A Word for Wednesday: Silk (A Series of Posts about Words)

When I was a junior in high school one of my classes was a creative writing class focused exclusively on poetry. I had no patience for poetry, I'm afraid to say. After all, I believed that words are best when they are in the good company of many other words. But after a semester (and then two more) of living in poetry, I learned to cherish good words. I'd like to start sharing some of them with you on this blog. 

Word for Today: Silk

Definition: This one seems deceptively simple, friends. After all, silk is a thing, not an adjective. The dictionary proclaims that it is a fine material made from spinning together strands from silkworm larvae, from the cocoons they spin and spin in their small bodies.

Silk, noun. The look of the babbling River Cary as it flows behind the house, the home of England.

I am six or perhaps seven, my small feet tromping through the mud of sheep fields, my skirt (which I staunchly refuse to trade for more practical little-girl blue jeans) bounces around my knobby knees. I have short blond hair in this story - and a smile that bursts from my face with all the energy of being in my favorite country. This is the year where I proclaim that I am half English and half Indian-ian (my mother hails from Hammond), and English air tastes fresh and clear.

Dad plays pooh-sticks with me. We drop broken bits of tree branches on one side of the little lane bridge, and we mock race to the other side. Laughing, we find my branch caught between two rocks on the other side while Dad's moves right along with the current. The water is so smooth and clear I can screech with all my energy: Look Dad! I can see moss on the rocks! The water is silk smooth and the memory is, too.


Silk, noun. The feeling of butter that's partly melted on your best friend's loaf of homemade bread, the bread that you watched her knead up to her elbows while you peeled peaches for a pie, in heat of summer. It's the taste of that butter running over your tongue and down the back of your throat, mingled with the taste of the warmth of the oven. My best friend, she cuts each piece in half so that we're always sharing it, breaking the bread together and letting the crumbs scatter on the smooth wooden counter. We slide the pie into the oven and wait for it to bake while we bask in each other's words and silence. Silk is this summer moment.

Silk, noun. Playing dress up in Mom's bridesmaid dresses when I was 13. Her teal silk gown was my special favorite, imagining myself the princess of The Princess Diaries and the heroine of some classic English novel, where I would always be dressed in silk and lace and have fans and feathers and silly flirtations. I would slip into the dress in the attic and hoist the too-long skirt up so that I could walk around in what I thought was an elegant way, trying out these words graceful and poised and elegant. I wanted to be grown up - silk is a grown up's word.

Silk, noun. A word to make poems with, to link to the other good "s" words like soft, hushed, smooth.

It's a word to describe unexpected things, a word to use because it is three-dimensional and you can feel it between your fingers and toes, run it along your cheek. You can taste and see it. The word becomes real and helps make the moment real. And isn't that, really, what we need words to help us do? We need them to help make reality real for us, anchor it in letters and sounds and onto the paper so that we remember, so that we bring those moments into our present. Silk is one of those words that is both noun, and adjective, and makes those moments of pooh-sticks and bread baking and dress up real. Silk is a word about real.

Love,
Hilary

So {This} is the Dare - Giving {Thanks}

Today Ann Voskamp had some words for me. They were deep and harsh and clear, like geese flying high in Mary Oliver's "clean, blue air." Not easily misread or mistaken. Not words for me to twist into relativity, squirrel away in a closet with moth-eaten suit jackets. Not comforting, indulgent, or even remotely... easy.

I cracked open the cover at 7:22am because I didn't want to read the other book, that tome of moral philosophy that peers at me in an insistent, unrepentant way. I smoothed my hand over the hands holding the bird's nest and the too-blue eggs, wallowing in the sameness of here and the difference of me. My insides have been squirming ever since I got back, restless for the manna, for the good bread. I have been typing and typing in the text box of this blog, hoping that the words I put on the page make it real, this return, this being in limbo. And so this morning, I peek inside the warm pages.

There it is.

{Thanks}

I forgot that part. That part of joy that makes it breathe inside us, that grabs our hearts, that looks us straight in the eye, and dares the incredible. That word, thanks, that says transform. Don't wallow. Don't mope. Don't sing a song of complaint to the Lord.

What have I been doing all this time? Singing a song of complaint. Yes Lord, I whisper to the corner of the seat cushion when I muffle my head in blankets and the special shirt that still smells like Mom and childhood. Yes, I know You're good and everything, but why are we here? Why do You make it so hard? Can't You just give me, just make me, just be a little more... 


Ann is stern with me, me and herself too, and she says it loud so I can hear it: "I've been living the no." The no it's not good enough no. The no I want more than this no. The no why can't things always be the way that I say they should be, why can't I get the joy I got before and the closeness with You and the feeling of Your presence and the daily manna from heaven?

That's the no I've been living these past few weeks - my heart sometimes yelling out gratitude and then sinking back into, But Lord, if You could just give me... I hear the dare loud and consistent and grating against my folded arms and determined serious line of a mouth.

{What if, today, and every day, you yelled out gratitude?}

It's the dare of thank you, the dare of thank you for here. The dare of thank you for this snow on the ground and the smell of coffee as I trudge (and yes Lord, for a word like trudge so beautifully sounding like the crunching of feet on snow) to class. The dare of thank you for babysitter art tacked above my bed and the scrawled sparkle heart that proclaims sticky fingered love. The dare of thank you for sky.  

I bought the book weeks ago and I looked at it, not in it. It sat on my makeshift nightstand table amid Grammaire Français and Come Away, My Beloved devotionals I still need to discipline myself to read. But this morning I found it and I couldn't look anywhere but inside it. And there He is, His voice in her pen, saying, it's {here}, here, here and here.

And so I sing it out in my own blue-black ink in the soft covers of Italian notebook from that last night in Rome, my hands feeling their way around those familiar DC words.

Sing it with me: Hallelujah, Grace like rain, falls down on me. Hallelujah, all my stains are washed away, they're washed away... 

(thank you, Sam and Hannah, for this picture)

Love, and you, you who sit and read this in your home, on your iPad or your phone or your computer between vacuuming or teaching or writing a brief or researching or fingerpainting? Thank you. Thank you. 

Hilary

Sometimes, I Revisit High School (And Look What I Find!)

Today is full of the quiet of snow.

Sometimes, in the moments when I am desperately procrastinating finishing the summary, the reading, the outline of the paper... moments when I am tucked into fleece and sweatshirt with the grey cat on my right and the black dog snoozing in his chair, I go back to high school.

I read backwards, searching the folder hidden in my computer called "Waring Work... I just had to keep." I creep up our rickety stairs and peer into the smudged penciled calculus tests, physics problem sets, and the drafts of essays with Charles' most honest criticisms in their customary bleeding black ink. I crouch down onto the floor of my room, surrounded by the words of wise editors and critics, peers who challenged this and that thesis, my interpretation of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. I swim for a few stolen moments in the place where I learned: it's about the writing, not the grade. It's about the words, not the big definitive strokes and the circle at the top of the page. It's about that moment, when you emerge, sweaty and triumphant from your tenth revision of the same poem with the right word - flushed - and all you know now is that the poem is better.

So I bask in the loving, correcting words of my teachers, my friends and fellow students, the ones who taught me that the point of learning, the real reason we read and write and sing and do calculus and speak en français and memorize lines - it's because the moment of the right word is the real victory, not the grade. I've lived in college for close to three years now, and it's high school that taught me how to love to learn, how to travel through this country asking what it means to be an American of the people we met on the street. My high school that journeyed me from poetry-disdainer to lover of words. Waring that taught me to breathe in the deep smells of Provençal lavender and write it down, never stop remembering and bringing it into life here.

The moment when you stand in front of an audience and say that quivering question - "Oh Edward, don't you see? It was me at the ball that night! Me in that gown of smoke and spider's web!" You are more beautiful, more Cinderella, than you've ever been before in your whole life.

It's the moment when you dream of something infinitely larger than a small red "A." It's the moment when you realize that what you want, at the end of the day, is to understand how to modulate your voice according to the arrangement of "Every Breath You Take" that the ever-talented Tim has arranged for your merry band of warblers.

 It's the moment when your bookshelves are full of the story of what you've learned - your story, right there in the dusty shelves and the questions and your heart is there too, your curious mind, you love of Dostoevsky with your love of Anne Sexton with Jonathan Kozol.

And after all, you are a traveler, and you have been taught how to see landscapes: how to remember the myths and the legends, how to look with the eyes of your heart at a place. (Thanks, Lisa-Jo, for these words that break my heart with how true they are). 

(photo credit: Clare Stanton, 2006)

You can see Campobello Island, you can see Paris, you can see Rowley. You can see the landscape of your friend's hearts and hear their stories and echo back to them those right words that were the point after all. You can pour love into your learning. 

(Photo Credit: Clare Stanton, 2006)

Sometimes, I go back to high school, and I remember the moments when I learned because it gave life, because the word was supposed to be "flushed" not "beaming," because the problem set about gravitational force mattered in the biggest way.

This year, I am going to replant myself in the heart of that girl who loved learning like that. I am going to seek the right words, the solution to the calculus problem, the short story that is just bursting to come out of me.

I am going swimming this year in the overwhelming, rich and joyful world of learning to love learning again, not for grades or approval, not for resumes or cover letters - but because it is bursting with light. 




Won't you come sit on a bench with me, our feet propped up in their bright shoes, our arms and minds and hearts beaming with ideas, and learn to love learning again, too?

Love,
Hilary