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

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

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 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

on champagne and learning to walk

Preston bought me a nice bottle of champagne tonight. The kind of bottle that means we are having a big celebration, that there is something amazing deserving of the best feasts. We drove to buy the champagne after I finished class for the day, just after I got my comprehensive exam results. Our exams are graded; I got an A-.While Preston drove, he declared that this was worthy of that nice bottle of champagne. I called it "pretty good."What he wanted to celebrate, I wanted to say only, well, I passed. I couch my pride in a constant future improvement, I feel good only if I get the chance to do even better next time. But of course, there is no next time for comprehensive exams. That's part of the joy, isn't it? It should be. But there I was, holding the nice champagne in its paper sack in the passenger seat, calling it only "pretty good."What is it about the future that dulls the shine of the present? What is it about the possibility of something even better that makes the real somehow less glorious than God has declared it to be?--I told someone this summer that, Jack? He is the real. He is what my ideals give way before. The ideals of me as a mother in her all-natural, breastfeeding, right-kinds-of-product and no-screen-time and ... glory. That sheen of imagined glory. I said that Jack has cut through it all. He looks at me and I give way. I give way to his real laugh, that dolphin squeak of joy over his trach. He looks at me and I give way, I give way to the goodness of the formula that keeps him growing, the screens that bring him people telling stories in ASL, in a language that he already seems to love. I give way to the real of his life.--Why won't I let Jack cut through the sheen of my imagined glory as a student?Why do I hold the nice champagne and permit myself only to say "pretty good"?--This is the summer where Jack first started to learn to walk. He pulled himself up onto chairs, plastic toy tables that make over 1,000 unique noises, along precarious couch cushions. He fell and he pulled back up and he banged his hands against the surface and he laughed.This is the summer where I sat down to watch him learn how to walk. I could have given that up, I could have studied 30 more hours a week, I could have spent my time grasping the sheen of the student I think I ought to be.And when I first saw the A-, I said to myself, you could have, you should have. Jack was learning to walk. He wanted to hold my hands in the dining room and cross the floor on two feet. He wanted to be held and then to launch himself away from my chest to grab the icon of St. Michael that hangs on the wall near his door. Jack was learning to play peek-a-boo with me. Jack was ripping my copy of Marx and Wittgenstein in his frenzy to stand up independently, pulling my high stack of books down around him.Was all that only pretty good? Was all that not worth the champagne, the celebration?--I am learning to walk, too. I am learning to walk down that well-worn path and answer myself differently. Was it only pretty good? No, it was more. It was the fullness of what I had, it was pouring out the hours, the understanding, the work. It was spilling out onto the altar the hours I had spent - standing bent double to anchor my son's first steps - perched in a chair on the second floor of the philosophy building reading and rereading Kierkegaard, Mill, Hume - worrying myself sick over Heidegger and misunderstanding Marx - singing a human being to sleep.I am rewalking the well-worn path and saying something new. It isn't just pretty good, it is good, full stop. I gave way to the real of my son's life. I gave way, but I did not give up. I gave way, but I did not give in. I gave way, but the way was still full, still fruitful, still full-stop good. --We popped the champagne, we laughed and kissed Jack and watched him try to pull St. Michael off the wall.This is good. Full stop.Love,hilary

when I haven't joined the gym

I used to live for the exalted feeling of sneakers on my feet at 4:30. The work day ended I would change clothes in my tiny office, slip into new running shoes-real ones-and take off down the three flights of stairs and bound out into the woods behind the campus where I worked. I ran, and I prayed, and I felt in the singing of my bones a bond with the world, with God, with myself.--I have an eating disorder. She is not easily described or categorized. I like food, and I eat it. So far, it seems reasonable, the relationship we are all supposed to have. But there are stretches of days and hours and weeks where she panics at the thought of ice cream and wine and that extra bag of pretzels last Friday lunch. So she writes me notes to remind me that delight will always cost me something, and here I will pay in ounces and pounds, the disappearance of my hip bones under flesh, the dress from three months ago too tight here, and there, and there.She writes me warnings, exhortations - if you don't join the gym you'll just keep gaining weight, if you only did yoga you'd be a better mother, don't forget that someday you'll regret the extra indulgences... everything in moderation, Hilary, no excess, self-care, self-love, it's what well-balanced people do... She was the reason I put on sneakers every day and ran and ran and ran. I was running away from her, running to fulfill her, running to keep her at bay and keep her my best friend.--I had a baby almost exactly 10 months ago. In the chaos of the NICU I lost the weight of him, all the evidence of his presence in my body, so quickly that I seemed disjointed in my skin. For the next nine months I pumped milk for him, and when I pumped I thought briefly of how the calories would slip away from me, safely into someone else, how I could breathe freely for a little while because the eating disorder, she was satisfied with the knowledge that nothing I ate could come haunt us.She promised me that it was better to be this new, loose self ill-fitted in her skin, that it was good to see the ridges of ribs and spinal chord. She promised it made up for the fact that I hadn't joined the gym. It made up for the fact that I hadn't put on those sneakers, that I didn't even know where I had left them.--I stopped pumping earlier this summer, and my flesh appeared again, different, new. The eating disorder sat next to me on the couch, weeping. How could I - become so different, lose control of my body - but she dried her eyes and she resolved with a smile - now is the time to join a gym, Hilary. Other moms do it, other moms make time for self-care and self-love and they go running with their babies and ... and... you can, too. You'll be okay that way. She is always promising me that if I stretch a little farther I will hold onto something better and more beautiful, that feeling of exaltation she used to give me on those long runs in the woods. She is always promising me that riding on every run is the proof of my commitment to doing what is best for my body, my self, my family, my world.It's time to join a gym, Hilary. --I miss the woods, the exaltation of them and the singing, the place where I would stop and look at the water and feel myself in the world and in love with the world. I miss the way the ground pressed up against my feet and the burning of my lungs while I raced myself up the hill. I miss the sweat and the satisfaction. I miss the simplicity of giving her what she demanded of me, the daily thirty minutes, the sense that it relieved me of guilt, that it washed me clean.And I cannot love her anymore, the eating disorder, the person she promises me I'll become if only I give her what she wants. I cannot love her anymore, and I wonder how to escort her out of my house, out of my car, out of my closet. I wonder how to give up all her promises and to press my hands into my skin again and to feel my bones only as mysteries beneath flesh. I wonder how to put Jack on my hip, day after day, and notice that it holds him on its own, how to feel gravity dance with my feet and to see that there are marks, memorials, of pregnancy on my stomach.I cannot love her anymore, and so I don't join the gym. The tiniest, first beginning, and a new feeling - not exaltation, not absolution for a guilt she invented - but hope.Love,hilary

this can carry us

I learned to pray when I learned to drive. Those smooth, familiar backroads, at age 17 too hasty in hoping to be older. At the stoplights where even now I do not notice how I know where I am going, I just turn, left, then right, then right again. I learned to pray driving past the old white house covered with vines and lilacs that only bloom for a week, a glorious hidden week in May, the kind that sneaks up upon you and shatters your resignation with joy. I prayed the unconventional hours: early morning requests and questions, the late evening thanksgivings. Often, I repeated this: I love you, Jesus. When I slink into the driver's seat, even now when I go home to visit, I feel the pull of those hours, the richness hidden in rhythm and repetition: I love you, Jesus. I remember the drives, keeping those hours, the expectation, the simplicity. The lilacs bursting forth against the old white house.These hours keep me praying in the long summer of expecting my first son. These hours keep me, my younger self's prayers, ones about God's glory being revealed to me, or the fullness of God's wisdom being shown to me, or the love of Jesus, my younger love of Jesus. These hours keep me, praying somehow still over me from the week of bursting lilacs to the week of driving to Temple, of learning about Jackson, of new glories.I have wanted to write about praying for Jackson, but the truth is, it's really the old prayer I'm praying, that the Spirit is praying in me and for me: I love you, Jesus. I find you so beautiful. My son knows my voice. This overwhelms me, since so much of the day I am quiet. We talk in snatches, I tell him about what I've been reading, I tell him about his cousins, his grandparents, how much love is waiting for him. I tell him about his doctors, too. I tell him that he will love them, that they are helpers, people God gave special gifts to for helping kids heal and grow and be strong. I am telling myself all these things.He hears about this ordinary life all day, carried around inside me with his fierce, strong spirit: he hears Preston read One Hundred Years of Solitude, me proclaiming my craving for red velvet cake and ice cream sandwiches, my laughter with his dad, our plans for crepe myrtle trees and a backyard garden and a library of books just for him. And he hears me on the couch or the bathroom floor, some mornings getting dressed, how those are sometimes hard moments in my expectation. How I cry sometimes because I am new at this, new at even the very act of becoming a mom, becoming his mom.So the old prayer, the lifeline - I love you, Jesus.He hears that, too.May this be the forever thread running through our days together: I love you, Jesus. I love you with the first light slinking through the blinds, with long hours of reading, with appointments and ultrasounds and so many pictures of Jackson as you are forming him. I love you when I pray laughing or weeping, or both at the same time. I love you with the bursting lilacs all those years ago, the first hours set down, that resound now. I love you with everything in me that is unfinished - with the poem that that line comes from, Robert Bly, I think.I love you, Jesus. This is the well-worn prayer. This can carry us.Love,hilary

when i am listening to coldplay

Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones.  This song is in my top five of all time.If I made you a playlist, sometimes, I wonder what story it would tell of me. I made one, right now, thinking about it, but I don't know what the story is.A story of trying.A story of waiting.A story of belonging, of leaving, thinking myself the one left behind sometimes.But more a story of always being found.--I have a story about this song that I can't quite remember, me standing in the back of a crowded gym after I had graduated from the school I love near my hometown. The a capella group in the school sang it, harmonies built with raw voices, and no one was afraid, and no one's voice trembled. I think it was the time that I was so sure things would not come back together, after a year of the try hard and try even harder life...And then they sang,lights will guide you home. I don't know how to explain this, exactly, but in the quiet tumult of these last weeks and months, I have been listening to it again.lights with guide you home. That's how I want my son's journey into the world to be - lit up, illuminated, glowing with the fierceness of love.That's how I want all of us, the wild and ragged band of us, to journey through the world. I want us to live illuminated.That try-hard life, it feels far from me now. It isn't - I've asked so often for something to do, for an explanation of how I didn't try hard enough, for a list of the should-have-dones, my voice cracks with over-asking. And some days I am heavy with the lie that we earn the life we have, that it is ours to possess, ours to control.The truth is that Jackson belongs to me, but I don't possess him. Jackson's story, Preston's story, my family's stories, they belong in mine, and mine in theirs, but the stories aren't ours, not our creation or our prop or our possession. The world shifts under you when there is a person arriving, a new life, a new wonder... and it all changes again, and you're cradling your belly in front of the bank teller and you realize that you are not the same. That you don't want the life that is hard won or earned - you want the life that is too full to be your doing.You crave the life too full, too good, to graced with God's intimacy, to have been your plan.--I remember that self in the high school gym, her with her try-hard tears and the weight of a world she doesn't quite know yet on her shoulders, heaving them forward. I want to tell her that it will be okay, that she will learn in about two hundred and twenty weeks that she will not want the hard-won trying life anymore. I want to tell her that instead, she should let the words sink into her bones, nestle there. I want to promise that her life will be lit by the fierceness of love.That her husband will love her so much better than the boy who didn't see her.That her son will kick her at the most extraordinarily right times, reminders of his abundant life even in the midst of what shadows, what feels dark.That God will move, and keep moving, calling out from ahead and behind and next to her - Take heart! It is I - do not be afraid. That she will have, not a planned life, not a hard-tried and hard-earned and hard-won life. She will have a life softened and lit by love.--Lights will guide you home,and ignite your bonesThis time, I sing it softer. A lullaby. A reminder. A single, glimmering hope.Love,hilary

when I find dirt on my wedding shoes

I had a plan for my wedding shoes, even before Preston proposed to me. I'd seen them in a magazine the previous Christmas and in so many wedding Pinterest pictures. They were the perfect color pink - ballet pink, the kind that's gentle but strong and not too flashy but not too pale - made of what look like satin ribbons, flat but elegant. I've wanted to be graceful like a ballerina for a long time (far longer than I actually studied ballet, I should admit), and these were the shoes I imagined wearing.They fit perfectly, and I kept them in their box without ever touching them or wearing them. I would show them off in hushed whispers, the tissue paper crinkling, slip them on for no more than ten minutes and always inside. I couldn't imagine ever wearing them anywhere - they were the thing I thought would make me beautiful.--And today I was cleaning our closet on a whim listening to the rain outside and I tried on my wedding shoes again, just to see. I don't know if any of us are very far from thinking beautiful things are magic, and so I stood amid the dust and the old scarves and the sweaters and I slipped them on.They fit perfectly.They're covered in dirt.I began a lament, half-formed the words on my tongue and half whispered them to the mirror, looking up and down and wondering where all this dirt had come from, if I should put them somewhere safer than in the midst of all my other ordinary shoes, as if they should be kept safe from my ordinary life, from my growing self.--But I couldn't stop looking, noticing, and then I realized: the dirt makes them beautiful.The dirt is the witness to the growing of a young marriage, the beginning, the glorious running through the world and the slowing down, the catching each other, the catching ourselves, the being constantly caught up in God. They're bearing the marks of marriage: the almost five months, the honeymoon where we got tattoos and the wandering through the grounds of my high school where we got married, the scuffs of grass from down by the river where we walked in the haze of a Texas summer. I can squint and see the mystery green pen marks I tried to erase with a Tide pen now permanently etched at their edges. They're wearing history now, a bit of rainwater, worn from being stamped in frustration or impatience. And they wear the history of love, how different and the same it is, how easy it is to forget that love is always moving in wild uncontrollable circles, bringing more people in, bringing you closer to the one you love, sealing the ark and the ache of marriage with every click of the lock and every first peek of sun too early in the morning.--We tell ourselves to make memories because time goes too fast, to take pictures, to Skype every detail back home lest we lose sight of who we are or were or could become.But perhaps our lives are already bearing witness to it. Perhaps it is we who are too worried to notice that the rest of our ordinary is holding and bearing to us the story of us, of our marriage and jobs and moves and fights and triumphs. Perhaps our shoes, even those we were so afraid to touch, are beautiful when we let them wear and retell our stories.Perhaps the dirt on my wedding shoes is a better storyteller of this hallowed beginning than I can hope to be.And perhaps, I should stand still in the perfect pink shoes now flecked grey and brown and that funny hint of green in my closet on a Saturday and listen.The story they tell is so beautiful.Love,hilary

when I am keeping a quieter vigil

I have a thousand stories that I haven't told.It's snippets of moments of remembering, the way that our hearts remembering, outside of time, bending it back and forth hoping that the truth of it will illuminate in the quiet, heartfelt, wondering places. Last year I wrote some of the stories down, a flood of remembering, in the way that when something changes you want to put it back together, make it a new story so that you can understand why and how and if it even was the way you thought it would be.I have stories of high school, stories of college and the first floodlit after-years. I have stories about midnight drives through the towns of my childhood and ones about walking the dog on a marsh field with my mother in the cold before winter, thinking about how I never imagined being able to grow up, only to turn around and find that it was happening all along.I have stories about the poems I used to write and the ones I write now, how my poetry is a scattered collection of skeletons, ideas that I love because they show me who I was not so long ago.When I think about blogging (and, dear friends, it's been such a long time since I've written over here), I think of all the stories I've been telling: stories of confirmation and falling in love, stories of Easter vigils and long car rides home, stories of missing my grandmother and letters to others about how to be unafraid of the beautiful monsters in our closets.But today, as I sit in the sunlit corner of the building where I do most of my reading and writing these days, I realize that I am keeping a quieter vigil. These are the days of collecting stories, gathering them around me like echoes of the Psalms, stories to rage and stories to pray, stories of God's wonder and God's silent watchfulness, stories of me, learning and unlearning the world. These are the days when the world lights and darkens, when I watch the fan above the bed in the early morning, when winter is coming, when the seasons gather us on their unrelenting way.I wonder if we are too quick to think all the stories are for the telling of them, and not our own hearing. I wonder if I am too quick to worry that I have been quiet on my blog, that so much has happened in these last few months and I've said so little, my space gathering a bit of gentle dust.And then I wonder if the stories won't be better, when they are told, for having been kept a little longer in a quieter vigil?So, perhaps it is not so terrible that I am gathering the stories in, that I'm out on the plains of my life caught up in the work and worry and awe of living, and perhaps it is, even, a great and mysterious thing to be silent and watch it unfold, so that when I find words for the stories, find movement in my heart to tell them, there will be a richness that might not have been otherwise.In my quieter vigil, I might write here or there, and I'm collecting the stories in notebooks and napkins, and oh, how good it will be to bring them forward in the time that is right. Vigil-keeping, it is a practice, a work, but we are the better for it.I will leave you with this, a bit of what I'm pondering in the back of my notebook, in scribbles and half finished thoughts:The goodness is sitting on a swinging bench. The goodness is next to us, near us in from of us and so why do we cry out except because we hope for more than an intangible idea we hope for a weighty glory of sunlight and dirt and squirrels climbing trees. I am along on this bench writing in my journal which is really a supposedly philosophical notebook and my pen keeps smudging as I go I remember the freewrites and how they must have been more about freedom than writing more about light and air touched and sensed and the scratching pen and distant frisbee thrower and how here in Texas the sky is a different color blue. Here the trees have grateful roots in dry ground, rain is a surprise and so always remains a gift like the freedom in writing. How can we know the world without knowing its beauty? Love,hilary

i write to keep believing

Someone once told me that my blogging personality was like sweetened, condensed milk. She said it perched on the edge of the swiveling chair just inside the office where I worked. It was late on a Thursday and I was working overtime, filling in for someone on maternity leave, half-distracted, half-exhausted, maybe less than half-hearted. She swiveled, proud of the declaration, or maybe just the uniqueness of her metaphor, I'm not sure which. I must have turned around in an angry kind of way, asked "What?" in that biting tone girls perfect for and against each other, and she stopped twirling, poised to defend her view. "It's not really how it is with you, is it, the stories you tell on your blog? It's just... sweeter."I think tiredness offered me a good reason to accept defeat on the point, so I just nodded and started to close up the office. We didn't talk about it again, but it still lingers, that metaphor, that question - is that really how it is with you - that makes me wonder whether I'm really being honest with anyone who happens to read this. Wonder if, somehow, I'm lying to myself.--Preston, a few years ago - "You have opinions and thoughts. And you should put them out there. Your blog should be a place you explore those things. Edgier." I don't remember the order he said those things, or if he said all of them, or if some are my interpretation mixed with his words mixed with the fog that accompanies memories. I do remember he was Skyping me from his kitchen while he made lunch for a friend of his. I do remember that we were still trying to figure out what being friends would mean to two people who had been so entangled in not-realized-it-yet love letters. I do remember that I was drinking iced green tea with lemon that my mother buys every summer from a plastic cup.I wrote a post in response saying that I couldn't write an edgy post because that wasn't me. Sweetened, condensed milk me.I wonder still whether I should have written about my opinions of education reform.--My counselor and I in a late January evening, the night black and the stars few and far between. Her office is warm and well-light, which makes the night seem blacker as I stare determinedly out the window. "I don't want to talk about it." And her wisdom, always pouring through - "But does anything grow the eating disorder as much as silence? As much as pretending it isn't there?"And so I blog a few posts and whisper in them the fears that feed it, the fears of enough, the fears of how I look and what it means and whether I am beautiful. I don't want to say much more, and I go back week after week saying that I didn't write or I didn't really talk about it, and my counselor, and her wisdom: "But you will know the right places to talk about it, and the right people to talk about it to, won't you?"So I go back to writing about Jesus and the ordinary aches of a heart growing up, I put my one word in front of the other in a steady parade of characters on the screen.--This afternoon, when I've despaired over enough of the workload I have to leave it behind for a few hours, I ask Preston for a writing prompt. He reads me something from Joan Didion, about truth and fact and writing and why she keeps journals and the words dance by me too fast. But I start to think about this blog. Why do I write?I don't write for sweetness. I don't write to make the days drift by in a haze of vague hopefulness or nice feelings.I don't write for edge - I don't think I would even know anymore what that would be, a raw honesty that forgets the truth that spaces are our responsibility, that something belonging to us means we answer for what we bring forth into the world in it.I don't write, even, to keep a journal of what I have and haven't done and accomplished and worked through or where I have or haven't failed or fled.I write, I discover, to keep believing.--I write to fix my hope in the firmness of the Resurrection. I write to hear Jesus calling for me. I write to believe that Jesus is calling for me, to believe that there is a wild calling on my life in the days where I don't believe it. I write so that, in saying it out loud, I can hear it. My heart has a quiet voice sometimes next to the girl in my head with her giant megaphone, and I write to hear over the noise of my life.I write to believe, to keep believing.O Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. I don't think I have ever told anyone that's what I pray most of the time when I sit down to blog.Except, now, you.--I don't remember a word of the Joan Didion quote Preston read me. But maybe the point of it wasn't to remember that, but to remember this: that writing is getting quiet enough to hear and believe in Jesus, writing is making my heart louder than my head. And writing is receiving: grace enough.

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

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 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

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

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

to the girls in my zumba class

Dear girls in my Zumba class,Dear you who is willing to jump up and down to music we don't really know the words to, you who is willing to do the moves with more energy after 50 minutes than I think I have in my whole body, who laughs at our blurred reflections in the mirror,you are what makes me brave. I've been up and down the mountains and hills for a little while now, with this question about food and how to eat and the fact that sometimes I don't know how to finish a bagel in the morning, I'm so nervous that it will upend my life. I've been in the thicket of the thoughts about mirrors and beauty and whether the scars on my stomach from the time I had my gallbladder removed are moments of skin knit together, moments of pride that my body is always doing a healing work on itself, or if I should be embarrassed and try to hide the thin pink line that dances near my belly button.I've thought about writing and not writing, I've written and deleted, and in the end of every day I don't write a blog post about this journey up and down the mountains of that question - am I beautiful? -you are the people I see at the other end.You jumping up and down in the aerobic studio to Pitbull and Lil' Jon. You in old T-shirts and yoga pants and running shorts and neon sneakers and bare feet. You, afraid and unafraid, because we are all a little of both if we are honest. I can't describe how much courage you breathe into my lungs just being in that second row with you.And yes, you know, it is courage to shake my hips and courage to swing them in something that I think might someday look like a circle. And yes, it is courage to keep dancing at minute 50.But it is also courage to be.You give me courage to be, without walls, without the tap tap tap of the prison guard of my mind that says I should eat less run more be more do more perfect more. In Zumba, there is no better and no best, there is just us and the courageous being of us.If I could tell you anything it is that yesterday at the end of class I walked out and realized that I think you are all, each, singly, remarkably, beautiful. I realized that I know this in my bones, that you are beautiful, that you are courageous.And maybe it's time I walked out of a class and thought of me alongside you, as one of those beautiful and bright courageous beings. Maybe it's time I walked out of class and let the lessons you are teaching me sink into my bones.I wish I could paint this for you, write the way you have built my courage from my pink sneakers to my heart, how you have changed me beyond what I had imagined could change. You, with every routine and every sigh and laugh you are rebuilding my idea of what it could mean for me to be beautiful. To be courageous. To be whole.Gratitude is not measured in a word count, so I will only say, again, you have done infinitely more than you know. And this girl, she is learning beautiful from you.Love, hilary