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!