I don’t know what love is but I know how to watch stars drip from the sky. How to lay on my back during a meteor shower and feel that light surge through the night of my body. Burning through my separateness, my greed, my forgetting that I am all of it. I know how to surrender to their bright blaze, let it pierce my heart, make me a burning city. And I know how to be ash, earth, ground, aftermath of a forest fire where wildflowers grow and moose walk.

I don’t know what love is but I know how to curl my body around the rocks of a stream. How to carve space like glaciers do. How to lay down in the current heavy like stone and forget I am human. I know how to be washed clean, empty, free. How to melt into rock, melt into water, melt into nothing, and everything. How to let the sound of rushing water fill my hearing. Until the Creator’s voice rises and shakes through me so heavy I’m a waterfall.

I don’t know what love is but I know how to lay down the ritual, the ceremony, the invocations, the prayerful words. The “right” ways. I know how to watch for the eagles every day. They scoop the sky out of my eyes and fill me with real sight. I know how to lose myself in their wings, come to hours later, praying, not realizing I was praying.

I don’t know what love is but I know how to be water. How to lay back into the dark water lake that sparkles under the sun. How to fall back into these waters of love. How to trust. All the water of the world is connected. You. Me. When I lay my head back, let my ears fill up with lake, look up at the quiet sky, we are together.

I don’t know what love is but I know how to be gutted, cleaned, gleaming. I know how to be soft and water. I know how to listen. Really listen. I know how to pray like the sky opens at dawn, without words. I know how to drop all my clothes beside a holy lake. How to enter clean like newborn. How to return. How to trust.