Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary (On Listening)

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.

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Dear Hilary,

I'm not a very good listener. I can hear everything fine, hear what my friends say, hear what my parents say, hear what various people want to see my life become and who they hope I am. I ask for advice about things - what to do about liking someone who doesn't like me back, what to do about graduate school or buying a new computer. But whenever I pray, I don't want to listen. I don't want to know what God thinks about what I'm doing or saying or what He thinks about... well, hardly anything. I know myself, I know what I want, and I don't want to listen to what He wants. And I have all these voices in my head already, from past expectations to teachers to my friends to my own beliefs to what I imagine God wants to potential consequences and... I just can't hear anything even if I was listening. I have a feeling this could spell trouble. What do I do?

Love,
Not Listening

Dear Not Listening,

A very wise and dear person once told me that there is this thing called "the quiet place." We named it that after she had been mentoring me for a little over a year. Every so often in the course of our time together she would wave her hand in front of my face and say, "that? that right there? that's the quiet place." And we would sit in silence as she nodded and I tried to figure out what about my lapse into defeated silence at the unanswerable nature of my questions equalled "the quiet place."

The truth is, this wise person wasn't talking about a place of no external noise. The quiet place isn't hundreds of miles into the desert or an abandoned forest or out in the middle of the ocean. The quiet place exists on a bustling Baltimore street or in the subway or in a crowded board room or while you are talking to your friends over sangria and mexican food. It's a place without internal noise. And it sounds to me like you are chock full of internal noise, love.

You have all of these words and sentences and thoughts and hopes spinning through your mind like tops set loose down a set of steps. They hop from one stair to the next randomly and without warning. A mind like that can't listen. A mind that's desperate to follow one train of thought to its conclusion (only to get rear-ended by another thought) is not able to listen. You are caught in all of these expectations and hopes... and you can't listen to any of them well.

So, love, what do you do? You go still. Like a bird on a telephone line, their hollow bones clutching firm to the swaying wire. They are still. Watch how they tilt their heads to taste the wind. Do that, too. Fold in your wings (you aren't ready to use them yet, anyway), and hold on to the wire and tilt your head to the wind. That's the quiet place. Where there is One voice, and He says, "I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth." Where there is One Person, and He says, "Come to me."

And as for listening but not listening, wanting what you want and believing that you know best, I can only tell you that what you want now is not what you will want tomorrow or the next day. The life you envision for yourself at this moment before the beginning is not the life you will end the day grateful for tomorrow. You said it before: spend your heart leaning on Him. Ask for daily bread. Ask for this day's work. Ask for help in this one small moment, when all you want more than anything is to find the right word for the swaying bird on the wire with his hollow bones and his bright eyes.

And then, love, when the rest has faded and you are in the quiet place, cup your hands around a mug of tea and remember, "man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD" (Deuteronomy 8.3).


Love,
Hilary

All the fullness (a five minute post)

Lisa-Jo over at the Gypsy Mama asks us to write, no editing or worrying about if it's right, if we've chosen the perfect word or sentence... just to let our words shimmy out of us and into the world, bringing sunshine with them. Won't you join us? This week we're writing about "Full."

For as long as I've been in college full means too full. It means a heavy and loaded schedule that groans under the weight of classes and work and meetings and then the preparation for the meetings and where is the room for the dreaming? For the last minute spontaneous coffee dates with friends? Full has meant overwhelmingly full, achingly full, full of things to do and become. Full is the laundry list of responsibilities and full is the worrying sense of guilt that I'll do none of them perfectly and even that I'll forget something in the midst.

But something keeps shifting it for me, the definition slipping from my overachieving fingers back into what it wants to be. Now fullness means full of Him. Now fullness means a heart that overflows and expands to listen and love and guard the ones I love. Fullness means a head that spins with the images of the manna from Heaven:

the beads of condensation on a cold glass of iced tea
the laughter of a friend over dinner
the realization on a long trek of 6 miles that your body is a miracle
the yearning to finish the next page of the book because you can't put it down
cupcakes
becoming 21
listening to the sound of the fans breathing

And it is all manna and it is all goodness and if I just eat it, put my hands up to the sky and say thank you and eat, and trust that it's really good food... then fullness is a word about joy.

Love,
Hilary

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (a memory)

We sit hunched between air conditioning vents in the backseat, pillows propped under our arms, our thighs red from the sun at the park where we stopped for lunch in Iowa. Her bright red hair is pulled back in a ponytail and my stringy blondish-brownish hair hangs on either side of my face. We are each buried in a book, and there is another sitting between us. In the front, Mom, Dad and the boys are talking, or listening to the twentieth round of the Arthur CD, and watching the landscape rush by us. It's land like we've never seen before: hills and prairie grass and North Dakota.

But Abby and I don't see North Dakota. We miss South Dakota too, and probably some of Montana - that big sky country that whips the breath out of you when you see how vast the blue really is. We only catch glimpses when we're forced from the car for a picture, a lesson, a historical marker, a brother's need for a Coke and a snack and to stretch his legs.

We are in Santorini, Greece, and Bethesda, Maryland, in South Carolina and in Baja, California. We are wrapped in the lives of Bridget, Lena, Tibby and Carmen, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the girls who traveled far and wide and who had adventures of love and laughter and growing up.

We eat and sleep these books, waiting impatiently for the other person to finish so we can swap. We buy the third book, "Girls in Pants" as soon as it comes out that summer in a bookstore somewhere along the bright red line of our family roadtrip map. We read other things, talk to each other, listen to Sheryl Crow and eat Subway sandwiches outside in 101º in Nebraska on our way home. The summer is full of our family, full of our own sisterhood. The summer is me and Abby, in our teens, dreaming about who we'll become and what all of this living is all about, laughing and braiding hair and sleeping in the two person tent and eating macaroni & cheese & peas in the car with all the doors open because it is too hot to have a campfire and besides, none of us really like s'mores.

The miracle of being sisters with someone is that you read more than books together: you read each other, you read your hearts. You learn by doing, when to send a note or call again, when to let space between grow to make room for who each of you are, and who you're hoping to be. You learn through all of the late nights talking between the beds, and the nail polish spills on your carpet, and the disastrous haircuts you give your Barbie dolls (and each other), and up through conversations about falling in love and how to be a college students and what you're going to do after graduation. You learn that sisterhood is about more than those four girls sharing a pair of jeans. Being sisters is holding another person's heart in your heart for the whole of your life.

It's been seven years or so (maybe more) since we scrunched into the back seat of our van and read about how Lena fell in love with Kostos, how Bridget discovered her grandmother, how Carmen (who we'd never liked as much) learned to be an actress, how Tibby (who we'd also never liked as much, but who grew on us) reluctantly befriended Bailey and how Tibby became a filmmaker. And in those seven years my sister and I have been growing just like I imagined the characters would: into jobs, into college, into plans for the future and imagining getting married and having kids, into wanting to travel and explore the world.

Today I wanted to remember how rare and special it is to have a sister. And remember how those hot July days before the beginning of growing up have faded seamlessly into hot July days now, where the growing up is right in front of us, and all the love of all the 21 years of being sisters is there too.

Ann Brashares, the author who first wrote Bridget, Lena, Tibby and Carmen into existence, published a new book about them. They are all older in the book - nearing 30 - and it follows the lives we all were left imagining at the end of the series. I bought the book because it seemed written to remind me of that summer of reading with Abby in the backseat. It seemed written to remind me that being a sister, and having one, is among the most treasured gifts.

Love,
Hilary