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!

when it was a year about light

I am 22 in this picture I paint of myself for you, looping the words over us like so much leftover Christmas ribbon. I am achingly frustrated and desperately unsure of myself. I am sitting, as I usually do, on my bed with the blankets still unmade from when I woke up. I am living in the in-between, in a place I know so well - so much better, really, than I wish I knew it. I wanted to be somewhere new, I say to myself as the New Year's night lingers on. I wanted to be in DC, I wanted to be in France, I wanted to have done something or gone somewhere, and yet I feel as I type that the word of the year must be light. 

It is meant to be a year of light. 

I expect this will mean the utter brilliance of day. I expect that God will hear this prayer of a word and turn my shadows into sunlight. I expect that when I wake up in the newness of the year, I will be different. I go to bed in that messy pile of blankets and I am ready to be transformed. Perhaps I even smile a little as I sleep. 

God turns out all the lights. 

The months pass and there is less clarity than ever before. I do not know where to find God even in all the usual places I go looking for him. I am still in the same place and I walk into the same building at work and feel as though I must have prayed it wrong, said it wrong, chosen the wrong word. Because in the wintering of the year I am wandering through nothing but shadows and all that I think I know of me is gone. I sit in Tenebrae, the service of the lengthening shadows at the end of Lent, and even there, though I hear Jesus say to me "You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you," I cannot find a window to open for the light to come into my heart. I must be praying some angry prayers in this year, too, prayers that tell God just what I think of this silence, this darkness, this apparent failing of my hope for light. 

But it is the wonder of the world that the shadows reveal the light more brilliantly. It is the wonder of knowing God that we are given a glimpse of how God loves us through praying a word like light and walking through shadows. It is the wonder of a year where I moved from thinking there was an easy way towards the light to despairing about shadows to meeting God again and new for the first time - 

it is the wonder that to be still before God with a trembling self one year ago is to pray a wild prayer. It is the wonder that God hears such prayers, that God is close to such prayers. That God so tenderly answers them. 

Love,
hilary

advent 1 (turn to light)

I once heard that Christmas was celebrated at the time it was because it was the time that pagans celebrated the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It was the time when people ran after candles and lampposts and fires, tried to beat back the darkness for the sake of the wild light that illumines, keeps safe, anchors. It was the time when the dark  was long and the sunlight raced across the sky and it feels, it always feels, like light is a scarcity we must hoard for ourselves and keep close until summer comes again.I'm not sure if that's the entire reason Christmas is celebrated in December, or if there is something beyond that, but perhaps it isn't as important as this word, light.And all the poets who have used the word seem to take a step toward me in my quiet non-writing life these weeks, all the lines of poetry that echo through the hallways of other years:somewhere overhead, the geese are turning into light again  - David WhyteFor the child at the bright pane surrounded bySuch warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. - Richard WilburShe is awake and stars at scars of light - Mark Strandhe fixes a funnel of mirrors, a trap for light. - May SwensonI think of the word, "light" the way it cuts us off even as we want it to go on forever, sounding the promise of seeing. I think of the way that we hunger and wonder for the light, the way it moves, the way it must move, beyond us.And you and I today are the people who have walked in this great darkness, these lengthening shadows, and today we are the people who must, who must always, turn our hearts in Advent towards the coming of the light.And on us, who have dwelled in a land of deep darkness, on us the light has dawned.Can you see it now, the shimmers of it on each other's faces? Can you see how it begins to warm us, color our eyes bright with its beams? Can you feel, just softly at first, how even the promise that we have been walking in darkness, even the word light, stops our hearts short with its certainty?Might we be the people who turn to light again.Love,hilary

to be saved

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

i am reminded about light

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

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God said, light, dear one?

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light?

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

where my winged prayer met my winged heart,

Right there, in the midst of it:

I could see.

Love,hilary

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(Photos by Bob Delaney of Rockport)

the word is light

Last year, at the beginning of 2012, I gave myself the word "build." I promised it was a year to build - to build on the new person I wanted to become, to protect and grow a dream of writing, of loving other people in words, of advice offered in letters like Sugar, a dream of a bolder, freer Hilary. It was the beginning of it all, I stated boldly. Now build.And I find myself back at another beginning today. My hands are full of dreams, just like last year. They spill out around me like ribbons escaping their spools - looping and spinning, brightly colored, almost invisible in their lightness. They sound like England and graduate school and Starbucks coffee dates and maybe someday I'll write letters to strangers and pour out love to them even though we've never met. They sound like the quiet nights of practicing sign language and praying for my friends far away. They sound like that tattoo of an empty birdcage I always wanted, the one that whispers "from grace, freedom." They sound like drinking wine with the people I love, like laughter loud and echoing across a bar or an empty office or a path through the woods. My head is full of questions, just like last year. And this year, I have new answers.Why do our hearts have to break? I tell you the truth, that only in the breaking open do we find love sufficient enough to carry us forward. Only in the heart widened by pain and surprise and change (sudden or long-expected), can grace sound its sweetest chord.Why do we have to do awful obedient things? Because we belong to something bigger than ourselves, and sometimes it calls for putting aside what we want. It calls for us to set apart some of what we wish we could do or say or have, and instead tell the truth. Even when the truth means an ending. Even when it means a fight. Even when it means an unknown outcome.Why do we dream so big? Because we are a people caught up between the fleeting beauty of the snow that melts tomorrow morning and the eternity of the love that did the dishes for you last night. Because we are always torn between seeing everything we cherish dissolve before us, and knowing that all we love is never lost forever. Because in the big dreams, we love each other and this world better.What do you want to build? I want it to be a great unfolding, this next year: I want to build a nest for you. I want to spend 10,000 hours listening and another 10,000 growing wings next to you: in writing your stories and pondering questions together. In declaring that love is brave. In whispering that you are lovely, just because you are. In 10,000 hours of harvesting the light for each other and cupping it in our palms, 10,000 candles to mark our way forward. So this is the way to begin again: with 10,000 candles and a million questions and a big dream to love.And the word is light.Love,hilary