(After the five minutes - I remember to say come join us over at The Gypsy Mama where we write words that fly free and beautiful like flags in the breeze! This week it's on loss...)
I hear her familiar intonation on the phone and I recognize in an instant that she's not here. The line crackles, a reminder in the midst of a hazy July evening that the moment to cry with her about her departure southward passed with rain and humidity and packing clothes to the sounds of The Plain White T's.
And I keep saying it's fine, all the way through the first part of the conversations where I can't imagine what her new house looks like and what fills her days and I hear her, and miss her, and all I can say is it's fine, it's fine...
But it's not, and I never write about it. I keep it tucked away, careful to look at it only in early morning light when I open my eyes to the ceiling and listen to the silence before the day knocks on my door. I hear it {the loss, the missing} breathe next to me as I run through the surprise rainstorm. I run, and run, and run until I ache in places that I didn't know I had, and I keep asking God if this is really the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living or if this is just the harsh wind over a desert.
Last night, the moon perched above the rustling shadows of the trees. And I remembered that there is nothing beautiful like the moon in a summer sky. In an instant, in less than an instant, my heart leapt up to meet the surprise gift of the moon in the sky and my mother driving next to me and the promise that behold He is doing a new thing and behold He will bring us up into the land of the living and behold, behold the moon clinging to the clouds, the familiar smell of salt water rippling past you, the quivering beauty of what seems small.
And behold, though I hear the gravity of departure, though I hear loss, and I worry: He is doing a new thing. He is giving a new gift. And I want to open wide my self to see it.
Love,
Hilary
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary (On the Discipline of Learning)
I tried this experiment in the month of May, when I wrote an advice column to myself.
I asked the question (about dreaming) and tried to give an answer (it
was incomplete). Today I'm wondering another question, and I wanted to
share it with you. And of course, I'm inspired, constantly, it seems, by
Dear Sugar's words of beauty and truth, truth that enters the room and sits there.
And she inspires me, with the possibility of learning to listen to the
quiet place and learning to live from it.
---
Dear Hilary,
Tell me a story about learning. Tell me about how and why and what the point is. I don't know why I study. I don't know why I read books about World War I and why I try to weave together Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr. I don't know if I'll ever be able to understand what this is all about, these links I keep seeing between the Vatican and Italian politics and Catholic social thought and how the encyclicals were really so much more important that I ever thought they were. And what if I can't do it? What if I'm not smart enough, after all, to be a graduate student or to change the way a whole group of people think about religious and political history, or to teach other people about the things I think I know?
Tell me a story about learning?
Love,
I'm missing it
Dear I'm missing it,
It's the spring of my junior year of high school. I am in an adaptation of Cinderella. I am playing Cinderella, and I'm failing. Not miserably, exactly, but failing. The lines are stilted - word perfect from my ability to memorize, but they don't ache and dip and soar and build the story. And Holly, the director, calls STOP! She comes up to me and puts her face rightthisclose to my face. And she says, "Cinderella! Come on!" And she turns, acting out what she keeps hoping I'll do. She gets angry at Prince Albert standing there in his Burger King crown and his blue jeans. She looks out at the rows and rows of empty seats, wondering, looking for an answer written across the flicker of the faulty spotlight. She turns back to me, and says, "Again." I sigh, scuff my bare feet on the grey floor, feel the cold concrete in between my toes, and shake my hair behind my ears. I return to the foot of the stairs and look at Prince Albert with what I hope is a colder glare than before. We try again.
Again. And again. And again. We rehearse until I can screech my lines, until they've seeped into my blood and they are my words, my emotions. Until I have put enough of the art room charcoal on my face, enough twigs in my hair, and carried enough buckets of invisible water to be this girl. We rehearse until every movement is fluid and known, yet somehow miraculous too (because the joy of theater is partly this - that everything you practice becomes new every time you do it).
This is learning, sweetheart. In all its glory and all its repetition. The story of learning is the story of practicing asking questions and getting under the skin of the plays, the problems, and the web of ideas that tether us to everything from economic theory to the themes of the Renaissance to the importance of the 1930s Vatican in Catholic Social Thought. Learning is not about performance or achievement. No amount of degrees or plaques or carefully crafted opening paragraphs of a CV will make you a learner. No laundry list of published articles or book jacket covers or specializations or guest lecture invitations will do it, either. Learning is about moving towards horizons, pushing onward into unexplored territories, wandering in the parts of the past that catch you and the problems that can't let you go. Learning is me practicing screaming at the guy playing Prince Albert. Learning is you sitting in your classroom wherever you are asking, "Why am I doing this?" We're already in the midst of all of it. All the best of it.
I never became a theater major. Sometimes I wonder why. I wonder why I didn't take that path and push that edge, push myself into that world. But learning is about being captivated by the possibility. Learning is slogging away at research and writing papers only two people read (you and your professor) and maybe not one other person ever reads it, but it doesn't matter because you followed the trail and it took you somewhere new, and you're changed because of it. And this is the point, though it's humble and seems small: you learn because the world offers itself to our imaginations and our observation, and it takes patience and time and practice to see it for what it is.
Learning needs discipline. Like learning lines and getting inside a character. Learning is practice, and challenge, and some days you'll go in circles and put your head on the pillow with nothing but questions. Lots of days and nights, in fact, years into the future. But the story is yours to write, love, and yours to create. You can fill chapters with what you learned about dating and marriage and loving another person. You can throw in lines throughout about why history matters (or environmental conservation or the German language). You can weave together in your life the hours of classrooms and exams with coffee dates and arguments.
So the only thing I can say about why you do it, why you study, why you are a student and a learner - because you've probably fallen in love with learning, and it has captured your heart, like Cinderella and theater and history captured me. Keep falling into love with learning. Keep practicing.
And then, write to me, and tell me the story.
Love,
Hilary
---
Dear Hilary,
Tell me a story about learning. Tell me about how and why and what the point is. I don't know why I study. I don't know why I read books about World War I and why I try to weave together Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr. I don't know if I'll ever be able to understand what this is all about, these links I keep seeing between the Vatican and Italian politics and Catholic social thought and how the encyclicals were really so much more important that I ever thought they were. And what if I can't do it? What if I'm not smart enough, after all, to be a graduate student or to change the way a whole group of people think about religious and political history, or to teach other people about the things I think I know?
Tell me a story about learning?
Love,
I'm missing it
Dear I'm missing it,
It's the spring of my junior year of high school. I am in an adaptation of Cinderella. I am playing Cinderella, and I'm failing. Not miserably, exactly, but failing. The lines are stilted - word perfect from my ability to memorize, but they don't ache and dip and soar and build the story. And Holly, the director, calls STOP! She comes up to me and puts her face rightthisclose to my face. And she says, "Cinderella! Come on!" And she turns, acting out what she keeps hoping I'll do. She gets angry at Prince Albert standing there in his Burger King crown and his blue jeans. She looks out at the rows and rows of empty seats, wondering, looking for an answer written across the flicker of the faulty spotlight. She turns back to me, and says, "Again." I sigh, scuff my bare feet on the grey floor, feel the cold concrete in between my toes, and shake my hair behind my ears. I return to the foot of the stairs and look at Prince Albert with what I hope is a colder glare than before. We try again.
Again. And again. And again. We rehearse until I can screech my lines, until they've seeped into my blood and they are my words, my emotions. Until I have put enough of the art room charcoal on my face, enough twigs in my hair, and carried enough buckets of invisible water to be this girl. We rehearse until every movement is fluid and known, yet somehow miraculous too (because the joy of theater is partly this - that everything you practice becomes new every time you do it).
This is learning, sweetheart. In all its glory and all its repetition. The story of learning is the story of practicing asking questions and getting under the skin of the plays, the problems, and the web of ideas that tether us to everything from economic theory to the themes of the Renaissance to the importance of the 1930s Vatican in Catholic Social Thought. Learning is not about performance or achievement. No amount of degrees or plaques or carefully crafted opening paragraphs of a CV will make you a learner. No laundry list of published articles or book jacket covers or specializations or guest lecture invitations will do it, either. Learning is about moving towards horizons, pushing onward into unexplored territories, wandering in the parts of the past that catch you and the problems that can't let you go. Learning is me practicing screaming at the guy playing Prince Albert. Learning is you sitting in your classroom wherever you are asking, "Why am I doing this?" We're already in the midst of all of it. All the best of it.
I never became a theater major. Sometimes I wonder why. I wonder why I didn't take that path and push that edge, push myself into that world. But learning is about being captivated by the possibility. Learning is slogging away at research and writing papers only two people read (you and your professor) and maybe not one other person ever reads it, but it doesn't matter because you followed the trail and it took you somewhere new, and you're changed because of it. And this is the point, though it's humble and seems small: you learn because the world offers itself to our imaginations and our observation, and it takes patience and time and practice to see it for what it is.
Learning needs discipline. Like learning lines and getting inside a character. Learning is practice, and challenge, and some days you'll go in circles and put your head on the pillow with nothing but questions. Lots of days and nights, in fact, years into the future. But the story is yours to write, love, and yours to create. You can fill chapters with what you learned about dating and marriage and loving another person. You can throw in lines throughout about why history matters (or environmental conservation or the German language). You can weave together in your life the hours of classrooms and exams with coffee dates and arguments.
So the only thing I can say about why you do it, why you study, why you are a student and a learner - because you've probably fallen in love with learning, and it has captured your heart, like Cinderella and theater and history captured me. Keep falling into love with learning. Keep practicing.
And then, write to me, and tell me the story.
Love,
Hilary
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Do you eat cupcakes on sunny days?
So, dear friends, here we are on another gorgeous Sunday, a day of clear skies and the best breeze off the beloved Atlantic. A day when the sun's rays warm the back of your neck, your arms freckle slightly and you wonder about joy and laughter and life. And since I've been asking you, these last few weeks, if you sing ballads to your reflection and drift through a good book and stomp your way across the kitchen to "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz, I have another question for you:
Do you eat cupcakes on sunny days?
I wrote about my cupcake adventures in DC, and to recount them briefly, by flavor and location, they look like this:
fresh peanut butter cup and red velvet, at Red Velvet (Gallery Place/Chinatown)
pretty bitchin' (peanut butter and fudge), fresh lemon & raspberry, and pumpkin spice, at Baked & Wired (Jefferson Ave, Georgetown)
apple caramel, pb fudge, at Georgetown Cupcakes (M St, Georgetown)
pink lemonade, at Hello! Cupcake (Dupont Circle)
blood orange dreamsicle, at Lavender Moon Cupcakery (Old Town Alexandria)
And I still dream and remember and adore those cupcakes. And I wrote to you all about the need to stop counting calories and instead remember that, in my own DC-infused words, "Food creates memories; calories create anxiety." So today, as a dear friend from that same semester and I strolled through Newburyport, the sun beaming down on us and our brief but beautiful reunion, we ate cupcakes.
Hers was M&M with chocolate drizzle; mine was lime with raspberry filling and key lime buttercream. We sat looking out at the harbor and our talk meandered through the afternoon as we sat there, dangling our feet, resting our busy and weary bodies, soaking up each other's presence.
Do you eat cupcakes on sunny days? Do you feed your heart with what it needs, time to be still and to laugh, to be comforted and challenged in the presence of someone you love? Have you paused today to lick frosting off of your palm and laugh at what a mess you're making, or to carefully fold up the empty wrapper like a piece of origami before throwing it away? Have you carved out a bit of time to eat a cupcake on a sunny day by the water?
There are moments when I think about my semester in the brick streets and corner cafés and office buildings of our nation's capital and I wish myself back there. There are moments when everything here feels like waiting, and nothing here feels like harvest. Where the soil seems shallow and rocky and dry and distracted, and I'm too busy and too overwhelmed and too frustrated and too impatient to bear witness to anything beautiful. There are moments when I look up from my desk at work and wonder when the time will come to see the fruit that I keep being told is growing.
And as our priest said in her sermon today, "God does the deep work when things are difficult." God grows the best fruit in soil that endures, that waits, that hopes and perseveres. God grows things in us that we can't hear unless we are listening for the still, small voice to speak. God brings life and light out of what we do not think matters. And if we trust, especially when it feels impossible, when the voices in our heads tell us it will never work, we will never become...
God will make miracles appear like the stargazer lilies that blossomed when you weren't watching.
And today, while I ate cupcakes and thought about God, while I wandered through Newburyport and wondered about all the questions in my heart and all the doubts about my future, I remembered that I already see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. I remembered that I see Him growing trust, and patience, and prayer in me. I remembered that joy is gift, and it is ours to receive if we will make space in ourselves.
Eat cupcakes with me, on this sunny day, and let's revel in the deep work that he's doing.
And if you are craving the best flavors I can think of?
1. Blueberry & Lemon
2. Key Lime Pie (with graham cracker crust on the bottom and a key lime curd in the middle)
3. Peanut Butter & Jelly
4. Pink Grapefruit & Honey
5. Apple Pie
Love, from my cupcake-adoring heart,
Hilary
Do you eat cupcakes on sunny days?
I wrote about my cupcake adventures in DC, and to recount them briefly, by flavor and location, they look like this:
fresh peanut butter cup and red velvet, at Red Velvet (Gallery Place/Chinatown)
pretty bitchin' (peanut butter and fudge), fresh lemon & raspberry, and pumpkin spice, at Baked & Wired (Jefferson Ave, Georgetown)
apple caramel, pb fudge, at Georgetown Cupcakes (M St, Georgetown)
pink lemonade, at Hello! Cupcake (Dupont Circle)
blood orange dreamsicle, at Lavender Moon Cupcakery (Old Town Alexandria)
And I still dream and remember and adore those cupcakes. And I wrote to you all about the need to stop counting calories and instead remember that, in my own DC-infused words, "Food creates memories; calories create anxiety." So today, as a dear friend from that same semester and I strolled through Newburyport, the sun beaming down on us and our brief but beautiful reunion, we ate cupcakes.
Hers was M&M with chocolate drizzle; mine was lime with raspberry filling and key lime buttercream. We sat looking out at the harbor and our talk meandered through the afternoon as we sat there, dangling our feet, resting our busy and weary bodies, soaking up each other's presence.
Do you eat cupcakes on sunny days? Do you feed your heart with what it needs, time to be still and to laugh, to be comforted and challenged in the presence of someone you love? Have you paused today to lick frosting off of your palm and laugh at what a mess you're making, or to carefully fold up the empty wrapper like a piece of origami before throwing it away? Have you carved out a bit of time to eat a cupcake on a sunny day by the water?
There are moments when I think about my semester in the brick streets and corner cafés and office buildings of our nation's capital and I wish myself back there. There are moments when everything here feels like waiting, and nothing here feels like harvest. Where the soil seems shallow and rocky and dry and distracted, and I'm too busy and too overwhelmed and too frustrated and too impatient to bear witness to anything beautiful. There are moments when I look up from my desk at work and wonder when the time will come to see the fruit that I keep being told is growing.
And as our priest said in her sermon today, "God does the deep work when things are difficult." God grows the best fruit in soil that endures, that waits, that hopes and perseveres. God grows things in us that we can't hear unless we are listening for the still, small voice to speak. God brings life and light out of what we do not think matters. And if we trust, especially when it feels impossible, when the voices in our heads tell us it will never work, we will never become...
God will make miracles appear like the stargazer lilies that blossomed when you weren't watching.
And today, while I ate cupcakes and thought about God, while I wandered through Newburyport and wondered about all the questions in my heart and all the doubts about my future, I remembered that I already see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. I remembered that I see Him growing trust, and patience, and prayer in me. I remembered that joy is gift, and it is ours to receive if we will make space in ourselves.
Eat cupcakes with me, on this sunny day, and let's revel in the deep work that he's doing.
And if you are craving the best flavors I can think of?
1. Blueberry & Lemon
2. Key Lime Pie (with graham cracker crust on the bottom and a key lime curd in the middle)
3. Peanut Butter & Jelly
4. Pink Grapefruit & Honey
5. Apple Pie
Love, from my cupcake-adoring heart,
Hilary
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