Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you." The Gospel of Thomas

This is my religion—

You huddle beneath the stars in the middle of your little horse herd. The moonlight is reflected in their clouds of breath, their whiskers, their soft eyes. The silence is brilliant. It tinkles in your ears like chandelier crystals somewhere way above your head, until it’s punctuated by the sound of a stamping hoof.

You pull your goose down jacket closer, look back at your ranch house where your family is inside. You’re off to see the horses, you announce, and they know you’ll be a while. They understand your hunger for the stars, even though you’ve all just finished dinner. Yellow light pours from the kitchen windows into the inky night, and you can almost hear the talk and the laughter going on inside, the clank of dishes in the sink.

You think of that Native American woman you read about in a story once, and how because she had no living male relatives, she was forced out of the tribe, out of her home, and had to seek some warmth, some shelter among the horses on a winter night just like this. A night so cold your breath comes quick and the emptiness of it all makes you almost dizzy. By the morning, the story goes, she had frozen to death.

You stamp your feet to get the blood flowing and understand why.

You made a diorama in grade school once. Of a winter scene like this, with a cardboard house and a barn and the mountains, white cotton for snow, and black paper for the night sky into which you punched lots of little holes with your No. 2 pencil. To let the light from your penlight come in from the other side. You see the big dipper suspended above you like the celestial mobile you hung from your daughter’s bedroom clerestory window when she was five. The constellations you wish you could name. The Milky Way in all its glory.

And just as you are being grateful for the lack of light pollution way out here, you have this hunch that the light is trying to get through. Right now. At this moment. That it’s pushing against the construction paper, that it might very well shake loose and spill out all over the mesa through the holes someone’s punched in it in about a million places. And they are punching more. You shiver slightly and lean against furry Toby to soak up some of his warmth, and as he regards you with the full force of his draft horse calm over his shoulder--you hear it.

I love you.

The words are as clear as a bell. You gape up in wonder up at the stars. Take a couple of steps forward, to try and hear better. As if that would do any good. Because your ears are not involved.

I love you.

Like the old school bell you ring on the front porch of the house when you want the kids to come in. Like the one they rang for you when you were a girl yourself who liked to run wild in the woods. You stand in your barn boots with your feet planted firmly on the frozen ground that’s reeling.

The stars burn.

I love you.

Toby sighs.

You stand out there a long time, clutching the hem of the lady's black velvet gown. Listening to the silence. Until all of a sudden they are ringing the bell outside on the front porch for you to come on back inside. And it's a couple of minutes before you do.