I’m coming home to you,
wear something see-through
so I may glimpse your heart,
not your body...
but that trembling lantern
behind your ribs,
which still dares to burn
even when the world blows cold.

Love, you see, is not a stage for triumph,
but a rehearsal without end.
We repeat the lines,
miss the cues,
drop the props,
yet return again tomorrow...
because rehearsal is not for perfection.
It is for the miracle of trying,
for the mad stubbornness
of standing before the impossible
and bowing to it,
as if it were a lover.

In rehearsal, we do not hoard,
we empty.
We scatter our strength
like bread broken in the hands of friends,
and in the very scattering
we are fed.
So it is with love:
not a fortress we acquire,
but a wilderness we surrender to,
again and again,
knowing we cannot own it,
only rehearse it.

And is not study the same?
To study is not to fill the mind
with stones of certainty,
but to be stripped bare,
to wander into unknowing,
to learn so that we might unlearn,
to receive and then release,
knowledge like a dove
that never stays long in the cage.

Love too is this studying:
a schooling in surrender,
a lesson where every page burns away,
where the exam is never passed,
yet the failure is holy.
For the secret is not to win,
but to kneel before the mystery,
and give back all you have rehearsed...
with open hands,
with an emptied heart,
with the faith of a child
who believes losing
is another name for love.