when you wake up to the desert

In the cross, in the cross, be my glory ever, til my ransomed soul shall find, rest beyond the river. ~ Fanny Crosby, "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross"One day you wake up to the desert, angels and ladders and wrestling long over. You've wandered far from whatever Ebenezer you raised the last time you felt sure you heard God speak a word over you, the last time the song meant something in your mouth and on your lips, the last time there was fire in your bones singing out for the Holy Spirit. One day, you wake up, and it's a fine day, it's a good day even, but it's all dull unholy light, it's all regular sand, regular camels with regular burdens. You can't complain, can you? Because of course this is the rhythm of the spiritual life, because wise people told you that and you believed them, or thought you did.One day you wake up to the desert.--I'm not a spiritual mother or an ascetic. I like remembering my Ebenezers raised because I like remembering that there were moments I could raise a monument to, that there were times I felt a dove descending or a ladder rising up from the ground. I like feeling my footing on the water and thinking, here I am. Where has all that been these last few months? Where have I been? I started to ask myself why I couldn't muster up the vision to see ordinary as extraordinary or to see miracles as what they are or to see things aflame with God. A cardinal on a tree looks just like a cardinal to me. Where I walk the leaves crunch with just the regular sound of leaves crunching.Is it possible that sometimes, there is no amount of trying that will make the world flame in glory before your eyes? Is it possible that sometimes it's not a matter of looking long enough or praying beautifully enough, but some wood is just damp, smelling like those cold February mornings in the woods behind my college where I used to run? And I loved those woods and I close my eyes now and I smell them but they do not rustle with some hitherto unfound holiness. They stand quietly in my memory. And that's all they do.--The other Sunday in church we sang this hymn, and the third verse sat like a stone in the palm of my hand, smooth and weighty. Near the cross, O Lamb of God, bring its scenes before me, help me walk from day to day, with its shadow o'er me. Perhaps this desert is that shadow, a glimmer of the shadow, accompanying me day to day. Perhaps, oh Lamb of God, this is both desert and shelter, both oasis and aridity, and perhaps even in the moments the world does not spark and catch flame, when no ladders descend, no voice beckons forth -then, when the trees stand quietly, the shadow keeps watch.Love,hilary

ask relentlessly

Dear Jack and June,I would begin this with an apology - it has been so long since I've written - but I think, somehow, that you understand. You were with me, both of you. I know that you must have felt in your own way the pace of the fall, before you arrived and our family widened.Together, we studied and defended a dissertation proposal. We graded papers and wrestled. We read Daniel Tiger books and we sang loud the first 8 tracks of Hamilton. I want to tell you something, because our lives are busy and sometimes I have been busy, carrying you alongside me into the busyness. We spend time - you with toys you're determined to eat and me with words and emails and philosophy abstracts and attempts to write creatively.Today I had a moment when I realized that it is hard to want so many different things in a life. To be a parent and a spouse and a philosopher and a writer, to create and to build, to take long showers (a luxury, a luxury!) and go out on dates and to play in the backyard and to have loud dance parties to the Hamilton songs you know so well.But, my loves, I want you to know, that even in the midst of asking for what many will tell you is too much, I remembered something important about this family, this family that was waiting for you all along -we ask relentlessly.We ask God for big things. We ask for wild dreams, for places to be our fullest selves, for the courage to walk outside of our fears and expectations of who we are, moving always towards what lies ahead. We keep going even when we can't quite see the road.I want you to know this from the beginning, for even when it is hard and seems impossible - whether it's balancing playing the flute and taking ballet or playing soccer and basketball or painting or calculus or French or your first job and your first love. Do not be afraid to tell God about the more that you want - the thing slightly outside the realm of what you are accustomed to thinking possible or easy or manageable. Tell God these things, shout them in the car or whisper them on walks.He is not surprised at how big of a life you want.This part of belief is not often talked about - believing in more than we think possible. And there are disappointments along the way, there are dreams to which the answer is no, or not now, or not this way... but I promise you, even those answers are good because you have gathered up your courage to go ask God. You have shown up in the throne room. You have demanded the kind of relationship that God is always looking to have with us: the one-on-one, no-holds-barred, fighting-to-believe-hard-things one.I write this because I want you to be unafraid of asking for a big life. For a life fuller than the one you think you deserve or you think you can bear. Jesus would like to bear it with you, to meet you in it, to make a bold question the reason for a deeper relationship.You have taught me that I can ask this. Your bold entrances into my life, your life-changing-ness, your joy, your willingness to ask a lot of me and the love that is being built between all of us as we grow into the family that we are.I am asking God for a big life. I am asking God for a bold life. I pray that you will someday ask this too.Love,mom

meadows and witnesses

I stare at the mantelpiece in our living room. There is a pair of baby nail clippers tucked behind one of the bookends, two small rabbit pinatas for Easter that I've waited to give Jack and June because the explosion of confetti needs to happen on our porch and not in our bathroom. In the middle we display our favorite books. These are the books I look at when I wonder why I write, and sometimes, when I wonder who I am.I run my hands along their spines: there are Davy and Reuben and Swede, Cal and Cathy, Asher Lev, Elinor and Marianne. I have read and reread, slipping into the stories like into a pool of cold water, swift and silent, my body and mind submerged in a world so different and so much the same as our own. I read these stories for the sake of entering a space where good is examined and evil challenged, where the Elphaba and Glinda are more complicated than their costumes, where there are quests to be undergone, circuses to be built, a tiger, an orangutan and a boy in a boat. I read to know their worlds and to have those worlds remake my sight.I wrote almost all of my first book, Forgiving God, with those stories watching over my left shoulder. I wrote in bursts, first one section, then another, paragraphs piling up like the laundry that sits in a corner, never quite finished, never quite complete. I would glance up at these writers and characters, and I would keep going, thinking that I would find the end of my story if I just pressed forward long enough.--I thought that the day my book was published I would feel an overwhelming sense of completion. I thought I would wake up to a new me and a new world, submerged in a new Hilary. The hours ticked by and I felt just the same, my laundry was still undone, my kids still wild and the sounds of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (Act II) still the soundtrack of our bedtime routine. I am still at the beginning, I thought. Have I even changed at all? --I think I keep waiting for a signal to mark that I've grown up, that I'm changing. I keep looking for a report card to come home in my pocket on this season of my life, a neat printed row of letters that tells me how I'm doing, the progress I'm making, whether I can go forward into the next thing. I keep looking for someone to mark and measure the seasons for me. And when the days go by in their usual blur, I am startled, frozen in place.--In ninth grade I traveled down to Texas on a road trip with my school. We were bent on finding the source of one of our school's legends, a van called Rocinante, that had broken down somewhere in Texas when the school was small enough to fit inside 15 passenger seats. We drove down through the south and I fell headfirst into love with it all - the sweet tea in Asheville, the fried okra in Montgomery at a restaurant whose wall was tattooed with the verse, O taste and see that the Lord is good, the gumbo and saxophones of New Orleans.We read this story, this story that's never left me, one afternoon in the heat of Selma while the Spanish moss wafted above our heads. And there is this line in the story, this image that hasn't left me alone - time is a meadow. When we read that, we sat quietly for a while, and tried to imagine our lives not as line but circles. It was impossible for me. I got dizzy from trying to mix up my neatly organized boxes, that steady progress and sure signs of the passing seasons.--Now I stare at my bookcase, littered with the echoes of the life that seems to work only in spirals. I have lived and relived the first few weeks of my son's life, entering and reentering rooms whose doors exist only in my memory. I live on a loop of the same motions, straightening the pillows on the couch or cradling my daughter in the dark, and there is no good measure or meter to these movements. Now I see, perhaps what Faulkner meant was not that we stop making progress, not that we stop changing -but we don't mark our change by rulers or report cards. We can't capture the people we are becoming by holding them up against a measure of completion.Instead, we walk through the meadow. We gather up the bits of our memories and hold them up to the light. We walk back through our memories, feeling how they have changed in our absence. We look at our bookshelves, how they've grown to encompass new stories, how they bear witness to the things we have discovered.I am letting go of the idea that I will feel a sense of completion, that I'll ever wake up to a brand-new self or a report card that details the seasons I'm entering and leaving.And in its place, I am noticing that there are a thousand things bearing witness to who we are becoming. I just have to pull down a story, or walk through a meadow.Love,hilary

a heart black and blue (for mothers)

"There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blueWhen they hold 'em to the light, you can see right throughEvery dreamer falls asleep in their dancing shoesI may say I don't belong here, but I know I do" - Iron & Wine, "Thomas County Law"

Three years ago, I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car, driving up the highway after my first maternal-fetal medicine ultrasound with my son, Jackson. We drove back holding our hearts in our hands, beating mercilessly with the news, the medical lingo, the printout of three-dimensional photo capture. Jack was missing an eye, Jack's chin measured small, Jack had cleft lip and palate. We kept the silence that seemed the only language we could both speak.Somewhere, I imagined as we drove, there was a country of mothers in fields with beautiful baby bumps and smiles, with easy pregnancies, with children ushered into life with no worry or intubation or surgery or possible threat. "Somewhere, on the far side of other hills", I believed, there was a land I was supposed to reach, a place where motherhood looked the way I had always thought it would, where the aches were always sweet and the tears always tinged with laughter.But how to get there, holding this news, this ultrasound? How to win back that song and join the ones singing?--I began to mother in the NICU, I began to mother in the surgical pre-op, I began to mother with a beast pump and an alarm set for every two hours. I began to mother by untangling my son's wires and reattaching his pulse oximeter. And what of my own wires, those images of what it might have been, me perfectly coiffed and only slightly tired, nursing a baby in the dim hours of the morning? The NICU cut them, quick and to the core, and there I was in a nest of broken wires, old expectations, unfinished images. I still had those ultrasounds creased from living in the pocket of my shorts all summer. I still thought I could hear other mothers singing a song of something that had been taken from me.--There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. Three years later, I hear this line as I'm driving to Target, paused at a stoplight. There is quiet in my car, a rare thing, my son looking out the window and my daughter asleep in her carseat. I am only half listening to the song, but the line pricks at me, and as I pull the car into the road I find that I am crying.There was no other country, there is only this one where all mothers, however they became them, live with a heart black and blue with love, bruised with the work of giving and aching and worrying, the work of cherishing and holding up again and again their children to the light, to see the wonder.Our hearts, wherever they come from, NICU or birthing tub, adoption paperwork or emergency c-section, worn with loss or grief, with worry or hope, measuring doses of baby Tylenol or repositioning a tracheostomy, going to physical therapy or solving another math problem-this list that lives endlessly in us and around us,it has worn our hearts to the same patterns, widened them to the same infinite space, made them translucent when held up to the light.--Three years ago, driving up the highway in that poorly kept silence, I believed I would not belong here, in this country of motherhood. I believed that I had no way to reach or understand mothers whose stories were different. I thought I would be forever separated from them, walking hallways alone, signing consent forms and pumping behind a screen, memorizing the procedure to clean and change a trach tube and a g-button.There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. We all belong, no matter how we began, no matter the shape of our aches or the number of our tears. We all belong, no matter the manner of birth or the length of time we've been at this -our hearts are the same color.Held up the light, we can see right through. We can see each other.Love,hilary

to a poet that I love

Delighted with myself and with the birds, I set them down and give them leave to be. It is by words and the defeat of words, Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt, That for a flying moment one may seeBy what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. – Richard Wilbur, from the poem “An Event” (from his book Things of This World)

Dear Richard Wilbur,You passed away this fall, just a few weeks before I read this poem for the first time. I never met you, a great regret of mine. I don’t know that I would want to tell you something about the reading of this poem, what it meant to me, how it changed me, because I think the poem knows—and you its creator knows—that such conversation would fall immeasurably short. Words, and their defeat. The flying moment, the “drunken fingerprint across the sky!”So I want to thank you for that very thing, the defeat of words.When I first determined that I would be a writer, after I had read East of Eden, before I had read Peace Like a River, I believed words could be caught, slippery silver fish in a rushing stream. You wade in with your jeans pulled up over your knees, barefoot, sliding on the worn down places in the rocks, catching bits of grass between your toes. You press down, commanding gravity to hold you, and you slice the water with your hands and come back with a rainbow of scales thrashing in your fist.I never got beyond the catching in my imagination. I have no idea if I thought you release them back, or if I thought you took them home triumphant.The words never obeyed me. I pressed my feet into the river bed and I fished for them and they darted past me. I sat in front of the computer sure that words would emerge if I wedged my mind into creative crevices and when they didn’t I was furious with myself. I am a writer! I shouted. I am a poet! But words do not have ears, no matter how many ways I try to make them into living creatures. Words do not obey, no matter my metaphors. No, words are like and unlike the black birds of your poem –

“they tower up, shatter, and madden spaceWith their divergences, are each aloneSwallowed from sight, and leave me in this place”

Mr. Wilbur, how did I not understand?Your poem is a gesture, a promise that the life words echo is infinitely too rich for the “nets and cages of my thought.” Your poem gave me permission to believe that part of the work of being in the world is to abide alongside beautiful things, things that move and change, like the fish in the stream or the trickle of rain on my left shoulder when I stand in the right spot on the porch.We need this permission, to abide alongside the beautiful, to permit it to change without needing a pen to pin it down. We need permission to stand among the things that change in the world, and in ourselves, and know that the living of those things will defeat the words we try to put to them. Only then, I think, can the words take their place as what they are –Gestures, echoes, signposts along the way of what we have loved.Mr. Wilbur, thank you for defeating my words, which gave them back to me.Love,hilary

my small span of ardent life (guest post at christie purifoy's)

Today I have the huge privilege of sharing a bit of my writing at Christie Purifoy's blog. Christie has been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered her writing a few years ago, and I'm honored to share this post - talking about wisdom, the architecture of our hearts, becoming who we are... I hope you hop on over! 

When I was in high school I was once described by a new friend as doing a kind of “butterflying” – from person to person, subject to subject, leaving conversations half-finished or always to be continued. I had, in the thoughtlessness of a fifteen year-old experiencing peer acceptance, jumped from lunches to free periods and neglected her. I hadn’t realized that she moved more carefully, finishing each thing before taking up the next one. I apologized profusely, and we went on to build a friendship in chemistry classes and after school theater. But I vowed to myself that I would change, I would abandon my butterfly ways. I would be slow, I told myself. I would be wise.Have you ever kept a promise too well? Have you ever been so good at becoming more like someone else that you left yourself behind?Keep reading over at Christie's - and if you want to read a bit more of my writing, you can learn more about my first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith over here and even order a copy from your favorite retailer!Love,hilary

when I meet an old companion

I wake up to my daughter's smile, her face scrunched up in joy in the still-dark room, waiting for me to come and begin the day. My limbs feel unusually heavy, as though the room were made of water and I am trying to stay afloat as I swim towards the crib. I'm just tired, I tell myself, though a thought flickers that this is not an unfamiliar feeling.The sunshine freckles my skin as I plop down on the brown, dead grass of our backyard. It's slowly freckling too, green blades creeping in, as relentless as time itself. The sky is a harshly beautiful blue, my son is laughing and signing to me to "please come here," as he chases the big purple ball I've kicked to the end of the yard. I don't know how to get up and do it again. My daughter is sleeping next to me, her green frog pacifier tucked under her arm. I don't know how I can love them more. I don't know how I can keep moving.I stopped taking my antidepressant almost exactly a year ago, when June had first made her arrival known, the two pink lines greeting me after I washed my hands and already concluded we weren't pregnant. I lived tenderly on the edge for her first 12 weeks, awaiting a resounding hearbeat. I stopped my antidepressant, and as the nausea of weaning off Cymbalta gave way to the nausea of June's furious activity, her cells splitting and replicating and building, I told myself that the chapter was finished.But postpartum depression, I discover, is not a finished chapter of a finished book; it's a thread already bound to a thousand others, it is a stream flowing relentlessly to the river, to the sea. I want my life to come in discrete increments, one at a time, I want the neatness of pages that read only one way, left to right, put behind me once and forever.And somehow every metaphor, every analogy, every image I create when writing this is driven by something like movement, connection, the way that things wind through our lives in predictable and unexpected ways.I'll be honest. Writing this is hard for me. When June was born there was a small seed of triumph that hadn't yet been blown away by the wind. I believed I had conquered depression, even though conquering never felt like the right metaphor. I held my daughter and she breathed slow and lovely against my chest and I thought something was finished with everything she began.But the thread of post-partum depression runs through these days and I follow it into the shower, where I tell God I have nothing left for my children even though it's only 11am and there are hours left to fill. I follow it into the kitchen, where food is like a calculus problem my brain can't solve. I follow it onto the back porch, where the sun is still as warm as ever and my bones don't feel it reach them. And I pray, because I believe in prayer, but I don't know what to ask for. Depression doesn't feel to me like an accidental shadow I need God to rearrange. Depression doesn't seem like a mountain I am asking God to move out of my way so that I can proceed, as if the depression and I were not bound together, and there was a me and a depression and it was simply in my way, a temporary aberration.So I pray for God to give me the ability to swim it, to climb it, to move with and through it. I pray for God to make depression luminous with a light that has already conquered deeper darknesses. I pray for a way to build a bridge that is also a raft that is also a rope that is also a ladder that is also the next metaphor and its answer. I pray for God to make this a place of encounter. I pray for God to show up and accompany me through it, accompany my children and my husband and my friends and those whom my depression touches even in unseen ways.I pray for a fierce friendship with joy, for eyes that wake to a smiling girl and a jumping boy and for muscles that remember these attitudes even when my brain doesn't.This is not a finished chapter, or even a finished blog post. This is a step into the river, a traced outline in a tapestry. There is more to discovered. May Jesus walk into the midst of it.Love,hilary

so much refracted light

For the past six months, I lost my words. I reminded myself, put on a weekly to-do list, but when I sat down, the words seemed hazy and far away. I kept a list of things to write about, I tried rising early in the morning or staying late into the night. I tried to coax them with prompts and questions, I tried to bully them with deadlines and numbers and visibility.But when I looked for the words, I found myself sitting in an empty, white room. The room was bright, seemingly lit from within, as if the walls were light, and there were no words accompanying me. I searched my pockets for even the most steadfast ones, metaphors and images I've stored up like breadcrumbs from better poets, and even those were gone.I was alone with the light, and I had no way to explain the experience to myself. I had no way to mediate it, no way to keep it at arm's length, no microscope to place between me and it, the quiet hum of the light itself.--When I first began to write in earnest, it was in a Harry Potter notebook in the sixth grade. I wrote the tiny stories of sibling injustice and lunchroom betrayal, the way that someone convinced me while we were decorating a bulletin board down the first grade hallway that I should tell them who my crush was, only for them to turn around and tell the person. I wrote in pink ballpoint pen, staining the edge of my left pinkie finger where my hand rubbed the words as I went.--And now it has been months of sitting alone with an unmediated light. Each time I sat down, telling myself, the words will come if you just try to write, I encountered the same silence, the same empty, humming room, the same me but without the words to sit between.I couldn't think of a single elegant sentence, even in the very season I most commanded the words to arrive.--So what can I tell you about the wordless season? What explains why I was sitting in a room full of light - why that seems the best metaphor - when the words weren't with me?It is easy for me to choose words over the experience that lies behind them. I can spend twenty minutes planning how to express one minute of living. I can ignore the feel of the sunlight because I've decided that I must find the perfect image to give to someone else of that sunlight.And so, when the words become sparse on the ground, then I am lifted back up out of myself, out of my need to make the words capture the moment. Then I become unselfconscious, as Madeleine L'Engle said, and I become able again to just feel the sunlight. No metaphor of its warmth, or the color it casts on Jack's playhouse in our backyard. No artful half-finished phrases marching down the page. Just me, the sunlight, the backyard.I was telling someone the other day that I think beauty is light refracted from the face of God. The beautiful here is not merely an echo, a dim fog, a shadow of something better. No, I think it is light bent and angled out and back from God's own self. For in him we live, and move, and have our being, it says in Acts, and this is a great mystery, but it is a mystery we are swimming in, a mystery that surrounds and buoys us up even if (even when) we cannot understand it.And though we often feel the air cool with passing shadows, though the light is too often veiled by ordinary and extraordinary living, this light bends but does not break. And when the words do not come, still there is a light, and still there is sun and a small red playhouse in a backyard and still there is oxygen entering our lungs.Beautiful, this refracted light.--I hope that the words are returning. I hope that I have become more willing to wait for them, to admit that there is far more we cannot say than what we can. I hope that even when I don't have a metaphor, a sentence, a poem -I still feel the light surrounding us. I still breathe it in. I still know its source.Love,hilaryP.S. My first book comes out in April! You can find information about preordering it at my publisher's website here. And you can still enter the giveaway on Goodreads here!

the watches of the night

In college I listened to one Fernando Ortega song a total of 1,0003 times, according to my iTunes clock. It was his rendering of Psalm 63, and it prayed on my behalf in hours where I thought myself unable to ever be the person I thought I most wanted to be.

I remember you at night, through the watches of the night, in the shadow of your wings, I sing, because you help me. 

In those days I was a well-worn believer looking for a story of rebirth. Or maybe I was an infant in the faith looking to appear wise and well-worn. Maybe some of both.In those days I hardly ever met the watches of the night. I stayed up too late only a few times at the end of college, once to walk the campus making only right turns to keep the conversation going, once to sing songs too loud in my roommate's car, and once, finally to say goodbye.What did I know of these hidden hours?--I am acquainted with the watches of the night. I have walked their hallways in a hospital in Temple, I have paced their floorboards and felt two babies sink into sleep on my chest at 1, 2, 3am. I have crept into the kitchen for peppermint Jo-Jo's and chocolate chip pumpkin bread and orange juice and dill pickle potato chips in the strange cravings between pumping or nursing.These are the watches of the night.Spending yourself to help another sleep, keeping company with the stars that guide only some distant sailors to safety.These are the watches of the night.The list of things undone and still to be done stretches itself and embraces me, thin ribboning arms weaving in and out. Wallace Stevens once wrote of a quiet house and a calm world, a poem that comes back now in the dark like a friend hailing you from the other end of an airport. The house was quiet, and the world was calm. You whisper it to yourself, but can't quite remember the next line.These are the watches of the night.--So much traveling I have done, in these hours I once knew only as words in a song. So many miles I have crept, belly pressed to the earth in prayer, looking for a sign of Jesus in the dust. So many verses I have sung my children back to sleep and hoped the songs were navigational stars, for in the watches of the night a weary sailor needs a guide. I feel the same, and not the same. This I still know is true: you alone, O God, are the song and the star.Love,hilaryP.S. My first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith is coming out April 3! You can enter to win a free advanced copy at a Goodreads giveaway by clicking here. So excited to share this with y'all!

becoming a tortoise

I linger at the enclosure surrounding the African spurred tortoise. I want one to make eye contact with me. Jack kicks at his stroller, ready to move on to see the two rhinoceroses around the corner. I push the stroller aimlessly back and forth, small bands of sweat beginning to form in the creases of my skin where I am expanding - it seems minute by minute - to make room for our second child. I keep looking at the four tortoises in the enclosure, silently crushing the weak grass under their ancient feet, their heads edging out past their shells ever so tentatively, sometimes barely even enough to see their dark, watchful eyes.I have loved turtles for a long time. When we pass them on our walks by the Brazos river and I see them sunning themselves on a log I call out "Hello, ancient ones!" Sometimes I am sure this prompts them to dive into the water. Other times I seem not to disturb them at all, and they pile one on top of the other, a precarious cascade of shells.I love their silence, the millions of years they've treaded the water and the grass. I love watching them slip from a log into the water or slowly venture to eat a piece of fruit thrown in by a caretaker. The African spurred tortoise might live up to 150 years; the Galapagos tortoise up towards 200. I cannot imagine so much life; I cannot imagine how much it must weigh, how it would feel. I wonder if their shells are markers of this longevity. I wonder if they carry the weight of such long living with them.--I don't know hardly anything about turtle memories; I know that mine fails spectacularly. I think about this as I sit on my couch, realizing that I am yet again afraid of the coming semester. How will I do it all or be enough. The worries are scratched and wobbly, a record that's been played too long and too often. I'm tired of this narrative, aren't you? Not just the narrative that whispers to us that we really aren't and really can't (after all, just who did we think we are). But I'm tired of the story about that story, I'm tired of running through the week fighting off dragons that might never breathe fire, and parading my sword around as a badge of honor.The turtles move so slowly through the world, and their living stretches out farther than my own. Why am I racing? What am I trying to catch up to? Who do I think is about to leave me behind if I stop to take in a lungful of wind off the Brazos and call out to the ancient, quiet ones below?--In Deuteronomy 6, Israel is told: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).I need to hold again in my hands, on my forehead, this great task, this one aim. I need to become a tortoise, and carry the commandment on my back - I need it to weigh me down again, to slow each movement and hour and day.There is no one I need to catch up to, nothing I might lose, no way I will be left behind. If I am quieter, if I move less rapidly, if I take these words into my heart and bind them to me - perhaps then I will be quiet enough to remember the Lord my God. Then I will move slowly enough to see Jesus.Love,hilary

when i meet my ghosts

The ghosts cling to me, thin and cobwebbed. They trail behind me. I don't notice them for 1,000 days and then I play a song, five minutes of praise and the ghosts crowd the car, clamoring for my attention. They all want to hold my hand. They all want to remind me, to whisper their moment back into life.There are 43 days of ghosts and then there are 180 days of ghosts that surround them and there are moments that stretch too far forwards and backwards to count.They are ghosts dressed in scrubs and halogen lights. They are ghosts that use hand sanitizer and take off all jewelry below the elbow. They are ghosts of footsteps and clipboards and bedsides.I tell myself we have moved farther out on the water. I tell myself that me and God, we are so much farther out, we are finally okay together again, we can talk.But when I sing that the grave cannot hold what your grace has justified, when I try to sing that this is the day that the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it then I am a living ghost, driving the old roads by the Waco airport, praying, believing for a miracle that became 43 days and two surgeries and 7,000 cotton tipped applicators and 104 trach changes and two nights where only the ghost of my heart kept beating and only the ghost of my lungs kept breathing as we suctioned and prayed and ran out of oxygen and drove to the hospital.What should I do with these ghosts? One moment I declare that they should be banished, for there is no use for them here where we are all living. And then I feel my daughter moving inside me and I see my son moving outside me and I realize that I do not want to give them up to the God whose name I sometimes cannot really speak. I do not want to know how frail my own arms are. I do not want to keep going in pursuit of him. I imagine that Peter's sinking was not just because he doubted, no, it was also weariness, because the days are long and the nights can be longer, living with the mystery of the Son of God. I imagine that the work of faith to keep your feet afloat was too much for him - how often it is too much for me. How far away Jesus must have seemed on that dark water. How far away Jesus seems to me when the ghosts remember for me how very deep and dark is the sea.This is not a story of banishing those ghosts, this is not a story of dismissing them with the fierce words of promise or the declarations of Zephaniah spread over me like a shield. This is not a story of taking respite from the storm in the Word because here the Word is in the storm, and the Word is troubled waters, in the very midst of them, not just a peaceful bridge over.But the Word of God is not a ghost.No, the Word of God is living and active, and sharper than a sword... and it pierces past my memories and the clouds of tears in the Target parking lot. There is no easy resolution. But there is encounter. Among the waves, in the water itself, there Jesus comes to meet me.It's been almost two years since I walked the hallways of the NICU. And there are songs that call up those footsteps and Subway still tastes like waiting for a surgeon's call - but now I see Jesus walking next to me. We haven't talked much about those days.But we somehow have been in them together.Love,hilary

when the writing happened

Five years ago, I was graduating from college, fraught with excitement. I see myself in the embroidered dress that didn't fit quite right but I wore defiantly, insistently, because it was the symbol of the woman I wanted to be - carefree, long-haired, successful, spontaneous... Isn't it funny how we imagine future selves by the clothes they will wear? How we dress up to become someone we think would be better than the person we already are?I remember driving through the silent back roads of New England towns, the dress put away, the ghost of the scrap of paper where I'd given the college boy my address hovering near my right hand. I listened to "Holocene" on repeat and furiously tried to make my mind form complicated thoughts, serve up explanations sophisticated enough for the woman I thought I could step into being.--Five years ago I longed to be a writer. I read poetry in quiet corners of campus and once I read John Steinbeck with a cold mug of coffee in front of me - the cream swirling reluctantly towards the top as the hours ticked by. I told myself I wanted to be one of those people, Marilynne Robinson and John Steinbeck and Christian Wiman, Ted Kooser and Erica Funkhouser and Edward Hirsch, people who made poems out of life and who mades living itself kindling for a flame of words.I used to exchange poetry by email with a couple of coworkers on Fridays. It didn't last, sadly, like so many of my well-intentioned plans for writing. I was so good at telling myself I was and would be and must be a writer that I didn't need to do much writing.I dressed the way I thought writers must dress. I listened to Bon Iver driving those backroads and imagined how someday I would build a world in words and a reader would drive with me and feel the slick new pavement, the sudden silence of the car wheels beneath our feet. I believed this is what would make me meaningful.--I wrote a book. I wrote it looking nothing like a writer and feeling nothing like the woman I promised I would become in order to be that writer. I wrote the book because writing it was the single thread back to Jesus I could find when the maze of the NICU closed in and I could not sleep for worrying and I could not pray for not sleeping and I could not believe what I had always believed I would believe.That is where the writing came. It stole up on me, a strange friend in the nights and I was not ready.. I had no clean Moleskin journals, no special sharpie pens for observing the world. I had not perfected the look of a writer, the feel of the words tumbling forth free. I thought writing would be like breaking a necklace of pearls - one snap, one idea, and the beauty would just spill out and clatter on the table and people would rush to snatch up as many as they could.But for me writing this book was becoming an oyster, shell rough, cemented to a rock and clinging hard at the regular chaos of the tides. Writing this book was building up a single pearl from a single grain of sand that found its way in uninvited and unexpected. My book is not the pearl, really - I think the pearl must be my whole life, my being with God, and maybe the book is the single grain of sand or maybe it is just a glimpse inside this oyster shell - a peek into the becoming of another believer.I hope, in any case, that the book is a story of this becoming.--There is so much to tell in the next few weeks - there is news of publishing the book, titles and covers and preordering and how very much I want to share with you this glimpse into the opening of Jack's story and the opening of mine, too. I want to thank you for reading this blog, this haphazard collection of snapshots. I want to thank you for following along with Jack's story in particular, for how you've listened and loved and prayed us through.This book I wrote in an unprepared season, when my table was not laid and my lamps not lit. A grain of sand and a lot of silence. A lot of my hair pulled back in a messy bun for days on end.But somehow the writing arrived, and now, soon, the book will too. I can't wait to share this with you.Love,hilary

dear june: when it has been 18 weeks

Dear June,Hey girl. I have been writing this in my head for a while - these days go by so much faster than they should. Your brother - have you felt him poke you yet? - keeps us moving, sun up to sun down, and there is little time for writing. But God makes enough time for us to be just where we are before we go somewhere new. There is enough time in forty weeks of waiting for you to be in this togetherness.Let's just come right out with it: when we went in for your ultrasound, in the same octagon-shaped room where we learned a few things about Jack, it had a heaviness to it that is hard to explain. I want you to know right away that it is not wrong for our lives to be changed by what happens in them. Heaviness is not always bad - for me and your dad, the heaviness was a heaviness of remembering what a gift it is to see you before you are born. And it was a heaviness of remembering that Jesus first walked us back to that room two years ago and when we walked out we were made new. How do I explain this? We became something in that room. We became the us that we are now -or, I should say, the us that we were when we walked in to see you.It will be easy to think that your brother changed our life because of some details about his ultrasound (details about eyes and chin and cleft lip and palate). It will be easy even for us to think that those details are what made everything different. We had a different kind of pregnancy than we had expected; we had a different journey through hospital hallways, in broom closets turned conference rooms, waiting by the phone for surgeons to give us updates.But you changed us on Friday just as much as your brother changed us two years ago. You changed us with your kicks and squirms, with your chin and eyes and tiny hands waving on the screen.We are always being made new by each of you. We are always encountering the heaviness and the goodness of becoming parents to you, because you and your brother make us the mom and dad we are. By your faces and hands, by your laughs and kicks, by your willful determination and your very living.You are our first daughter, and we could not be more excited, more anxious to meet you. I used to imagine how it would feel to learn I would have a daughter. But this is far beyond what I imagined; you've brought me somewhere my imagination couldn't ever reach. I love you to the moon and beyond it; I sit in this chair, where we will sit in some handfuls of weeks together, and I realize that I am not the same as I was when we walked in to your ultrasound on Friday. You've already started making us new.We named you Junia, after the apostle that's just mentioned - the smallest glimpse in the Bible - of someone whose life was radiant with light. I pray that your life, June, is radiant too. I pray that it defies and surprises. I pray that it is heavy with the goodness of walking next to Jesus. That goodness is not always pretty or easy; becoming your mom and Jack's mom has not always been pretty or easy. But it is and always has been radiant.Here we go, June - as one of my favorite songs says, "into the dark and wonderful unknown." May Jesus illuminate our going with his radiance.All my love,mom

when this is the mom I am

I am standing on my front porch staring at some random dead bugs on the concrete. Jack is pulling at my hands to go down the stairs into the sun. I don't know where the sunscreen is and I can feel a mosquito biting my ankle. I try to swat it. I slap myself hard on the ankle and the mosquito buzzes away. Jack laughs. We go down the stairs and he immediately runs toward the road. I run after him and he laughs as he sits down on the hot sidewalk to stare at something amazing I can't see, the sun beating down on his blond curls because I have lost the will to strap his head into a hat and I start to think to myself - if someone sees me right now with my kid's head uncovered in this sun what will they think of me? I think about dragging him back inside to find the sunscreen. I should. I really, really should. I should also buy him some sidewalk chalk and maybe a trampoline, because I think good moms have these things to encourage outdoor play. Or was it that I should move to a nearby creek and let him wade in and befriend a local turtle? Or was it that I should put him in a sun-resistant suit of armor before letting him outside? I can't remember. I tell myself that good moms, whoever they are, must be doing something different.--I have been lurking in the shadows of too many well-framed Instagram photos. I have clicked on the links and noted the hashtags. The start of this summer I found myself knee-deep in jealousy - how does she come up with all those games for her kids? How does she look like that every day? How does she have time to do everything? How does she remember to drink enough water and eat the right proteins?--Here is the truth. I forget to drink enough water. I can't come up with a fun game for an almost-2-year-old to save my life even though I spent years babysitting to earn enough money to waste on Tommy Hilfiger-esque purses and wishful-thinking American Eagle tank tops. I see how much fun other moms can make the summer for their kids and I think about things like going to get ice cream sandwiches from a food truck and I do it once and it's 95 with nowhere to sit and Jack protests being taken out of his carseat only to be put back in it because there is no shade and he won't wear a hat and so we go home with melted ice cream and I click on Instagram and somewhere in another part of the world someone's kids are grinning with their ice-cream smeared faces and I spill my ice cream on the only clean shirt I have left.--I became a mother because someone made me one. I became a mother to that someone and that someone looks at me, at the end of the day in between whatever chaos has been made, whatever has been said or not said or whatever games have or haven't been played - that someone looks at me and his face says safety. His face says joy. His face says love.God let me co-create. God let me in on the work of bones and blood and scraped knees and waiting rooms in day surgery. God let me in on the gutsy glory of my son. What else is more important? What food truck or sidewalk-chalk or photo can keep me from believing this?This is the mom I am. The mom who sometimes faints because she probably did forget to hydrate and standing in the sun can overwhelm the body. This is the mom I am. The mom that doesn't know what to play with her kid half the time and reads the same book over and over, and spills ice cream down her shirt and is pretty sure that Daniel Tiger songs will be the only ones she hangs onto by the time she is 90.And my kid's face still says safety and joy and love. He still crawls up in my lap at the end of the day, if I've been working or I've been with him, if I have managed to eat lunch on time or only at 3pm by standing in the kitchen stuffing my face with Goldfish while he listens to "Satisfied" from Hamilton for the 37th time. He still asks for the same song and the same Where do Diggers Sleep at Night? book and when I read it, my voice scratchy and tired, he still smiles at the same places and turns the pages himself.This is the someone who made me a mother. And this is me, his mom.Love,hilary

what my mother taught me about miracles

 When I was about 16, I found a $100 bill fluttering behind a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot. It was being blown around mounds of almost-melted snow and the cracked, dusty white spots on the pavement where the salt and sand trucks have left their long footprints. I saw it, a flash of green, as I was crossing to the Italian sandwich and wine shop across the parking lot. I stooped to pick it up and unfolded it to see Ben Franklin's face peeking back at me. Standing in my kitchen thirty minutes later, my mother hummed out a tune that has become something of a hallmark for the memory - "I found a hundred dollars on the street, boom-BOOM-boom!" To this day, we only mention that parking lot and we both burst into song, usually accompanied by percussion on the back of chairs or pulling mugs from the cabinet. "What are the odds?" I remember asking her. She paused, and smiled, reaching for the cheddar cheese in the fridge. "God is watching out for us," she replied.At the time it didn't quite seem like an answer to my question.--My mother sees the world saturated with the wondrous. I think it must be the scientist in her - for the kingfisher, the bald eagle, the mushroom spores, the deepening riverbed, the melting snow pulling back to the reveal a tired but faithful New England spring - these are the stories she tells me of her morning dog walks. These are the reminders she offers to me on Wednesday mornings when all I seem to offer back is worry or fretting, the impossibility of laundry and school and learning ASL and teaching it to Jack.My mother tells me about the mushrooms and the nearby owl she couldn't see but she heard, high up in a tree somewhere between the marsh and the upper field.And my mother sees the most ordinary of stories infused with this same wonder. The God she taught me to love who made kingfisher and owl is the God whose miracles are often unrecognized. My mother taught me that it does not diminish the word miracle to acknowledge that the exact amount of money hiding in the cupholder of your car when you need to pay a toll is a kind. When someone you love shows up unannounced with a McDonald's cheeseburger, just because. When, despite everything working against you, the train is delayed just 5 minutes at the North Beverly station and you make it.--Nearly two years ago, I thought I gave up believing God worked in miracle. The halogen hallways and the broom-closet-turned-conference room on the third floor of the under-construction wing of the main hospital in Temple must hold the ghosts of my old beliefs. I set my face towards what felt safer and more realistic. I said it was too late and I said that this is what we have to do and I signed consent forms and listened to people explain echocardiograms and g-tube placement procedures.I was often a shadow on the walls at church. I darted up to Communion and back, afraid to confront Jesus and afraid to let him see me avoiding him. I prayed by counting the toes on my baby and feeling the weight of his tiny foot in my hands. I signed more consent forms, I learned new hallways at doctor's offices.--And then our car needed repairs.It is so completely ordinary, the kind of thing that my grandpa - my mom's dad - would say, "Well, that just happens, Hillie" as he cracked open a can of pop from the garage refrigerator and reached his hand into a bag of Utz potato chips. I can see him, now, sitting on the back porch of the house where my mom grew up, smiling at the regularity of the things that happen in a life.Our car needed repairs and money is tight. And we made a plan, we figured out what we could do when, we set our faces to the path ahead and put our hands to the plow, as my mother would say. I didn't think about Jesus, or a miracle. I thought of the plan.This is how the might of God comes. In a Mazda service station. In the regularity of car repairs. Preston told me a few days ago that some people on the internet, reading his piece in the Washington Post this week, had asked if they could help. And then he told me that they had banded together and the entire car repair had been paid for. All of it.I want to say this is a miracle. The regular kind. The kind that come disguised in wintry parking lots or dog walks in New England or car repairs that people take care of for us.The regular kind of miracle: women at the tomb bringing spices for burial. Me in that rented SUV in a Mazda service dealer and then in my kitchen pouring Cheerios into a tupperware. The feeling of water swirling through your sandals as you step out of the boat.And from the miracles I sneak a glance at Jesus. We are in Easter season. Jesus looks back from his risen, glorious body bearing all the marks of his life. Still it is not ever too late for me. -- My mother told me ten years ago that the hundred dollar bill I found was connected to God watching out for us. The story itself is faded, except for the song we sang in the kitchen.My mother taught me ten years ago - teaches me still - that in a world so saturated with the wondrous it should not be surprising that God is paying much attention to us, so much that it is not too late to ask to be shown again the kind of love he has: a love of generosity through his friends that make your car repairs possible or bring cheeseburgers, a love of tolls and late trains, of owls and kingfishers and winter that always gives way to spring.I thought I gave up on miracles. I'm sure many days I still live as though they are too far for me to believe. But I keep calling my mother, listening to her tell me stories of this wondrous world and the God who made it. That is a miracle, too.Love,hilary

dear jack: the oxygen itself

Dear Jack,You got your trach almost exactly 18 months ago. Its birthday is three weeks after yours - it's always chasing you, trying to keep up, but you're always a little ahead of it. This is the way that you are with the whole world, I think. Running out a little ahead, exploring and climbing and pushing your way through clumps of grass and tree branches and holding your hands under the hose outside.Your trach follows you, and yesterday, we learned that it will follow you a bit longer.It might seem like this is confusing. You aced your sleep study, you breathe on your own all day while you run around. And so we thought, me and Dad and your doctors, that yesterday would be the day you didn't need the trach anymore. We told people about April 11, and their excitement translated to prayer and hope and smiles and imagining with us all that could change, would change when we left the trach behind.But yesterday you showed us that your busy self needs the safety of easy breath at night. You who love to babble at us all day long need an airway free of obstruction when you sleep. And the trach gives you a safe, secure airway, one that lets your lungs breathe this gift of air and give your body oxygen, breath by sacred breath.When you first got the trach, I told you that what Dad and I wanted more than anything was for you to breathe easy, to know what it was like to breathe without fighting for it. And you do this so beautifully, Jack. And that's what matters. What matters is the oxygen itself, what matters is that fierce molecule of life, what matters is that you run around and play and sing and sleep without worrying or fighting to keep oxygen.You are already so much bigger than the trach, Jack. Your life stretches tall and far like your favorite maple tree in the front yard. You love to be chased and tickled and you love to dance to the record player and you love to throw the green frog kickball in the backyard. Keeping the trach for a while longer, for however long you need it, is so small.Sometimes it might seem not so small. Sometimes people might point or stare, or ask what it is, sometimes people might think it is harder for you to do things. Sometimes the rhythm of our home might feel really different from the homes of some of your friends, and it is a little different. But what I want you to know, when it feels different, when the trach feels like it separates you or when people stare or don't know how to talk to you, when you're scared or angry -you can ask Jesus to tell you the story of you and your trach. You can march up to the throne of God and ask, in a way I can't ask for you, to hear the story of your creation, the story of how God calls you, you, Jackson David, very good. You can go out onto the water where we look for Jesus and you can wrestle and argue and fall down and be rescued and keep arguing and being rescued every day. This is the fullness of life with Jesus, Jack. It includes argument. It includes telling our stories and hearing our stories told.So for however long you have the trach, however long you need it, however long it helps you breathe easy, I pray that you keep asking Jesus to tell you the story, that you keep asking to see the goodness and fullness. I pray that you keep running and chasing and laughing when you're tickled. I pray that you keep loving the feel of water in your hands and splashing in the tub. I pray that you live in the fullness of easy breathing. As for me, I'll be thanking God for that small bit of silicone, and the wondrous life of yours it helps protect.Love,mom

on a lemon tree

I read Rainer Maria Rilke to my plants. They're two small bushes, lime and Meyer lemon. This year is the first I ever thought seriously about growing something, tending to it, watching over it. I have been too good for too long at letting plants die in their original pots. We bought rose bushes last summer I never planted. They scorched in the July Texas sun, and every so often I would feel a sadness come over me when I looked at them. That's how it feels, I would almost say out loud. Overwhelmed, and scorched by the sun, by the heat of the rush and bustle. I learned later that it was also the slow creep of depression, settling in along my veins, my brain quietly putting its seratonin production on bedrest. Without knowing it, my body rearranged itself to survive. It is a miracle that they do this; it is a miracle that so often we do not notice until much later.So this winter, so new to the feel of a daily pill and a gulp of water, so unsure of how to permit myself to walk slower through a quick world, I bought these plants. I positioned them near a south window. I let them drink in the winter sunlight and overheated our living room by pulling up the blinds for hours at a time. The lemon tree flowered quickly, filling me with a strange sense of achievement. Of course, when I stopped to think about it, what had I done? But I didn't worry myself with it too much. I watered and I lifted the blinds and I took credit for the first tiny lemon that sprouted. I felt a sense that the season would turn around for me. I would get better, heal quicker, return to my usual pace.And then I forgot to water the lemon tree. The lime tree is vigorous, pushing upwards with new leaves almost daily, though it is stingy with blooms so far. But the lemon, in all its exuberant growing, had five or six tiny lemons on it immediately, small and green and perfectly shaped.And I forgot to water it, and those beautiful tiny lemons, signs of my imminent return to some mythic normal, fell off. A branch or two turned brown, the green shrinking back further and further into the main stem.I wept and fretted. I brought the trees outside. I repotted the lemon tree. I watched in apprehension to see what would happen.The tree is still alive, and it's still flowering. I can't get those first lemons back. I can't take credit for its living; though I'm some part of the story of its first losses.What is this all about?When the first lemons fell, and I felt the salty taste of despair in the back of my throat, I remembered having read that reading to plants, or playing them nice music, can help them grow. I reached for the first book of poetry I could grasp - the collection of Rilke, a daily reading. I opened to that day. And it said:

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathingthat is more than your own.Let it brush your cheeksas it divides and rejoins behind you.Blessed ones, whole ones,you where the heart begins:You are the bow that shoots the arrowsand you are the target.Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall backinto the earth;for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.The trees you planted in childhood have growntoo heavy. You cannot bring them along.Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 4

It's Rilke who said that so much of everything that is most true, most important, is unsayable. And poetry is the gesture, the promise, that though we cannot say the unsayable, we can glimpse it, we can approach it.I feared the loss of the lemon tree. I feared the loss of a myth of returning to normal. I feared slowing down permanently in a world where the pace quickens, quickens, quickens.I read to the trees still, read to myself while reading to the trees. I read it out loud to the backyard and the fading Texas sun. And now it's been a few months of learning the companionship of depression and its unpredictable arrival. I do not know that I will come back to a place I've been before. I do not know that I wish to.Love,hilary

the size of faith

"The size of your faith is not measured by the things you ask for."I said this as I watched the spearmint wilt under the heat of the water. Preston and I have taken to steeping the leaves themselves in our teapot some nights; it makes us slow down, at least for the ten minutes we set our timers to. We let water do its mysterious work. We wait.I found myself saying this to someone who was waiting with us for a second steeping of the leaves. We had been talking about big dreams that we all have, and the often insignificant size of the steps we take towards them every day. I am always quick with a sentence of empathy, support - but this one seemed to come from my mouth without me being the speaker. The size of your faith is not measured by what you ask for. We poured the tea, and we all went back to scribbling in notebooks the small next steps we might take towards realizing a big, beautiful dream. And I kept thinking about how it could be that I said something without having thought of it, read from my mind like so much ticker tape. The steam of the tea slowly settled as the cup grew colder in my hands. Long after we went to bed, I was still awake. Who was that speaking? Was that for me?Some days I am a wistful believer, a sideways-glancer, a noticer of those who stretch arms wide in worship and those who get readily, consistently, obediently to their knees every day. I keep a kind of faith envy nestled somewhere near where my collarbone meets my neck. That's where I feel it, a small lump when I see someone whose faith fairly sings, who is a small speck on the horizon of the water, running to Jesus. I screw up my eyes to try and glimpse what they're doing - I imagine them, pants or shorts or dresses soaked, feet pulling deep water up to the surface with each step, eyes fixed on the man who looks like everyone and no one, his arms stretched wider than seems possible in these limited muscles and bones. I imagine that meeting triumphant, full of love. I imagine this in my wistfulness, and I turn back grumbling. I've been in and out of the same boat ten thousand times. I have made it maybe ten steps on the water. I keep thinking I will see Jesus and my eyes hurt from peering in sun and fog and rain and ocean spray and so I turn back again and again to the boat.The size of your faith is not measured by what you ask for. Could that have been Jesus, sitting with us, watching water hiss and steam rise, waiting for that second cup of tea?And if it was Jesus, how can he be the same Jesus who I squint to see greeting the wilder faith of others so far out on the water?Jesus is the measurer, the keeper and maker and beholder of our faith. Jesus is as unafraid to get right up next to the boat as he is to stand back and call out.The size of your faith is not measured by how far out you ask to go.Sometimes, asking just to get one foot in the water is harder than asking to run ten miles on a surface that shouldn't hold us up. Sometimes, asking just to gain the strength to go to the next service, to walk up to Communion, to be held by someone else's prayer or someone else's faith, is a bigger ask than asking to see before our eyes a miracle of feet help up on the open sea.When I realized it was Jesus, I prepared myself for the reprimand. Envy is vice, clinging to my collarbone, keeping me grumbling in the bottom of the boat. I prepared myself with guilt and ashes and shame.Jesus does not come with those. Jesus comes with the same impossibly wide arms and the same embrace. Jesus gets into the boat with me on the days I cannot get out of it, and in his quietness he touches the lump in my throat, the envy at my neck, the same quizzical look in his eyes. The size of your faith is not measured by how far out you asked to go. It is not measured by how far out anyone else goes. I can feel the envy slipping away, dissolving like steam in the air.It is enough to ask for help getting out of the boat; it is enough to ask for help in asking.Love,hilary

what freedom might be

It's alleged that Robert Frost once said, when asked what freedom was, that it was "being easy in your harness." I remember the cold tiles under my feet in the room where we had poetry class, that winter my junior year of high school. We huddled over words that we were almost too young to encounter, but just old enough to know what we were meeting was - must be - a kind of scarce beauty. My hand curled over the page to scribble title, words, the stray phrase that I memorized by the repetition of the pen along the thin blue lines and empty white spaces.We were working on villanelles, difficult poems with difficult rhythm, a scheme of lines repeating, tumbling over each other. At first, we were tasked with repeating the lines exactly, no flourish or artistry. I remember how our feet and eyes shuffled at the apparent strain on our creative spirits. "But," I remember thinking, "how will my poem be free if I have to repeat all these lines, over and over? Isn't that why they call it free verse?"My teacher knew my question and answered it aloud. "Robert Frost said, 'Freedom is being easy in your harness.' The villanelle, this week, is your harness. Our task is to learn to be easy in it."--I am thinking these days about what it might mean to be free. I suppose most specifically I think about this in the strange intersection I am often in, between school and motherhood and my own writing, in the spaces where I most often feel constrained by my life. I always want to stretch an hour to be just a bit longer; I always want just fifteen more minutes for the thing I am doing now or the thing I know I need to be doing later. More than once this week I caught myself checking the time while my son slowly, deliberately rolled his blue plastic ball towards me, grinning wildly. I was thinking about how to make the afternoon last just a bit longer, because there was laundry and there was reading and there was some other thing that I had written on a list somewhere that felt much more important than my son and his blue plastic ball.I wonder if I have filled my head with so many boxes to check as a way to stave off the possibility that it might be as simple as riding a bit easier in the constraints of my life. It might be as simple as laughing and rolling the ball back towards my son.--The week of the villanelles in poetry class I struggled to write a single word. Each one felt too insignificant to bear repeating; nothing felt worthy of being written down so many times. I deleted so many sentences. I ripped pages out of notebooks. I very nearly turned in a blank sheet of paper.--I just began a ballet class. On Monday nights I leave behind the hum of the world and enter a hum of concentration, beginning in my feet and tracing its way up my back and along my arms and up into my head with its flyaway hairs caught in a headband. We are asked at the end of each barre exercise to go into sous-sus and often to then bring one leg up into coupée or passée. All of this is in a delicate few seconds where we suspend our bodies on the balls of our feet, lifting ourselves farther and farther up. "Find your balance" the teacher tells us. Some days I never find it, my hand hovering over the barre and grasping it too quickly, afraid I will fall. Some days I feel it instantly, the living wire of tension holding me up suddenly lights up and I can even smile as I feel myself aloft.But most days it is a few, hard-won seconds of balance, a few, hard-won seconds of that perfect hum of tension, that feeling of having suddenly reached a point where it is easy, where the limits of head and feet, of arm and leg are met fully and somehow this produces balance. In those few seconds, I am free. And then most often I tremble, my foot shifts just slightly, and gravity pulls me back.--Ballet and a villanelle, and wasn't this a post about freedom? Perhaps it still is. Perhaps Robert Frost was not wrong to tell us that freedom is being easy in your harness. Perhaps freedom is exploring the limits of the repeating lines of a poem and the few seconds of balancing yourself on one leg. Perhaps freedom is most often a few, hard-won seconds, a few hard-won lines of beautiful words. Perhaps there is no good way to describe it, and my longing for achieving freedom (as if it could be grasped, as if it could be possessed once forever) too often leaves me without it.--I did write a villanelle. It was the hardest I have ever worked on a poem in my life. It was the first time I heard my voice peeking through my words. A few, hard-won seconds of freedom - it was still the birth of something beautiful.

grace, a year later (sharing at Christie Purifoy's)

I get the chance to share a piece at one of my very favorite writers, Christie Purifoy. Her book wrapped me up in a new way to see the seasons, in the world, in my life, in this always-beginning relationship with God, anew. It has meant so much to me, and I'm honored to share at her space today. Join me?Here is a little excerpt:I was all grace-less worry the first six weeks of my son’s life. He was born into the bright steadying lights of the NICU. He was born into weeks of poking, prodding, scoped up and down. His first pictures besides our Instagram snapshots were the flickery black and white of heart and head and kidney ultrasounds.Two by two, we would go into that ark, my husband and I. Two by two, and no more than that at a time. In the mornings the attending physicians and residents would form a crescent moon standing around his bassinet, and the real moon would take the night watch alongside us.We are all born into motherhood. The labor is from us, and for us, and so I too was welcomed by bright lights and pulsing blue and red monitors. I too was born into an endless click, click of blood pressure cuffs and kinked IV needles and blanket forts to hide us while we slept.Keep reading, over at Christie's?Love,hilary