Intimacy

The Task Of Love

As we relate together
I ask you, please,
Not to talk about me to others.
Talk about yourself if you have to.
What we say about someone else
Is really about ourselves anyway.
What I do appreciate
Is that you talk about me to me.
And I will do the same with you.
I will not talk to others about you.
For you are sacred in my own heart,
And sacred there you will remain.

I ask also as we relate
That we keep opening to each other,
So we share more and more of ourselves.
For I see relationship
As a sharing in realness.
I want to know you
As I want to know myself better.
When we open to each other
We open to intimacy.
I can find you and you can find me.
And finding each other
We build the bridge of love.

I like that,
I like sharing my life with you,
And I hope you also enjoy
Sharing your life with me,
Or what else have we?

Please, when the difficulties come up,
Let us face them together
When they are ours together,
And face them separately
When they are ours alone.
I don’t want to live your life,
And I hope you don’t want to live mine.

Love is a mutual journey
To places we know not yet of.
I hope for us to be
Companions on the way.
Realists of the spirit
Dancers of the true heart.

I hope the closer we get in realness,
The further on our individual journeys
We will also go.

Let us practice a daily devotion
To truth and consciousness,
And include within the circle
Of a growing love
All that we are and can be.

Let us never withhold love from each other,
Even in the most trying of times.
Let us reach out to our greater selves
So that we may come into balance
With ourselves and each other,
Able eventually to deal with anything
Which comes up, in the service of
A greater destiny for us both.

Let us love and share love
For as long as love lasts between us,
And may that be for as many stages
Of the journey as possible.

We are one in the All.
We have now to give and receive
Together in the arms and hearts
Of a greater love reached for
With the full measure of consciousness
We can, and do, bring to this,
Our human life.

from Love, Sex & Intimacy, Strephon Kaplan-Williams