change

posting over here now...come take a look and follow along. xx

100 miles.

ran 4 miles today

and hit

100 miles

since april.

!!!

I'm so so so excited / happy / can't-stop-smiling / sweaty (well, yeah) / sore / glad.

the stats:

12 miles in april

38 in may

50 in june

personal records:

fastest average pace - 8:45/mi

longest duration - 40:13 (consecutively. sometimes I got for another run a day ;))

most miles ran in a day - 5

when I started running, I could barely run 2 minutes straight. seriously.

I was huffing. and puffing. but I wasn't the little engine that could.

more like, I was barely able to breathe and my lungs were aching and my legs alternated between jello and bricks that threatened to melt or fall off.

and I really really really wanted to quit.

but slowly.

and surely.

and most definitely slowly.

let me emphasize slowly.

I started to get better.

I started to push myself (and not die in the process)

and my body started listening to me

and I could breathe again (sorta)

and I hit mini milestones and thought,

"hey, I can do this."

and I still have a long way to go.

I'm not training for any marathons and don't see any in the future.
I love running for the sake that it makes me strong.

my goal is to be fit and strong and healthy.

not necessarily a marathoner. ;)
I like short runs and quick runs and under 5 miles a day.

especially since my knees / ankles are so messed up from ballet, that's what I feel comfortable sticking with.

that doesn't mean that I won't someday go crazy and run 26.2 miles consecutively.

because I might!

but I like short runs.

I like 3-4 miles a day.

I like running 15-20 miles a week.

and that's what works for me.

so I'm focusing on endurance. building up to 4 miles straight

(right now I run for three, walk for 2 1/2 minutes, and run the rest of the way),

and a 5 mile run at least once a week.

I'm excited to set new goals and keep pushing forward.

but right now...

I'm happy. and content. and proud of myself.

because hey jack (in my best uncle si voice),

I ran 100 miles.

and that's pretty exciting. :)

we are surprised ;

we are surprised ; by
by and by, joy seeps in our
crevices

we are surprised ; honey
trails on the counter
rivers for ants. we are

surprised ; there
is no question leaving
doesn't press into our
faces.

day wears the
questions: on, in, around,
(eyes) my we

are cracked ; there is
room, by and by, rivers and lakes,
for light.

scurry along, home to
where the ;
questions aren't for
answers(answers

don't demand
a word)

You tell me

you count your freckles

so do I

your favorite smells is grass after rain

mine too

you can't bear to write in books

same here

you don't stop missing people

we are the same

you only drink coffee black

pass me a cup

your dream home is here.

yes.

/// wild mulberry.

I'm eating strawberries like candy and my mornings consist of drinking the rain up in swallows of sky and sometimes think I have stars in my lungs, flowers growing in the spaces between my fingers and all this to say, do you miss me? Everything I touch is stained pink and smells like raspberries in the summer, and everything I breathe tastes like walking into Home Depot, with the wood growing old and damp and musty in shavings swept in scattered piles on the floor. I used to walk into the store and flip through the catalogues of color like each shade was a hue I could name, and I wanted to buy the paint swatches for not only the colors, but the name. I dreamt of taping them to my walls and waking up to a kaleidoscope of onomatopoeias, colors shifting slowly from deepest of blues to the softest of peaches, made up of words like winter surf, manhattan mist, wild mulberry. On the right side of my bed, I would plaster a whole sheet of yellows for days when the rain was my only rhythm, and next to the window I'd tape a sample called pollen grain, and I swear I'd be able to taste the sticky dust of it like I had blossoms scattered on the floor. Do you know that there's a color sample called Star Dust and it's the softest yellow, like an Easter egg dipped too briefly to be more than an echo? I imagine walking hand in hand to show you my walls and when you opened your eyes, you would laugh.

You are the color of Irish Mist and you smell like dried salt from the sea and I painted a picture in shades of grey and green like the cold coast, just for you, and everyone who sees it asks why the sea is butter yellow, not blue. I tell them that there are different colors for missing people and lately, everything is shot through with gold and it seeps and trickles into all that I do and what I want to say is,

I still hate the rain (and I love you).

///

(fiction)

"There is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us." — Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird

"The point is the Lord has called us to a lifestyle, it's not a lifestyle simply for the sake of successful ministry, so that we can see miracles. That's part of it, but that's a the fruit of what we are being summoned for. We are being summoned because we are people made in His image, who represent an aspect of His nature, that unless it is expressed in the earth, there is an aspect of God's person that people will never see. And you and I each carry uniqueness in design and person and gifting.

We've been stating a lot lately that when a person discovers who God designed them to be, they would never want to be anyone else. There's another layer to that. When a person discovers who God designed them to be, truly sees it, they will never compromise their life for inferior things. Because the significance of God's design is so great that everything else pales in life by comparison, everything else is simply counterfeit.

And so the Lord is summoning us into, first of all, a quest, the quest for more. The quest that sometimes wakes up in the night, that quest, the cry where we say, "Lord, we want you to do something deeper in us." And we learn to live in that place of abiding presence." - Bill Johnson

Wow.
Wrecked tonight.

louder yes.

"If somebody is walking in greater authority and power in Jesus than you, it’s not because they’re more annointed than you, it’s not because God loves them more than you… it’s because their yes is louder than yours." — Reinhard Bonnke

the peace of wild things.

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry

instructions for living a life.
pay attention.
be astonished.
tell about it.
- mary oliver

this is what you shall do.

"This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency
not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between
the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
― Walt Whitman

beginnings.

for you I wish.

i.
for you I wish
cups of coffee clinking
weekly maybe daily, but only
with a friend.
the
type that understands
your reasons for
refusing sugar, refusing cream, drinking
black.

ii.
for you I wish
days when the marrow
of life sprouts flowers,
little green things that
insist on growing.
smelling wet under gray
skies split at the
seams.

iii.
for you I wish
slowness, the ability to sit
watching birds, sunsets,
the lulling strands of
conversation. promises of stillness on
warm spring evenings,
when
your soul leaps, fits breathes, over
what is
small.


hannah nicole

just life and stuff.

a few bits and pieces...
+ last week, I went to Maryland to visit ellie & go to kristen's storytime workshop. some of the best eight days ever. more (so much more) later.
+ I launched my new website & blog! eek eek eek EEEEEEEK. been on my heart for such a long time. so bittersweet to say goodbye to aspire / hannah nicole, my original blog, finally, but good to have a new beginning and I'll say it and be cliche, a new chapter. letting go and learning it's a good thing. + that being said, excited to have this little space for personal stuff. having clearly defined professional & personal blogs is already so good for me. + I almost stopped blogging but just couldn't give up this place and small space. blogging for me is going to look differently for a bit and again, I'm learning that's okay. I'm not a blogger but I am a storyteller and artist and photographer and writer who has a blog, so I'm not going to try to fit myself into what a blogger "should" look like or "should" do. I'm content with who I am and realizing that while I love it, blogging is not as big a part of my life anymore and it's a bittersweet but good realization. + the 85mm has replaced the 35mm in my bag and I am so okay with that. + also, thinking of summer projects and I keep coming back to writing and I'm trying to figure out what that means / what I'd like to do, but a book has been on my heart (okay, I have a lot of things on my heart) and I don't know if that would happen or what that would mean but it's something I'm thinking about. (that being said...well...there's a lot that I've been dreaming about lately) + I bought a curling wand and it's pretty much the best thing to happen to me since black coffee. + I had an incredible engagement shoot last night with two of the sweetest / funniest / down-right-wonderful people ever and it was just incredible for my soul. deep down in my bones, know that this is where I'm supposed to be and I am so grateful. + it's sunny and warm and beautiful outside and my heart is about to burst. have a rich & wonderful Sunday! xo h

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking.
C.S. Lewis

...

I bought plum blossoms

more for the name

than for the color;

I buy lipstick that way, too.

In other words,

if it sounds like a poem,

I’ll take it.

— Dorothea Grossman, “Untitled”

dandelions.

you stand in the middle of the kitchen

because your mother said it was easier,

said it was lighter without the weight of

a braid thick as the bread your

grandma used to knead back and forth

on her wooden table. your grandpa

made that table when your mother

still ran around in long

hair tangled with weeds she still

believed were flowers. there

were five chairs then, she tells you they

were crooked.

misshapen like the scar on your arm

from falling off the willow the

seventh summer you lived. the branches

pulled the sky to the earth,

dirt cracked your wrist, but

you were lucky. you were lucky,

your daddy said

to only have the breath stolen from

your lungs for a moment. that

moment of grasping for

air never left you, still, and

you

stand in the middle of the kitchen

crying as, in one snip, the past your

waist strands of your hair swish.

near your bare feet and she's wrong

it's not

lighter.

you finger the sudden cut and peek

in the chipped mirror, you look older.

and now

it's too late to pretend you won't

ever grow up, too

late to still call dandelions

flowers.

if there were words.

Be Good To You

Be yourself, truthfully

Accept yourself, gratefully

Value yourself, joyfully

Forgive yourself, completely

Treat yourself, generously

Balance yourself, harmoniously

Bless yourself, abundantly

Trust yourself, wholeheartedly

Empower yourself, prayerfully

Give yourself, enthusiastically

Express yourself, radiantly

-Tracey Steffy

learning to do just that.

photo from last summer by the always talented and ever dear & lovely allix.

coffee shop.

I am alone but not lonely. tell me,
how can i be? i am a part
of the passing glances of strangers, grabbing
coffee cups in four sizes for fifty eight
kinds of heartbreak, (number three:
a sun setting suddenly on familiar
red wind fields come autumn, the
same, every year, the difference, every year.
number eighteen and a half: the first laugh of your baby,
the last word before a goodbye. inexplicably
intertwined with how your face feels creases)
every hello, i manage to slip
my hand into, i find a way to whisper
my name into lapses of conversation, if
only to say, "I am
here."
the door opens and closes for people,
friends, lovers, strangers, all
saying good day, and i am somewhere
no where, now here, a part
of the dust in the air from
boots treading dirty roads, a single
fluttering breath in these
minute exchanges meaning
everything and yet nothing at once.
this, you spill accidentally, not unlike,
the stains leaving rings in your journal,
still bitter when the smell leaves your
fingers. i stay long
after the doors have shut, and always
choose the oldest leather chair
to unravel my worries into, spilling
them alongside sips of
a lattee foamed with milk. is
there anything lovelier? my name is written
in sharpie on the side. i read between
the lines of every letter and write
a poem for each barista that
scribbles the h in my name with a swoop,
for the ones who scrawl the letters tightly,
a love song. there are white pages
before me bound in the third journal
i've used in two years. look, do you see the
blue sky, washed clean after rain?
outside. if you wait, it will ring gold and
how can i (you) be lonely, when you
sit next to a window?

justified freely.

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." - Romans 3:23-24

He gives freely that which we could never earn nor deserve.
Not because we are good or righteous in and of ourselves.
But because He is good and righteous -- and we are His.

Hallelujah.