomasina,I try not to swear too much. It's not so much because I don't believe it's ever right but more because I want to be sure that I do so powerfully - that I name things what they are, that I respond with force to things that are forceful, vehemently to things which deserve my vehemence.And the "what ifs", my dear, are not more nor less than bullshit.Yep. I said that word, and I would say it again. The what if's, which slide up to you, glamorous, sleek, offering you a glimpse into the future, the chance to plan ahead, the chance to give you a head start on everything coming your way - they're a bad apple. A bucket of bad apples.The question, "What if this happens?" sidles up to you, and suddenly, then, it seems almost irreversibly, you're far and away down the road of worrying, convinced you've got it wrong and you look behind you and the what if is far away down the road, laughing.I believe that this is the work of darkness in the heart. I'm acquainted with this darkness. I can spin into questions about whether I am a good wife or a good student or a good anything, and from there I ask, "what if I'm not those things and I've been seriously f***ing up every part of my life from birth until now?" It grows, like shadows do at the end of the day - quickly and without warning. And, like darkness, the what if's make you lose your sense of touch, make you feel like you're waving your hand in front of you but you can't feel anything, can't be sure of anything, can't hold onto anything.Oh, how I am acquainted with this.And then there is the fluttering flag planted in your beautiful letter: What do you do?Can I call it, perhaps, how do we overcome? This is what I believe with every fiber of my being: we overcome this bs by shunning it. We gloriously slam the door in its face when it knocks, when it comes around to the side porch, we look at it, and we say "no." Say it with me. No.There is space in the wide wild kingdom of God to overcome - and it begins with no.It begins with shouting back, and I mean it, say it out loud in your room and say it out loud in your letters and say it loud in church or in the car or in the woods, speak it out:I belong to Jesus.Do you remember how Jesus showed us the picture of ourselves, trembling, vulnerable lambs, and then told us - "I am the Good Shepherd"?He said more than that. He said that his sheep know him. That we know the sound of his voice.You writing this to me tells me you know that there is something wrong with the voice of the what-if. It doesn't sound like Jesus, does it? It doesn't sound like the Good Shepherd. It doesn't sound like hope, like love, like confidence in Him through whom we are more than conquerors, through whom we are co-heirs, through whom we are raised up on the last day and never lost.The voice of the what-if is the voice of a stranger.You can call bullshit on that.You can shout-sing-cry-whisper-pray-rage it, tell it that you belong to Jesus, that you do not listen to the voice of the stranger.And then, however you can, in words or tears, in laughter or hope or something else altogether, ask Jesus to call out to you again who you already are. Ask Jesus to tell you the better story of your life, of your hope, of your wonder, of your worth. Ask Jesus, "who am I?"Hear yourself called beloved again. Then, holding onto that, shun those what-ifs.Love,hilary

in the land of the living

I keep thinking about prayer. I keep wanting pray in this space, to tell you something, to lean over and bend knees and heart with you. 

This is what I pray over us, we who live and move in the ragged tumble towards heaven, on the outskirts of certainty, we who have thrown off the confidence we used to wear so timidly - 

I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. - Psalm 27.13

In the land of the living. The goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, the present, the here and now that builds and begins and springs forth under our feet. I cry it out in between stoplights, as I cross under the highway in the middle of fearing that I will never know the goodness of the Lord because I am not enough. 

I pray this wildly over us, abandoning for a moment the usual lilting words, the customary blog post format, the worries that you'll think less or differently of me - 

I pray that King Jesus, in whom we are more than conquerors, will cast forth from you all that keeps you from the hope of the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

I pray that Jesus will show up, right in the middle of wherever you are, disrupt the everyday where we become so good at avoiding him, and remind you that nothing in this world and nothing to come, nothing in heaven or on earth, can separate you from Him: 

not exams nor papers written late into the night

not a messy house nor a missed deadline

not a broken heart nor a mending one

not what you have nor what you don't 

not fighting nor going silent nor raging nor the thing you shouldn't have said but you did nor the thing you meant to say and forgot nor the misunderstanding nor the awkward afternoon nor the time wasted or well spent...

None of it can separate you from the love of God in Jesus.  

I would have lost heart tonight between stoplights. I would have lost heart in the beginning of doing a new thing and being so afraid of failing at it - I would have lost heart in the promises of God, right there three blocks away from home -

But I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

We will see this goodness, this year, this month, this week, because we are in the land of the living and we are walking with a God who covenants with a people the promise of His presence. We are in the midst of God, of the goodness of God, of the love of God. I believe you will see it stretched wide and loud over your life. I believe you will find that God comes into the midst of you, disrupting the comfortable patterns, the way you think at stoplights or when you're folding laundry, the quiet despair that creeps into our days that what we do is not enough. 

I believe the goodness of the Lord will be seen in this land of the living.

I pray that we stumble into this believing until it has nestled between our bones. I pray that we call out to God to keep His promises to us. I pray that we get on our knees often, preaching the power of the love of God, preaching the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

I believe it tonight; that I will see this goodness. I'm whispering it over us.

Love,
hilary

draw nearer and i will show you

I want to write, and I can't think of anything, and I think I should tell a story. I think I should return into the past, back to a hill, to a late-night on the street outside the athletic complex, to the long looping drive to Great Neck in Ipswich, which is best at twilight when you have too much on your mind to sound it out. I think writing is this work of building a story out of what has happened, to explain in artful just-long-enough paragraphs the way he looked and she sighed, the way I knew then and there that I would remember that moment and it was a lesson. 

But the great work of remembering is not always good. 

It is tremendous effort to gather the scattered bits of a story from across our mind and resew it, present it back as a whole. This is the beginning - when I walked out the door, and here is the middle, when I was wearing old tennis shoes, and here the end, when I gather the wisdom as the door of my car clicks shut. And then this is the lesson of the story, the point where I see again the gracious goodness of God, where I see freedom beckoning, where I stand up for myself and the story is a triumph story and I retell it again and again remembering. 

Oh, I would like to believe it is always good to remember. 

I would like to live in my memories, recreating again and again the way that it went, exaggerating my innocence, their unfathomability, which I relive, claiming to seek understanding, but really, it's just to comfort and rejustify the parts of it I suspect might yet need to be laid on the altar. I think to myself that if I keep the story closer, if I tell it to enough times, how I learned the wisdom or how I kept the faith... that will be the making of me. 

I have told some stories to myself far too many times. 

I have reveled in the revisit, conjuring up images brighter than the first of the summer blackberries glistening on their spidery branches - what I wore and just what I said, and how it happened next that this one song started playing, and when I hear the song this is what I go back to. 

I'd be happy to keep doing it if Jesus didn't interrupt me almost constantly these days to ask questions. Hilary, he begins, as I start to hum the opening bars of the guitar chords of that song that was playing at the time that... Hilary. 

How does this honor me? 

What a question, Jesus, and I can hear the scoff in my voice as I think the words in my head. Isn't the telling of these stories the point of it all? Look at the wisdom I have. Look at the understanding I have gained. Look, look, look at what I have been through and what it means and how I got through it in this glorious way. 

Yet the question remains. How does this honor me? 

I try to keep assembling the pieces of the stories, to keep my eyes fixed on that one time in high school and then that letter he wrote me at the end of a long summer and then that time she and I argued about whether God existed in a Starbucks when they still had the beautiful purple chair to sink into after a long day. 

The pieces crumple, like ash, like dust. I am trying so hard to remember the stories of how I was wronged and how I have been hurt and how I am so good at overcoming. But when have I told myself the stories of how only through Him am I more than a conqueror? Have I ever written the words on the doorposts of my house, on my forehead, on my heart, written the story that those to come might yet praise? Have I remembered the encounter with God on the drive home more than the two drinks and the heartbreak that came before it? How long, O Lord, have I been making the stories after my own desired image of myself, rehearsing my part pitch-perfect, lingering in the hallways of the past for the rush of the feeling? 

There is nowhere to hide from the question anymore, and as it catches up to me, I am afraid. Without these bits of dust, without these bits of the person I think I was and the way I want to remember myself to have been - what then? 

Jesus only says, Draw nearer to me, and I will show you. 

Love,
hilary

I'm leaning harder

"You've changed." He tells me this as we're getting ready to turn in for the night among the whir of electric toothbrushes and the ripples of the brush through my hair. I turn, still trying to loose stray knots from the red lion's mane around my neck. "Changed?"I know you're thinking that this is an obvious one: marriage changes you. He nods. "Yeah. You're more sure of yourself. You're leaning harder into Jesus, too."We keep talking, our voices circling in the dark, how things are new and different, how my thinking has sharpened on some things, how we've both learned to weigh and sift our words anew, because we live with someone who wears our words like birth marks on their skin. We slowly drift into the silence, the comforting dark of another day that has been put to rest.But I can't fall asleep. I'm still thinking about that, the leaning harder, the change.It's not that marriage changes you that surprises me: it's the weight of the change. It's the way you carry the change in your ribcage and guard it like your bones guard your heart. How you feel it differently, more than just self-awareness or increased confidence or courage, feel it some more physical than that, feel it in those tugging counts of the hairbrush and in the whirring electric toothbrush.I've said for years I don't do change well. That I'm a creature of habits of my own making, that if I want to be spontaneous I want to the only one in control of that spontaneity, the one who decides to change the plan. I've declared foolishly that I'm just not very good at it and thought it would be a sufficient excuse to never have to do it. I thought God would give me a pass on transformation bigger than the ones I say I'm ready for.But the Spirit moves us along in the wiser pace - the pace we wouldn't set for ourselves. So here I am, being changed in big ways, ways that make even the word marriage bigger because it has now begun to mean all that changing, all that becoming between me and my husband and our voices circling in the dark.I'm weak-kneed from the changing. Maybe that's why I lean so much harder. Maybe we lean into Jesus not out of the virtue of feeling like we have the time, or we simply desire it - maybe we lean in desperation. Because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and his joy in my changing in the ways that are perhaps much more than I wanted is the strength in me to do the changing, to submit to the changing.So I lean harder on Jesus because Jesus calls the change forth from me in this marriage, in the little ark of family that my husband and I make every day, and because Jesus is the way to change.But what about that other part? Me being more sure of myself?I'm still awake, my eyes searching the ceiling, my hands over the blanket, tracing a pattern in the quilt. Most of the changes these past weeks make me weak-kneed, remember? So how can that make me sure of myself?In an Orthodox church near my hometown there is an icon of Mary, called in Greek the platytera, which means "wider" or "more spacious."  The icon is of Mary, her womb a golden circle with Christ inside, holding up a hand in blessing. Mary's hands are outstretched, a position of prayer.I think about that icon often, for it puts an image to the meaning of Christian - to be a bearer of Christ. To bear Christ in this world, even as Mary did. Somehow this is not separated from her hands in prayer, the way that she is presenting Christ to the congregation in the icon, even as she presented him while he was on earth and even now as we in turn are sent out each week to put on Christ, to see Christ in one another.Maybe being sure of myself is in this: I am learning what it means to put on Christ, and therein lies my real self, my self that is raised to new life in the power of Jesus. Maybe being sure of myself is not a confidence but a clinging, my own hands and weak knees opened in prayer, my own feeble heart even now becoming more of a home for the living God."I've changed."I whisper the words in the dark as I begin to fall asleep. Perhaps it is its own prayer.Keep me leaning on you, Jesus, where I can be sure of myself.Love,hilary

there is no safe gospel

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13.47-50)

I read this in a room full of light, warmth trickling across my palms on the table. I'm wearing a favorite grey dress. I'm in a circle of thoughtful and kind people, and we are bending our heads in morning prayer, coffee cups nearby, open notebooks. I've been asked to read the Gospel lesson.I read that there will be a separating of the righteous and the evil, that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.And the warmth seems to evaporate from me as I let the words spill forth, proclaimed into the spaces between our rolled up sleeves. The Word of the Lord is living and active, we say - and I speak and Jesus stops me, my comfortable dress, my comfortable coffee, my comfortable posture in a comfortable room full of light.This is an uncomfortable parable.I start to pray in something between a condescending and a wishful-thinking tone of voice, something he is unamused by. I tell myself I am just asking why he preaches to us in stories. But the truth is I'm asking, Why did I have to read that parable? Why couldn't I have gotten to read the one about the pearl of great price or the mustard seed or the treasure in the field? It isn't just that I wonder why he teaches in parables -it's that I don't really want to proclaim the teachings that I don't like or understandthat I don't really want to be linked to something uncomfortablethat I don't really want to be that close to some of the teachings because speaking them out makes me uncomfortable.Jesus just looks back at me.My junior year of college I memorized the first chapter of John in French, a project for a French class. I recited it in a brightly lit room in the morning, wearing a comfortable dress. If I close my eyes now, the words can sometimes still appear - my favorite sentence -Le lendemain, il vit Jésus venant à lui, et il dit: Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.There is no safe Gospel. There is no encounter with the Word that will leave us comfortable. Comforted, perhaps, but only first through the upheaval of our worlds, the collapse of our presuppositions, the relinquishing of our desire to have the easiest story to tell. We cannot claim Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of world if we are clinging to a tamer, easier version, without the uncomfortable parables or the uncertainties or the radical promises or the hardest questions. The power of the declaration is in how unsafe it is, how transforming, how world-shaking.I cannot say, Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde if I am always searching for a way to make Jesus safer, or find Gospel passages easier to read in a brightly lit room in morning prayer.I have to give up my search for the safe Gospel.I'm still wrestling the parable of the nets, still going back again and again for an explanation, for understanding, for the right way to read it.And in the midst of that wrestling, not on the other side of it, not beyond it, not anywhere but the sweating tired mess of giving up the idea that I'll wake up to a comfortable, non-radical Jesus, and trying to learn what it means to preach this unsafe and life-changing Gospel in my life, in my heart, in the world -Voici, l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold.Love,hilary

when this is my anxious heart

My heart is the cave of fearful wonders, a lion made of sand, of endless what-ifs and ideas, and I am Aladdin trying to fly free of the fire, when everything I touch seems to make only more fear. Don't worry, be free of fear, but I'm not free of fear and that means I should try harder and I'm still worried about the original thing which is whether or not I am capable of doing something or excelling at something and now that I think about it I have to manage to give everyone the impression that I've cured myself from all these anxieties that circle me and I have to prove myself a good woman who can be wise and be unafraid and who leaves the troubles of tomorrow for tomorrow.The cave always collapses at the slightest touch, swirls around me the moment I touch the question of how something will happen or work out or be okay. And some days I look around, trapped in the middle of the sea of my anxiety, waiting on a magic carpet to rescue me.--They say that there is a kind of knowledge we don't access as often anymore, the knowledge by analogy. If I tell you what it's like some days in my heart, how it sometimes builds like a hurricane at sea, and I'm battening down whatever hatches I can find, but the storm is still coming, maybe I can give you a glimpse, a recognition.This knowledge requires a deep imagination, they say. I think it requires more than that. I think it requires a kind of courage, to enter with one another into the shape of their world, into the cave of wonders.--So I have said that my anxious heart is like the cave of wonders, but I could tell you, too, that it is like a baby bird, edging to the blue sky beyond the nest. The sky beyond the nest of my worries, the safety of woven fears, is so beautiful. The sky there is an indigo, the kind of sky early in the evening where the world has settled into itself again, where it has turned and will keep turning, and the nights are full of stars and strange beautiful new things and so I am a baby bird edging to get a little closer. There are days when the nest feels safer than surrendering myself to the radical trust in God. There are days when I stretch my wings against the winds of the Spirit and imagine myself flying, free of worry, free of the endless uncertainty of myself or my surroundings or my success or my status or my standing. And some days I take off and the wind lifts under me and I am made alive again.--A cave of wonders. A baby bird. A hurricane. They are all true. Maybe the wondrous thing about the heart is that it can be like so many things at once. It can be known better by the stories we would tell about it than the clinical words we might use to describe it.Maybe kindness to one another is practiced in this: that we imagine by analogy the landscape of our hearts. That we see the baby bird and the hurricane, we see the boat anchored in the deep and the Montana skyline and the quiet river and the chorus of crickets and the countless other thousand things that could be our hearts at any moment.Maybe kindness to myself is in this, too: that I tell stories about my anxious heart more than dwelling only on the word anxious. Maybe I tell God my analogies and hear God say back to me the analogies that God writes and knows and sees in that same heart.Because God sees a new creation in that hurricane baby bird cave of wonders.And God sees a new creation in yours, too.Love,hilary

the first month of gratitude

When this is a month of gratitude.That sounded like a good way to title this post, but truthfully I don't know what to call it.--It's been a month and a day since I married Preston.And in a month I didn't know you could learn so much thankfulness that it seems foolish to try and contain it in words in an online space, seems almost laughable, but then words are cherished vessels, and sometimes, they're what we have, and the writing is a most needed remembering.--I didn't know you would be grateful for the noise of the coffee grinder because it means he lets you stay in bed longer. Or the way that taking out the trash when he's running another errand would mean so much. I didn't know you could learn to revel in doing small things like unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry while watching a show together, how that could be the most romantic afternoon. I didn't know about the joy of takeout or the joy of leftovers that become something new and beautiful tasting under his watchful eye. I didn't know about the Splendid Table podcast or how to share in things that you are new to loving with the one that you love. I didn't know your heart could be taught again and again the meaning of the word, "thank you" when it's dinner or dish washing or keeping track of the ways to use up the vegetables from the farmer's market. How saying thank you would be a thing that he would teach me, day by day, gesture by gesture.--I didn't know that sometimes I would need the discipline of writing down the gratitudes, the way that you must ask of yourself the work of remembering, of thankfulness, because even the deepest love becomes accustomed to itself sometimes and even the thing that was and is and will keep being so wondrous, like making a home with your best friend, asks to be remembered among the work of building it.He has told me more than one about the importance of telling stories, so that things will not be forgotten. He told me again on a drive into the city, my feet in their customary position tucked up under me and my eyes half-closed against the sun. I didn't say anything in the moment, and I should have. He has a wise heart. I should have said that, should have said then and there that he is teaching me the work of remembering and telling the stories, the love stories, the ordinary grace stories, the extraordinary provision stories, the stories that we will write on doorposts in our house that the generation to come might yet praise the Lord.I should have told him the story again of the drive home from the airport the first time, when everything was so new and I didn't know how to lace my fingers through his, when we knew and didn't know how we knew, on that walk leaning late into the hazy rain of June.--It is a month of gratitude, the thousand thanks Ann teaches, spilling out over our days. We must do the work of remembering the blessings, tell again and again the story of manna coming down from heaven and the way that we are provided for, the way that we are loved. We must tell the stories of love at first meeting and the way we build love, gesture  by gesture.This is my first month of gratitude.Love,hilary

dear hilary: building the gates

Dear Hilary,

You seem to be pretty guarded online, while your husband isn’t. This has me asking questions of what I, newly married myself, think about putting my life on the Internet. How do you or you and your husband think about those boundaries? So much of your own relationship, from what I have witnessed, is thanks to the Internet. So, yay Internet! But what about the danger zones or the places where you have to set boundaries?

Sincerely, Newly married and lost in the borderlands

Dear Newlywed,

I was nine years old. I was walking through fields in the south of England, by myself for the first time, on the lanes immediately surrounding my grandparents' house. In England, when you come to a break in the path and it continues onto someone's pasture, there is a high gate that you usually have to climb up a few steps, unhook the gate from the other side, climb over and then rehook the gate after you.

I thought I could scale the fence.

In my purple (probably stolen) sweater and boots that were a little too big for me and these polka dot leggings and let me tell you there were also ruffles on my socks. It was a complete outfit - there I was, trying to clamber up over the fence without any pretense.

It didn't go that well. I got caught on part of the fence and I came dangerously close to ripping said sweater and came very near to losing my balance into a ripe pile of mud and cow pie. I finally gave in and pushed up the heavy iron ring that keeps one post of the fence closed against the other, and proceeded down the other side and on my way to the playground.

What is it about fences?

We try so hard to scale them, Newlywed. We try to be the confidant, the one who is in the know, the person with the most in-depth analysis and interpretation and information. And in a world where so much information is available, is possible to find and have and be the possessor of, I think we take to scaling fences.

It's not all bad. It's not all out of malice or wrong intent. Often I think we find something we love and so, in our eagerness, seek to know everything we can about it. And we usually don't stop long enough to think about whether or not it's something we ought to know.

And in the world of the internet, where a Google search can find you someone's high school photos, it's so easy to start wandering through the middle of the field without thinking too much about where we are walking.

And so my husband and I have worked on our fences. We sat down on car rides or lazy afternoons on the porch while the fall wind ruffled the trees and hammered out where the gates would be. Our blogs - what kind of path of our life did they open to the general public? What kind of personal details do we include in our storytelling along the way? What about Facebook, or Instagram or Twitter?

And we built them slow, and we build them still in the midst of learning about each other, because marriages are living things and so when we meet something new, we ask ourselves: what should go through the gate? What shouldn't? What can shed light and laughter along someone's walk in the woods and what is just ours?

We met because we are writers, because we love the way words sound and feel on a page, because of the ache and promise of them. But for every word that's in the public binary code turned HTML turned text you read on your iPhone screen, there is more to it. There are the thousand things unspoken between us, there are the things spoken only in the whispers across the couch or the front seats of the car, there are the things we remember with and for each other that we keep to ourselves.

The beautiful thing about building fences and gates is that the gate is the gesture of welcome, the fence the gesture of protection, and those two things - welcome, and protection - live together in harmony. Building one doesn't mean that you need to abandon the other.

We need each other's stories along this long and winding road. And we need each other's fences to protect for each other the things that should belong only to a few.

So, Newlywedded, I don't think you're lost in the borderlands: I think you're right where you are, in your plot of land, and you've got some timber and some time with your spouse. Start to build.

We'll love the paths you make for us to walk around in.

Love,hilary

when this is making a home

I was fourteen. The age where all your limbs are back to their newborn feeling, you've changed jeans sizes twice or three times, up and down as your body asserts sheer aliveness. I tripped over things all the time, and more than one well-placed odd brick in the familiar sidewalks in Newburyport were my undoing all summer.Dread finds you like a slow drop of water dragging its way down your back. It slides over you, leaves a sticky trail behind in its wake. The international terminal at Logan airport, November, my newly teal and purple colored braces, an endless drip of details. My dad's suitcase, borrowed for the occasion, in the back, and my backpack, forcibly begged a few nights before - white and blue, Jansport like the other girls, but mine was too new, too shiny. It didn't look like I skied across open fields on the weekends with it. I tried to scuff it with my hands as I sat in the front seat, my mother chatting in the back of the van, my dad's eyes keen on the road ahead of us."You're going to have so much fun," my mother told me, her voice almost singing. I nodded dumbly. "It's not every day you get to go to France for a whole month!" I only half-hearted smiled, whispered, "Mais, oui," before I stopped, almost in tears.Departure is like dread. The airport was immediately close but traffic kept it ever-approaching, past the dog racing track exit and the two dangerous rotaries and the sixteen Dunkin' Donuts, on both sides of the highway. We parked, we made our way to AirFrance check in. We saw my classmates. My mother, who is relentlessly kind and friendly, chatted with the teachers. My dad drank a small coffee quietly, patted me on the shoulder, smiled.It was the first time I'd left home.--I used to think being a homebody means being someone afraid of change, someone who doesn't adventure, the lack of curiosity. I am both, but they don't mean each other. A homebody, I have learned, is more often the person who burrows deep into places, who scatters pieces of himself into the walls and floors and doorways and sidewalks, builds belonging with place. They're the people who trace the same path on their morning run, not only out of habit, but out of love. They love home, but home is also the thing they know best how to make, everywhere.--I was a new twenty, in the city almost two months when my father came to visit. I met him at the Newseum cafeteria, coming all the way over from my internship site on the Metro, moving with the sure footing of my SmarTrip card and my work wardrobe. I took him to dinner at my favorite restaurant, loud as it was with the happy hour crowds drinking blueberry martinis while we had water and burgers and fries, and I told him the stories: Eastern Market, walking to the Metro, learning to cook a little on my own, the way that I never thought I would, the Baptist church I went to, the almost-tattoo in Adams Morgan."You've made a home here, Hil," my father told me as we walked back towards Union Station under a still-warm sky, "It's so good to see."--Home is not about travel or return. Home is about widening spaces in the heart.No one famous said that, I don't think, but it sounded wise.--The day of my wedding, I saw my dad first when I was trying to move a box of bouquets into the room where I was getting ready with my bridesmaids. I saw my mom a little later, when I was trying to give my car keys to someone. She was wearing one of my favorite dresses she owns, a cornflower blue, and I remember she laughed. There was a remarkable kind of laughter that day, rich, full, the kind that bubbles over and makes you think you must gather it, the woman at the well first hearing of living water.The kind of laughter you grow accustomed to over the years, the kind that fills you and fills you and gifts you the grace and courage to leave, to begin.And this is how I have learned to begin to make a home, ten years after that first departure:to fill the rooms with laughter.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the solitary inch

Dear Hilary,I'm sorry. I say I'm sorry probably approximately 218 times per day. I say it to basically anyone about basically anything. It's my catchall, my secret weapon. Say I'm sorry and then the conflict can end, right? But lately I've started to hate the word sorry. I use it when I don't think I mean it. I use it when I'm just tired and want to not be having the conversation anymore, when the explanations for myself run dry or I don't know how to justify being sad or being angry or being any of the emotions I've spent my whole life putting in the, "THIS IS DANGEROUS LOCK IT IN A BOX" category of my heart. I don't know what to do. I am mad at myself for being mad at myself, or sorry about how often I say sorry. Help?Love,I'm sorry for even asking thisDear I'm Sorry,Hey love.Been a little while since you've let all that out, eh?Or maybe just a few days, if you're like me, and you sit in the counselor's office and say the same things week after week, that you don't know how to build a person who believes in herself as herself because the habits run deep, habits of denial and apology and habits of self-deprecation and self-doubt, habits of keeping those emotions at bay so that now they loom out at you in the night and  you really didn't feel like you had to apologize about that thing you said or worried about or over-thought, but you did and now you don't know how to take it back and you think you'll always be like that, always the one in the wrong, even though yes you know that it's supposed to be shared and aren't you just a failure for not sharing it better, eh?Sound familiar?It's an agonizing discernment, when we've done wrong. We avoid it, all of us. All. Of. Us. You included. Yes, I bet you didn't see that coming. I didn't either. I assumed for the longest time that I was the only person in the world who was able to be accurate about what was her fault - everything. Every fight. Every misunderstanding. Every agony.And in doing that, I built the safest protection of all: protection from the truth.Because here it is, the uglier truth: by apologizing for everything when you know perfectly well not everything is actually your fault, you've excused yourself from really owning your wrongs. You've allowed yourself to think that there isn't really anything wrong with you except the deliciously dramatic EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE and so by doing that, you're keeping the real work, the work of looking at a fight and saying, "that was ugly and fierce and mean" at bay. You try to take the whole thing into yourself and in doing so you sneakily get your fix of absolution. You get the control back. You get the safe feeling back.Let's be free of that, shall we?You will have done some things very wrong in this life. You will have done some things very right. Sometimes you will fight a good fight and at the end you will both cry and rage and not be sure how you made it through but you did. And sometimes you will stay in the same place and some times you will need to gather your courage like a fur coat around you and plunge into the winter of being risky and vulnerable and not say sorry as a way to escape the fight but only say it after you've fought longer and harder than you want to know the truth, to live the truth.Most days it will be only one single solitary inch of work. Most days it will seem like nothing, like you're still doing what you've always done, falling back into saying "sorry" as a way to make it all better or make it all go away (or make it all belong to you). Most days being in a fight will still terrify the living crap out of you and you will think, I am going to die. But you are not. You are going to live.You are going to live more gloriously, too. With every solitary inch of work. With every moment of saying, "Am I sorry? Is this mine?" you move. You move that inch and that inch is full of glory.I've long given up the ghost on becoming "perfect" at not being a perfectionist. I am one, and it moves and lives, and the solitary inch has to be full of glory because most of the time that is just what we can do. It is glory-full, even when it isn't done exactly right or you still apologize too much or you're still kind of controlling.Every solitary inch of work we do is glory-full.Love,hilary

bring back everything

I wander in the thousand windsthat you are churning,and bring back everything I find.Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 55God.I pray in the cloisters of a thousand older prayers that I have to believe someone before me prayed, that I have to believe are already well worn, broken in shoe prayers.I am wandering in the thousand winds.You've brought me here to the beginnings of everything, and there are a thousand winds, each so full it seems it will take a lifetime for the words to catch it. How can I bring you back what I find?I find my old shoes on new pavement, a Texas sun planting freckles on my shoulders, a bridge over an unhurried river, the smallest breeze lifting my hair off the back of my neck between red lights, almost as if you wanted the ordinary world to come a little closer to me. The air, the sweat of the morning, the silence.How can I bring you what I find? Because he is next to me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep, and there is suddenly, finally, and all at once, the ark of marriage, as much mystery as calling and covenant and courage. Oh, the courage it is to be married, to wake up next to each other with so much more than ever can be said between you, with so much fullness, and so much wonder? How, God? How can I bring you what I find?You are churning these thousand winds, O Lord, and I am so small. How can I bring you what I find?The question echoes along the corridors of my heart, walks with me into the grocery store, when we walk down the street to talk about our days, or what has surprised us, when it is morning and the words don't seem to be there, for what it is that I want. But this is what I want: to bring back everything I find.To be a gatherer of the scattered pieces of your goodness in the world, the smallest goodnesses of muscles that move me along that unhurried river and the goodness of the man who moves with such ease in the small kitchen, his smile betraying so much more joy, the goodness of the well-fought fight, of the bigness of Texas sky or the way a phone call will pour water on a thirsty heart, of Life of Pi read out loud one morning, of country music through speakers, of running out of words long enough to be asked to listen again.This is what I want, God, to walk these cloistered prayers and to be in the churning winds and to bring you what I find.I find your fullness in these thousand winds.I want to bring back everything.Amen.Love,hilary

the gift is given

It's a slow morning, the kind that you take a long time to wake up fully, not sure if your dream has shifted into sunlight or if you're still in the midst of it. There is a quiet to this kind of morning and an unrest, too, and the heart is full, always, achingly, full.I've been trying to sit with the Bible more lately. I'm a lover of the liturgy, prayer book guidance to the Word. I'm more likely to trust what someone else appoints for me to read than I am to trust my gut telling me where I need to go. So when I sit, alone for a few moments, on the familiar porch, and God says, read about washing the disciples' feet, I'm almost too quick to resist it.Isn't that always the giveaway? We find a reason not to, a reason it's out of order or our sermon series has us meditating on something else, we must consult a calendar and a guide to be in the Word the right way?So I slink towards John, chapter 13.And Jesus got up from the table.He got up from the table and took off his outer robe and took a basin and knelt and washed their feet. These, whom he loved until the end, these, whom he cherished. These, who knew so little about what they had seen. These scattered sheep. He washed their feet."You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."I am only the first few steps along the cracked cement of understanding, and I'm holding my arms out to balance myself as I read out loud these words.So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. Is there anything more beautiful?Is there anything more precious than this? That we were taught by his way of living. That we were known in the washing of our feet, and this morning I need Jesus to wash my feet again.I need Jesus to show me how he will come into the midst of everything that is still a mess inside me and he will hold it tenderly, he will change it, he will do this wild act of grace on my heart and set me free. I need Jesus to make the lesson alive in the doing of it, not just the thinking or the idea-making or the understanding-seeking that so often and so quickly becomes misunderstanding. It wasn't about the prayer book appointed reading today, it was about Jesus coming to me and taking off his robe and washing my feet.And I do not understand one thing about this love but that it is gift and it has been given to me.These mornings I go to the Word because the Word is life because the Word is a lifeline in the days where the joy meets the ache and it collides in my heart. These mornings I sit and shrink away but I keep going back because I am sold out to this Jesus, who washes the disciples' feet, who tells us again and again to love as he loved us, we whom he calls friends, not servants. I go back, again and again, to King Jesus because King Jesus is life, because he is freedom, because he is the fullness of beauty, because he knows me.And I do not understand one thing about Jesus' love but that it is gift, it is washing my feet, it is meeting me on my familiar porch, with such tenderness, with such freedom. It is gift, and it has been given.Love,hilary

go free, prisoner

I find myself looking at Jesus out the window of the borrowed Highlander in the midst of Waco.He is there clearly in my mind, maybe car windows can be like the iconostasis some days, that piercing window into heaven, that stirring up of your spirit to meet the Spirit.It's just a few days before Pentecost.I have been in the midst of telling Jesus that I am trapped in my mind, lost in the sea of obligations. I have been telling Jesus with the bold and arrogant assumption more often made by the accustomed Christian that Jesus is mild-mannered and so tolerating this rant, and that eventually the emotions will subside and I'll go on, and Jesus will go on, both of us mostly unchanged.Let me tell you something: that is not Jesus.Instead I hear the thought ripple - no, that's too gentle - rip into my mind, hurricane wind, not just a little bit of fire in the voice. I am telling you, go free, prisoner. I don't know what you're talking about, Jesus, the easiest lie, the lie of pretended incomprehension, because a God that we say is so beyond our knowing surely cannot be speaking so clearly to us, to me, as I stare out the car window hoping against hope that I can find my way around the words.I am telling you, go free, prisoner. It takes nothing less than the Spirit to shake us out of our assumed ignorance back into the obvious truths, the who we are before and afters. Because I am so much of the time a prisoner rattling the iron walls when the door behind me is swinging open and it is Jesus who stands there, arms open, waiting. I am the too busy noticing my own struggles to see that the shackles are at my feet, that the sun through the window is the first day of the week and I'm living in the time of the resurrection.I do this with the story of how eating became harder, or how I don't know how to stand up for myself, or how I am too people pleasing or too quick to worry or how I don't know when to allow myself to feel grace because I worry that if I give myself room to not be perfect I'll collapse altogether. I rattle the walls of the prison of I should be better or I should do more or I am not good enough at and then there is Jesus, calling for me - go free. Me, in that car, driving through Waco, and there is Jesus, caring so much more than I imagine he does. Not mild-mannered, not indifferent, not unconcerned. No, I meet Jesus who says, Go free, prisoner, and who keeps calling out to me, who is relentless in the message that my heart is no longer bound anymore, but freed. That there is no need to rattle the walls because the door is opened, because life is beginning.Just a few days before Pentecost I hear again the old story, the Gospel of the radical concerned grace of God - that God will not be mild-mannered or indifferent with us, but come to us, driving through Waco or when we are in front leading worship or as we glance back at the iconostasis, and Jesus will keep saying, go free, prisoner. I have loved you, I have freed you, you are urgent and important to me, you belong to me. Oh, how the Gospel needs preaching again and again to this tired heart.And oh, how good God is, to still come shout it over me.Love,hilary

put on a little emmylou (a letter to preston)

Dear Preston,It's the one-month-mark today, here at the end of the winding road, the one that will so soon become that impossible stretch of green grass between us, aisle to union to marriage on the other side.Tonight, I'm playing songs on a playlist I made called, "h&p" - with everything that's indie and everything that's country and everything that's the way that these last days make me feel. I'm cleaning the almost emptied room, looking at the bags packed, the dresser drawers that creak with their once full life, their own sort of sweet goodbye.I'm playing the first dance song from J&E's wedding last weekend, the one that made me cry, the one where I was leaning against you, feeling your chest rise and fall with the steadiness that belongs to just you, that's more than oxygen entering and leaving, but the very tenderness of being next to each other.I wanted to write you a marriage letter early, the way Seth and Amber have written those, calling out on the waters of these blogs something, I don't even really know what, but something, some echo of the impossible hope that I feel building in my chest when I look over at you, after more than a year, awestruck and comforted all at once.But we aren't quite yet married, and for all its ache, there is something about being engaged that I felt like I had to remember, now at its closing days. So, Preston, here - a last-month-of-engagement letter.Put on a little Emmylou with me?We will move slow across the room, just a sway like that other time, and the time before that, when the work was too much and for a moment we shrank the world to the small steps across the ancient wood floors. We will move in the sticky rhythms of a second summer together, make our way around her voice laughter tickling our ears.Put on a little Emmylou with me, and I will press my hand into yours, we can drink lemonade along the water and you can steal more than one kiss before I duck my head, blushing, as the teenagers walk past in their colorful struts. I will wear your favorite dress and ask you a thousand questions about your favorite kind of pie and whether you think you'd ever live in the South of France.Put on a little Emmylou, Preston, and we will reread our story in the pages of graduate school applications and gall bladder surgery recovery, in wedding menus and Pinterest pages, in my grandmother's lost and now found ruby ring that I'll wear in a month and again, in the smallest whispers across a French 75 or a morning cup of coffee or a birthday present and a made bed. We will remember how we build this, and I'll make a joke that you laugh at and roll your eyes, and I'll make that face and you will laugh again.Put on a little Emmylou, darling, and I will start singing the way you like me to, unafraid, my feet up against the dashboard on the long drives, and I will promise you again and again, there is nothing quite as wondrous as stumbling on another way you've loved me - the boxes you've saved to open together or the the way you remember how much I love the Trader Joe's twizzlers or the way you relentlessly force my hand with Jesus, day after day, so sure that the only way to heal my heart is to ask me to open it again to God. Again, and again, I will sing it out, one year and two and ten and sixty-five, how it wasn't just happenstance, this love, but whole, and maybe even, holy.I'm singing with Green River Ordinance, now, again that line, put on a little emmylou, and we'll dance into the night, singing hold my loving arms, my loving arms are for you. And I remember how much love was singing at their wedding, in this song, in this dance, and so, my not just yet husband,put on a little emmylou,and slow, in the softness of these last days -hold me. My loving arms are yours.Love,hilary

for when the poem makes promises

I'm a haphazard writer, at best. These days I turn to the keyboard and I find that I have little to say, that everything coming to the surface is about the waiting, this endless waiting, or about the hurry-up-and-slow-down dance we've been doing. I keep thinking that I have nothing new, that there is nothing new under the sun, to gift or to give, and I want to sigh like Anne of Green Gables, exhale all the sorrows of the ages into the world, breathe in the goodness, breathe out the worry, begin again.My wordpress dashboard tells me that this day two years ago we began here, a wild love for people and God and words and the way those things are in each other and through each other. Two years. The two years of agony and wonder that only a life lived full can bring at the same time.And there, the silver thread running through, the minnow in the shining water, is poetry.It is the beginning of every metaphor I have given in the past two years, the end of every sentence. It is the heart behind the heart I present, the asked unasked question that shivers in the dark. It is the stolen moments at work when I type to remember how to write at all, to stitch limbs with words like so much dissolvable surgical thread, hoping the body, the poetry, will heal itself. It is itself, too, spurning my company in an instant for the sticky sweetness of the afterword, the last punctuation, the ghost in the air.I started this blog with the idea that love is wild, and maybe that is the prayer which is the poem which is not either thing, but I want it to be so I can be writing about poetry, so that I can be a poet, a prayer. Love is wild. Is it?The poems command me to say yes, that it is an untamed thing, living like fire, the other breath in our lungs. Love is basic, built from what builds our bodies and yet, like our bodies, beyond its elements. Love is hormones firing in the brain and then pushing out into the kiss, the skin cells meeting, the silent late night sorting of the recycling. Love is basic, built up from the periodic tables we live in, then reaching so far away from us it takes a poem to pull it back in, takes words, takes the Spirit's speaking. And a listening ear.Poetry is that listening ear against the galaxy, against the spinning chaos, against the noise that becomes the music that still is chaos.Poetry is my surgical thread, the minnow I imagine at the bottom of the pond that most days looks too ordinary to notice, poetry what turns my gaze back towards the world in horror and awe.Poetry pulls the wild love out of me, of you, makes more of us wherever it is, sitting in dusty chapbooks abandoned by the world.Day by day, stitching us whole.Love,hilary

for when God has time for you

He pulls me onto his lap in the chair he always sits in to type out the emails, the tasks, the daily-to-do's that pile high in the cramped spaces of our lives.It was a series of comments about this or that thing not fitting well anymore, this or that salad I should have could have eaten, this or that friend I probably should have texted again but didn't...He held me there when I started to pull away, back into the familiar chaos of the busy, making the customary excuses to avoid the quiet place - you're busy, I'm busy, no one has enough time, this will be too unwieldy, this mess of my heart and don't you want me to just buckle down and get myself under control? We only have this many days until everything changes."What would Jesus say about that?" He repeats the question twice before I make eye contact, and again once I do, holding my waist still.I gulp, oxygen suddenly a precious gift, because it's the Name, Jesus, that still undoes my heart at its sounding. I am not sure how to breathe anymore because my husband to be asks me what Jesus would say to me. He doesn't try to fix it with his words, just keeps his hands fixed, because I am going to run away from Jesus if he doesn't help me anchor myself there. Because he knows, and I know, that Jesus has something to say to me."I don't know!"I get angry, the second kind of reaction. If not flight, then fight, and it comes out biting and cold and full of frustration. I don't know, which means why are you asking, which means can we please not do this and can we please not encounter this.But this life does not obey our fighting or our flights, and encounter is gifted to us in the worst times because the worst times are the needed times.I don't want to answer this question, because the answer is this: Jesus would say, Come here. I have time for you. I have time for your mistakeI have time to talk about all this chaos, this wedding, this waiting, the days when it feels impossible to do the work I give youI have time to breathe next to youI have time to hear youI have time to remind you that not everything you have ever done is wrongJesus is Lord of time. Who am I to tell him he doesn't have enough of it? Jesus is the Word made Flesh dwelling in the midst of us. Who am I to tell him he doesn't want to spend time with a sinner-trying-to-be-saint like me? Jesus is the tabernacling, ever-drawing-us-nearer Physician of the soul and body. Who am I to tell him that he shouldn't be interested in healing me?My husband to be keeps his hands on my waist while we sit in that all-too-familiar chair, and keeps me there, so that I can answer this question. What would Jesus say to that? And fellow wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving, caravaners on the road and you who are lost in the jungle and you who are scorched by the sand in the desert at noonday and you who walk so calmly and you who ask the fourth question of God when we all stop at three and you who doesn't know how to believe God has time for the sinners, for the people who should know better and still break -Jesus says,Come to me.Love,hilary

when we are not competing

I go to the gym and almost start to cry. There is a row of treadmills and a row of elliptical machines, pristine from the spray-and-wipe-down routine religiously followed by most of the gym-goers. I don't know where to start, and so I choose an elliptical machine, a familiar one, and I plug in my headphones.But I can't shake this worry that starts after about minute 3 that the soccer girls next to me are much better at this. I can't shake the worry that the woman to my left is decidedly unimpressed with the level I put my resistance at and that she is better because hers is over 30 and mine is just 22. I keep my eyes fixed on the orange blinking lights, minute by minute, and amid the shouts of encouragement from the first string center forward to the striker who are running faster than I will probably ever run in my life, I start to calculate it - more loved based on calories burned or miles run, better person, more virtuous version of herself, actually excellent, more good and beautiful than me.A little while ago I read this post from the lovely woman over at Scissortail Silk, about we aren't each other's competition, not one more standard to measure against in this already overmeasured world.And I am fired up and I start this post, my blog says, at the end of March. I think, we are not competing, and I wanted to write and say it out loud, that we, the bakers and butchers and lawyers and authors and midwives, we are all in the ragged band of beautiful making our way towards heaven.We are all, I want to tell you, the raw art, the rare creation. We are all, not in the diluted universals we always use, but in the particular concentration of mitochondrial DNA and endless cells recombining and holding us together, in the concentrated, intense, fiercest way - we are all and each the uniqueness we cannot fathom.I wanted to say this when I first read those true words - we are not each other's competition - but somewhere I lost the message. I went out into the world thinking I had the voice of a prophet and I still preached a fear of the bathroom scale. I still proclaimed scarcity.It can be hard to remember that the work of becoming well is a series of hills you fall down, and the falling and rising, they live together. And so I marched out in March thinking I could wear the banner of the not-competition, and it is May, and I am still sewing the pieces together.But here is what I know, what I preach next to you, in my nervous ponytail making our way through the jungle of the kingdom of God:God is too particular about us to compare.God is too intent on us, on the molecules of being, on how we move and lie down and arise, to watch the numbers at the gym and mark us in a rank of better to worse, against each other.If it is true that God wrestled with Jacob, if it is true that Jesus appeared to Mary and called her name, Mary, like that, each syllable resounding with news of the resurrection and life -then we cannot be competing.Because as Jesus calls her Mary, so Jesus calls me Hilary. So Jesus calls you, calls the striker and the first string center forward, calls the Zumba class ladies and the lawyers and butchers and authors.If God is really wrestling with each of us, our bones pressing against God, our lungs stretched to keep breathing the air that gives the life as we wrestle with the Lifegiver,then we are not competing.We are each the beloved, particular, wrestlers with God.We are each the remarkable made alive again.We are each so singularly loved that God laughs at our comparisons, touches our hip socket with His laughter.And so shall I be delivered.Love,hilary

for when love is desperate

I woke up in the haze of the night, that space where the sunrise is slowly bleeding into the day, where rain casts an enormous shadow, where there are things like jury duty and immediate deadlines and the last plane ride of the man back to Texas.Sitting in the eerie, half empty room with the other wanderers with their bleary-eyed coffee, their newspapers and knitting, their snuck-in granola bars eaten quietly, it struck me that this journey is almost over - well, perhaps, almost begun. Or both.I can't tell you why, but when they dismissed us - justice reached between the hallways and the bank of elevators - and I was driving back in to work, to meet that deadline, it hit me: this is the man I'm marrying.This is him.I started to laugh, but at the same time I started to cry. I was laughing and crying along a 10 mile stretch of road that I have never seen before, with small clumps of pansies blooming in the median boxes, the rain still hesitantly pounding the windshield, and two UPS trucks turning left and right and me in between them. I was laughing at myself, at this beautiful world, at the fact that in that moment I realized it:I'm marrying the person I always and never imagined.I had to tell myself that I was still driving, that this is the middle of the workday, that the world is racing past me and there are places to go and deadlines to meet, because in a moment, I am a heap of tears and shaky breathing and laughter, so much laughter it seemed to rebound off the walls and windows, carrying me.I think this must be what it is like to fall desperately in love.Not a hurricane, no, but the steady second, third, hundredth time falling into love. This is the we've been engaged for a long while now, the we know who does the dishes and sets the table, the ordinary missed words and not missed eye-rolls, who loves hummus and who loves sea urchin, where she always forgets her glasses and where he always puts down the car keys. This is the falling in love again with all the familiar, with all the still-surprising, with the way that love turns out to be eating leftovers on the floor or walking to the pond when the sun finally comes out and warms the earth.I always imagined that it would be as simple as that, the person as inevitable as breathing. I never imagined it would be so good, goodness essential as breathing.This isn't the post where I can say anything profound about love, other than I didn't realize how much you keep falling into it. How you fall into it, again and again, when you realize that this person still thinks you're the best thing that has ever happened when you oversleep and mess up plans and forget things. How the fact that he knows how much I love hummus and steak makes me cry. Or how he never lets a day go by where he says, "Hello, beautiful," and there I am, hopelessly falling into love.This is the post where I say that I spent that drive laughing and crying because I'm getting married to Preston. Because it's the hundredth time I've fallen in love with him, and love it wild, and sometimes I could cry with how extraordinary it is. And laugh.Love,hilary

for when the poem hurts your pride

This is for the poems that stand defiant on the other side of the fence from you, sure that they have evaded your grasp, and you are tired, limb-tired, arms hanging off your shoulders like skinny stockings, and you are too tired to understand them.This is for the poems that read me better than I read them, aloud in my office in the eerie stillness of an evening working too late, my halfhearted defiance against the ordinary. The poems that sat contented to watch me struggle in pronunciation or in prayer, poems that I imagine laughed at my third or fourth reading where I adopted a British accent in the hope that would uncover the meaning in the page.Poems are meant to hurt our pride.They are bruising things to the tender fruit of our thinking ourselves wise or right or people with understanding. The poems tear down our defenses. The poems reveal and reveal past layers of skin and shards of interpretation to that quickening heart, the one that beats and beats and goes on beating even in the longest day.When I wind my way home on an afternoon, when I am convinced that I will be weighted and measured by the accomplishments that gather dust in the old battered shoe boxes at the top of the creaking stairs in my house, there the poems arrive.One after another they cling to me like stubborn water, in my hair, in the hollow spaces of my ears.I can hear them even now, their echoes -"so, through me, freedom and the sea" (here)"He had cancer stenciled into his face" (here)"Something there is that doesn't love a wall " (here)"Out on the flats, a heron stillas a hieroglyph carvedcarved on the soft gray face of morning."(here)That's Pablo Neruda meeting Edward Hirsch meeting Robert Frost meeting Leonard Nathan.And still, they devastate me with the promise that I am not the accomplishments, I am nothing as neat as a checklist or a perfect score. I am nothing as simple as dotted i's, for the space between a lowercase i, ee cummings, and the regal I of Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" - that is where  mystery begins.If a poem was a graph, I think, I could map its meaning, plot it, make a line of best fit to zip the untidy grammar and preserve this idea that I can be known by what I do, and by that I mean you can know me by what I presume and present.If a poem was a graph, but, then - a poem in the midst of the thought -the small clustered army of empty boxesmarches across the white desert, line by starved blue lineawaiting the signal to scatterplot, parabola, sharp V like the neat geese northboundin June.I can't even write a post about poems without being taken up with the idea of one, the promise and peril of words on paper. These poems wound my pride until it sits meekly in the corner, finally, aware that there are a million acres of understanding between me and the poem, me and the poet, and those acres in an instant no distance at all.This is for the poems that make me think I can never love poetry.Those same poems preach in my worried heart that I wanted to be taught the wild love, and they are the unrepentant teachers.These are the poems that will uncage us. These are the poems that call out our sweet, living flame.Love,hilary