“Love creates the unity of heaven and earth.
Love tears apart heaven and earth.

Is love sympathy.
Is love gentleness.
Is love possessiveness.
Is love sexuality.
Is love friendship.
Who knows?
Maybe the rock knows,
Sitting diligently on earth,
Not flinching from cold snowstorms or baking heat.
O rock,
How much I love you:
You are the only loveable one.
Would you let me grow a little flower of love on you?” ~ Chögyam Trungpa

Things I would like to do with you in my Bed beneath the Ocean.

I would like to drink tea with you.

It will be late so you will drink something non-caffeinated. It will be late so I will drink white tea, just a little caffeine, I am tired, we had dinner in a cozy Nepalese restaurant, I have not slept enough in weeks, and I would like to stay up for you.

It will be our first night, together.

Would it be okay if we cuddled, a little, you will say.

It is cold. It is January. We get in bed.

I show you the blankets, one by one, peeling them back off of you. A few are from Hudson Bay. One is heavy and bright red with a black stripe. One is heavy and white with a yellow, red and green stripe. One is light and blue and white, knitted for my mother by an hundred-year-old blind lady.

I tell you about them, one by one, as I fold them back, off of you. I love you…a little, I will say in less than two weeks, and it will become a joke between us.

The snow falls from the skies, settling against the trees and sidewalks and up against wide curving ancient trees in white, light sparkles.

I pronounce my “t’s”—button, mitten, bitten, written.

I would like to watch Sherlock with you, as we drink the tea. Or we could watch an old movie: Cary Grant, or Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, or Toshiro Mifune, or Groucho Marx, or Paul Newman, or Redford. And Red dog will curl up on my bed and help you get warm and he will sigh and snore softly.

~

This would be our life in my mountain valley town, together, if you were not to live as you do now, away against the blue gray cold ocean. On weekends we might drive to hot springs, or bus to the City with our bikes and do High City things.

~
The blankets are gone. Before we get cold, I would like to move into you and over you, my hand under your red striped white tank top stretched over your breasts, your peaceful eyes wide beneath me in the dark. Your dark eyes still and empty, the look of openness. The look of love, a look that can not be faked, your hair falling over me in the dark, your arching breasts, your bright stomach, turning, and the feeling between us: we are dancing closely held, moving as if in a waltz, only with less elegance. Less prescribed.

~

I bow and ask permission, then pick the mountain’s sage and crush it between my fingers, and smell it with appreciation and put it in my jacket’s left breast pocket. Same with the juniper. I thank the high trees.

~

A quiet life, full of parties, and noise, and laughter, and coffee, and conversations in the street, and climbing, and running over the mountain trails with my dog, and vegan nachos and hoppy beer, or farmers’ market lunches on the lawn, and many dark nights lit by community events, or fundraisers, or my working quietly in the attic as I have done for so many years. But when I come down from writing and you come up from your things…I know what comes next: I will kiss your plush lips and your wet tongue and the underside of your top lip and I will lightly bite your ears, breathing hot air into them and you will wriggle and attack me with laughing kisses as I will kiss the underside of your neck and your nipple and then your other and then I will put my hand down upon you, first over your jeans and then later under. I would like to stand and move into you against door frames in the kitchen and in the back dark room and the entrance and you will say people will see but I am protective and they will not. My hands against your back pulling at your clothes, my hands in your thick dark hair and you will say, I like how you touch me, and I know you do, for it is that dance, separately and together: passion.

A dance of passion—words sound so easily cliché but I would like to mean what I say. And so I mean the words that I say to you: it is a dance, and it is a dance that builds a movement of passion, if passion is water, heated by fire. Fire until you are wet and I am overripe and your hands are full with mine.

But sex is a small part of a relationship: and a relationship is a small, but significant part of a life well-lived.

~

The main thrust of our lives together shall be to walk a rocky path, barefoot, together. I would like the woman who I am to ask to join me on this mountain journey to be a brave, patient, sharp woman. A caring human. I would like you to help me and I would like to be able to help you to be of service. I would not like to commit to a love affair that distracts either of us from helping this poor, endlessly confused, ungrateful, self-righteous, critical and yet speedily shallow world. For in this our world we are all skimming the surface of the life each of us should live, the sadjoy ocean we could swim down into. We are lonely, but many of us, we are not friends with this out loneliness. Not yet. We skim the surface of our precious life instead of swimming down, beneath the movement of the heavy ocean. Below, we would discover our basic goodness, instead of speedily searching for an itch to scratch, instead of clinging to a momentary fragment of external happiness while we push away pain. When reality is right here: your soft, beautiful, decent red raw heart.

And that is what I would like to offer you, if you are brave—I shall be a mirror for you, because I care for you. I would like to let you finally see what has been hidden from your searchingly hungry gaze: your red heart.

And that is what you would like to offer me, and this is why my heart is broken beneath your ocean.

And I can not commit to solidity, but I can commit to swimming, with you, beneath the waves.

Close your eyes.

Get your copy of Things I would like to do with You.

Read more Things:

Things I would not like to know about the future Love of my Life.

Things I would like to do with You when I am Drunk.

Things I would like to do this White Winter without You.

Things I would have Liked to Say to You the Last Time we ever Spoke.

Things I would like for us to know before we Fall in Love.

Things I would like to say to you without you Knowing.

I would like to hear from you when you are confused.

Before I lose you, I would like to see you again and again.

Things I would like to do with you in Time.

Things I would like to Remember about our First Kiss.

Things I Would Like to do with You this Evening.

Things I Would Like to Do with You in the Woods.

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