Seed

Left once again

in the detritus of dysphoria,

ripped, deflated,

rendered helpless by its flat words

(give up, you can’t do it

and you don’t want to anyway

(take that palliative, don’t complain)

you don’t have whatever it may take

and don’t deserve to either)

You are not alone,

and though you feel

no one could approach you,

look again

As you let the stillness sweep you

as the ebbing wave subsides,

you will sense, inside, a tiny seed,

its threadlike roots extending,

pulling you together

till the sprout can lift its head

It will tell you

nothing overcomes you —

you will blossom, and your voice will soar,

you’re made of life —

that old voice isn’t —

it falls to dust, but you,

you still shine clear.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 7, 2020

Reins

Here is a dream of sweet movement,

something to find in the time

before attempted sleep,

something to bind myself to,

to embody, to walk in the steps

in which my feet rejoice

Here before lethargy paints

a bland blank wall,

let life bound up in me

and take the reins.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 6, 2020

Entering at the door

Let me approach

with utmost respect,

with reverence for the size and shape

of the place in you

that is designed to open

You will recognize me

in our mutually reflected light —

you will let me in,

you will come out to play

We will multiply our brightness

like flames in oxygen,

like fragrant blossoms in the midday sun,

we will be fed

and we will feed each other

in the pastures of the Allness of the One.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 29, 2020

Starting Point

I feel great peace remembering

the starting point never

gets far away —

Whatever structures

I may have erected,

whatever standpoint

I may have backed myself into,

they never dictate

my next step,

which can always start right here

with the fundamental innocence

of all life,

with the first impulse

that unites us all.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 26, 2020

Where I seek guidance

Not in a map

so much as a practice —

the practice of presence,

the practice of catching

the tiny upliftments

each moment holds —

the silent flowing,

the intricate crystalization,

the clasp of life,

always a celebration,

every living thing reprising

life’s essential properties,

joy ever being what rises

like oxygen, what fills and blesses,

what confirms my being here.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 20, 2020

Orange and Silk

The silk I was washing

tore in my hands like wet paper,

myriad holes appearing

in what before was whole cloth,

my innocent fingers proving themselves deadly,

hapless

The oil from the orange you described

stayed on my fingers

and my lips,

its presence in thought

so immediate, so important

Ways of seeing things fall away,

suddenly proved unable

to hold truth in them,

new images tingle,

evocative, potent,

their scent suffusing everything.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 17, 2020

A Word for Tomorrow

Do not be dismayed

at the insanity you see —

the flagrant lies, the bland

denial of what’s known to be

This whole charade

with its elaborate displays

can only lope so far

before it topples

Do not be afraid,

for underneath the bald parade,

Life’s engine hums,

and in the end, life moves itself

the way life wants to go,

and as you nurture it,

it will bloom huge —

there is no lie it will not overthrow.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 4, 2020

Something like that

(from the biking philosophers’ notebook)

I wouldn’t want a tame bird,

she said. Wild birds

have so much life. They don’t

need our bread

Still, a wild bird

could take you somewhere,

in the trill of song,

the dip and dart of wing

You could have a relationship

with the badlands. They could

take your breath away

in the way they pull the light

like it was a silk scarf

or a skein of time

stretched and altered,

rendered otherworldly

You could find a related essence

in a baby’s smile, in the flash

of that moment where you shared

a recognition of each other’s souls,

your unplumbed depth,

or a mutual acceptance

that lets you both stay wild

in some elemental way,

elixir of living,

life breath of day.

©Wendy Mulhern

January 1, 2020

Attention

Now that my hope is fully uncoupled

from the day’s outcomes,

now that it holds itself

in its own light,

I can see shoots sprouting

where before, perhaps,

the weight of my wishes

would have smothered them

I have no wishes,

only conviction

that every living thing

forms in this sacred space

of weightless hope,

nurtured to fruition

by the attention,

in wave form contiguity,

to every breath.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 25, 2019

Settling In

Today I consider

putting my whole weight down,

settling into life, letting it

bear me up

Funny, until now

I didn’t notice that all this time

I’ve been holding back,

keeping the tense pose,

assuming I needed

to hold up my own weight

(As if I could, as if

I wasn’t fully riding on this adventure,

as if I could withhold

any dependence on Life’s uplift)

Today I consider

nestling into Life’s shoulders,

feeling its wing thrusts

surging us on.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 10, 2019

On Falling

You can’t fall

into the darkness

because your being

is made of light

No gravity affects it,

and even if it could fall

it would bring its essence with it,

lighting up the way and pushing darkness

ever farther off

You can’t fall into darkness

but we can release

any dark presumptions that have tried

with jagged scribbled lines

to draw a ragged image 

on your form

We can let them go

and they’ll fall down,

way, way down

where they don’t even have a story,

far away

where they can trouble you no more.

©Wendy Mulhern

November 29, 2019

Day off, in town

Though I talk about

techniques for survival,

I really mean

ways to maintain joy —

there is a level

where it amounts to the same thing

And it’s easy to find uplift

in the faces of young fathers

and their children,

in reachings out for connection,

in all these things that

right now

are of utmost importance to people,

however fleetingly they catch

the light-elixir that sustains us all.

©Wendy Mulhern

November 12, 2019

Gravitas

Life, as it turns out,

is not always instructional —

less and less so, in fact, these days

There is a statement

in the curl and color of a fallen leaf,

the reddened stems 

of blackberry and bracken fern

But they don’t seek to teach,

just to be,

just to let the light of this one

moment of afternoon

glow through them,

just to rest in light gravity

against the cool ground,

or to stand still

in the pauses between the wind.

©Wendy Mulhern

October 26, 2019

Weightless

And if we know

nothing we do

holds any weight,

we won’t try to sit down

on our achievements

and we won’t fall through them

wondering, as we fall

what happened — why

we weren’t supported

If we recognize

we are held up by our breath —

all we take in, all we give out,

all we see as true, and honor —

we will move lightly through the day

unmired by past or future,

nimble in the turnings of the moment.

©Wendy Mulhern

August 8, 2019

The Place of Adventure

This, right here, is the place of adventure,

here with the hole in the clouds

where blue sky sounds through,

here with the broken bootlace

and the black bugs that ate our greens,

here with the work that needs to be

pried and prised from our powers of invention,

and then, on top of that,

needs to be done

This is the place of adventure

where we plumb the depths

of our understanding, then go deeper,

where we live in the light

as far as we know it

and still keep going

There may be other adventures,

years down the line, lifetimes away,

but this is the path by which we’ll get there,

placing our feet down

in every step of today.

©Wendy Mulhern

July 23, 2019

The True Thing

The true thing

present in this green and golden

afternoon, with events suspended

while time ripens

and firs sing wind songs

while little birds converse

The true thing,

older than all the human stories,

newer than anything we’ve thought before,

is Life’s unfurling of itself

in multiple dimensions,

in ever awe-inducing harmony

for all of us to be.

©Wendy Mulhern

July 19, 2019

Life Power

In the dream, the little girl

pulled the shining life jewels

right out of the air,

and when others scrambled for them,

reaching out in desperation

for the ones that pulsed with power,

she seemed surprised. “It’s right here,”

she said. She opened up her hand

and pulled out more

On waking, and in latter days,

I find that what she said is true —

It’s right here — infinity of life power

waiting to be pulled out from the air,

waiting to be lived.

©Wendy Mulhern

July 18, 2019

Open Field

And if you didn’t think

you had enough,

you could always

open all the doors,

especially the ones

you thought were locked,

especially the ones

you didn’t know were there

A willingness

to allow for their existence

will help you see them,

a humbleness of mind

will help you find them.

What you need will flood in

without disturbing anything —

a dawning of awareness

of what’s here.

©Wendy Mulhern

June 17, 2019

All Things New

Not even time is exempt

from the rushing wind of Spirit,

not even the past can harbor wrongs

that don’t get swept away

All things are clean —

no atonement is demanded,

no punishment required

before you enter

the liberating kingdom

of the law of Life

Right now is when you’re governed

by that which has no adversary,

that which holds as sole demand for you

that you be subject

exclusively to Truth.

©Wendy Mulhern

June 16, 2019

Life Size

I’d come to think of my life as small —

small circles, small desire,

small prospects, small needs,

and it felt truer, certainly, than

how I used to wave my hand, 

and utter grand plans,

and watch, with something less than confidence,

for some great wave to come along

and bear me up to what I felt

was a deserving height

I recognize that humbleness

is both the starting point

and the essential stance

for riding on the arc of being.

I notice, too, that service to infinity

does not make me small

And so, though I don’t know

what it is for, or how it will work out,

I now am willing

to enlarge my tent.

©Wendy Mulhern

June 9, 2019