Dear Hilary (A Five Minute Post)

Lisa-Jo challenged me to write a post about the best piece of mail I received this week in just five minutes!

It's a midnight email, the one I don't receive until the next day at work with my hair all stringy and straight from needing to be washed again, the one that just starts with "Hi love!" and there it is: the best thing. She loves me.

She is my Uganda journeyer, the one who ventured beyond the bounds of our campus this spring into a land of red dirt and wonder, of hot sun and rice and beans and instant coffee, of stories of Ugandan Christian University students.

She is the one who writes love into every typed word from the land of rolling blackouts and no internet. She writes love, and I feel her fingers clack their way across the keyboard and find that piece, that piece of my heart that was just missing today. That piece that left on some early morning plane to another place, and she knows. She doesn't even need to ask.

She just writes love. She just finds the piece of my heart I couldn't find today and holds it out: here, Hil. I can hear her voice in her words. I can hear it in how she wants to know about life now, life here in this smaller place, life in my moment of just needing something, a taste of cappuccinos together in the red booth with the cracked leather and duct tape of the Atomic. She calls me love, and friend, and reminds me that all this? All this glorious hardness of being home in a place I don't know how to call home anymore, all this struggling to see myself bright and cheerful in the midst of winter, all this exuberance, all this living, is what she wants to know about.

She is my coffee beans and sunburn friend, my farmer lover of the land friend, my silence is just about as golden as talking together friend, my friend who can hear me breathe on the phone and know just what is going on in my insides.

And so she knows, in that midnight email from far away, in that special black and white shaped moment, bounded by the keystrokes of consonants and silent sounds, that I need to hear love. She spells it big in my heart: L. O. V. E. periods marking the places where I should stop and listen to it. Listen to her tell me - Hilary, I love you. 

She catches my eye in the bleariness of Monday morning and then the best thing - she catches my heart and helps me put it back together.

Love,
Hilary

A Word for Wednesday: Ephemeral (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: Ephemeral


Definition: According to the dictionary we need words about time - being short-lived, lasting only a moment, temporary. We need words that say - "it will only be here for a little bit, and then it will disappear."

Some of my definitions:

Ephemeral, adjective. The first moment that you step outside into windy winter, your hair plastered to the neck of your jacket, your hands neatly tucked into their coat pockets and you survey the world: fresh-faced and dusted with snow.

Ephemeral, adjective. The word for the moment when you see someone you've been waiting to see for weeks, and you are simply... lit. You glow, incandescent, beaming out light. The word for the moment you run forward and throw your arms in a big bear-hug around the person and hold on tight, an extra second of love squeezed into your arms.

(Mandie... too beautiful not to share)

Ephemeral, adjective. The word for that music you hear when there isn't anything playing, no noise blasting from your computer or your stereo or the conversation next to you. The word for that violin solo that lingers just one second after all has been hushed. Can you hear it?

Ephemeral, adjective. The word for the quick, quiet smile, almost hidden but not quite, when you look at the most beautiful finger painting from the two year old with her stringy blond hair, the look between mothers and daughters that catches us all breathless.

Ephemeral, adjective. The word that grates against what we wish life could be: endless cycles of cupcake eating adventures and late nights around a kitchen table, fall weather in Lincoln Park as you and your friend laugh right into the camera, unafraid of tossing leaves in the air with that mischievous grin.

We wish it wasn't fleeting - all this living. We wish for anything but the ephemeral. We wish for the endless.

... and we are promised eternity. But maybe, just maybe, we can't know what eternity might be until we look at the gift of ephemeral. Maybe we can't hear God say, "Behold I am with you always, to the end of the age"(Matthew 28.20) until we hear all those moments that pass us by, all those beautiful, fleeting moments of new ideas and unread books and hot chocolate with whipped cream and oven baked chicken with your girlfriends and hugging friends and kissing spouses and rocking children to sleep, writing the last line of a story and putting music onto paper.

And so I say too:

Ephemeral, adjective. The word that God loves to defy - for He is with us always.

Love,
Hilary

XOXO... Gossip Girl: American Sign Language and that Bad Habit We Never Discuss

So it's late on a Saturday night, a quiet one, a sitting-in-my-pajamas-and-eating-popcorn-with-honey Saturday night. And I'm watching "Gossip Girl" - the "scandalous look into the fabulous lives of Manhattan's elite..." And I suddenly remember this lingering blog post about gossip, about words, about their power and their meaning and I thought perhaps today might be a good day to dive back in and finish it. 


Yesterday morning, my sunshine yellow hat and I got ourselves on the 7:55 bus to DuPont Circle, the bus with my favorite bus driver (he calls out 'Union Station,' 'DC Courts,' and 'Metro Center' in the best possible voice), and I began my morning ASL lesson.

The lesson is mostly me sitting in my bus seat with my blue Signing Illustrated book propped open on my lap, my hands awkwardly trying to make the signs for "horse" or "establish" or "corn" or "reason." I love sign language more and more with every day. I carry my book in my bag and read it during lunch or on the Metro or even just in the lobby of fancy DC buildings (like the beautiful Heritage Foundation lobby that has these fake flowers that ALWAYS trick me into thinking they're real).

Yesterday on the bus, as we neared 13th and K Sts, I turned the page in the "Emotions and Abstract Ideas" I came across the sign for "gossip." I was taken aback. Why was the sign for gossip in my book, showing up that morning? I learned it. I took it in and tried to understand why it was being signed to me from the crisp white pages of Signing Illustrated. Why this morning, with its sweet November sunshine (the kind of sunshine that just seems to scream for tea with honey and an afternoon to sit in Lincoln Park and just breathe in the promises of fall)? Why am I thinking about how to create this word with my hands, make it tangible and felt in the world?

I tried to move on quickly, skimming over that word and into the more comfortable territory of "smart" and "feeling." But the sign repeated itself as I teetered through the marble lobby, showed up on my lunch hour while I sat with my coworker and thinking about the power of information about other people - the power that we seek in having information about other people. It even showed up on the bus ride home after a long day of glazed eyes and demography numbers in the Pacific Islands. I might have wanted to ignore it, might have wanted to pretend there wasn't anything to it and that, of course, like everything, it was just a passing thought through my whizzing brain and like so much else it would be gone tomorrow.

And beyond my interest at its staying power (why do some thoughts linger and others fade?) I feel more and more convinced that I am supposed to be paying attention to something in this sign for "gossip."

...And now it is January 31, the last day of the first month of a new year. It is January 31, weeks and weeks after the beginning of this blog post. I have journeyed through leaving a place I love and through that wonderful land of Italy, and have finally returned to here, to that nebulous place of the present, where I am asked to pay more attention, be more aware, live fuller and fully. And I want to bring this idea about gossiping, and our words, into this present.

Friends, our words are immensely powerful. Perhaps we forget they are powerful because we think we aren't powerful. We aren't dressed in the suits, carrying the briefcases full of legal jargon. We aren't in front of a microphone. We just whisper, whisper the "did you hear?" and the "I just found out that..." and the "Can you believe" so soft who can hear us, just to one small person, powerless like us.

We leak the secrets from our lips like faucets that won't stop dripping.

(http://levahnbros.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/dripping-faucet/)

Don't tell anyone else, okay? We say it quiet, that preface of powerlessness that keeps it safe, that drip, drip, drip of the precious things we've been told, the things we've seen and observed. And we make words about these things, cup our hands and in muffled laughter and low voices we are powerfully, awfully destructive. 

When we gossip, when we move our mouths without our hearts engaged, we make the worst kind of meaning, tell the stories that are anything but gratitude, anything but joy. We may be gleeful when we talk, but it's glee at your expense. 

Why do we do this to each other? I want to scream. Why do we choose that kind of power? But rather than dwell on this bad habit, on the hiss of words that hurt, I want to challenge and encourage us. 

What if, instead, we spoke the love words? What if we held out our hands, grabbed another person's, and whispered, "Did you hear - today, God is good?" What if we answered the seemingly benign question about another person with a simpler truth: "Between you and me,  today I thought of you, and I smiled and gave thanks." We have the power to shower the world with loving words, with a power and a life all their own. We don't have to choose the destructive words. We could lavish loving words, challenging, truth-filled words, joyful words on each other. 

Pour out the love words today. Pour out the joy words. Pour out the words that warm the spirit and comfort the weary eyes. Pour out the words that leave us breathless, fill your house with them, pour them over all those people that you haven't loved because it's hard. Pour out love words on them because they are true and they are kind and they are good. And though we will wobble, and fall, let's speak love today. 

Love to you, from the whole of my heart, 

Hilary