Every Living Thing

Every living thing desires

to clasp hands with another,

desires to feel the interchange of juices,

to be strengthened

by what they give

and what flows back,

to feel potentials multiply

Every living thing desires communion,

to nourish and be nourished 

by the whole,

Every living thing

fulfills the call of Life like this —

We can’t deny it —

We know what we want.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 7, 2015

Redemption

When scales fall from my eyes

day after day,

When I see with new light,

When I see how many of my constructs

have been wrong (all of them, really)

Should I be surprised that gratitude

grows as easily out of tears

as green blades after rain?

However justly I may have earned

all the isolation in my life

(however weird I was, and blind, and gross)

there is redemption:

None of us has ever owned

anything to cast us from the circle.

None of the condemnations ever

had any truth. None of us

deserve (nor have we ever)

to be anything but celebrated, loved.

There’s no account I need to go and settle,

no debts, no currency of wrongs,

no need to reconstruct an altered story —

I forgive myself, and everyone,

and wake to home.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 6, 2015

Community

We come eager

we come ready

we come expecting to be surprised

We never know

which of our gifts

will make that key connection

that catapults us into vaster realms

We know that something

we haven’t fathomed,

some gift another brings,

some unseen part

will find a way to liberate our vision,

ignite the latent radiance of our hearts

And so we shed our plans and our projections,

come open handed, with no words in mind,

to let our gifts spring forth to meet each other,

hands and hearts so gratefully entwined.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 6, 2015

Uplifted

Lift me gently

as rising tide

lifts seaweed in tide pools

so their strands can float freely

and wave in the current

untangled, unmatted

in shimmering softness

drinking the sun through the water

Lift me gently

supporting the whole of me,

letting me move in the sweet understanding

that I am upheld

and don’t need to hold myself up —

All that I am

swims delighted in you.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 4, 2015

Weathered

The sun scorches us

The wind dries us

We only notice on the edges

of our work and our wonder

The brambles trip and prick us,

Some insects bite —

We carry all these things

with a nascent understanding

of how we are owned by this land

and how our love emerges

as we are eroded,

how in this weathering

we become capable,

in this honing

we become something different —

More of the earth, less of the city,

closer to both the land and the sky.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 3, 2015

Evening in Marcola

The sun goes down without coloring,

as confident as it came up,

its gold still shimmering

as shadows rise in the grass,

gracing the underwings of evening birds

and whole bodies

of myriad insects

The hills behind which it dips

are already somber,

the fields are hastening

to join the visual hush

the air cools quickly

when the sun retires,

bird song continues

on into the dusk.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 2, 2015

Escape

We are marvelous creatures

and our instincts are unerring —

See how we fall like water,

see how we follow the veins of continuity

that still flow through the rubble

of our chopped up lives

See how we leave the lies

that said these broken stones

were natural, that the meaning

of our lives is to collect them,

pile them together

in some kind of race

to be someone with a complete structure

We sink beneath the stones,

We find what flows,

We find what holds together,

We find the land

So we escape to find ourselves

no longer partial,

no longer fractured, disconnected,

no longer severed from ourselves —

So we stretch out in how we know

that we are whole.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 1, 2015