I will not be afraid,
for the work to be done
is bigger than the voices that would nix it
If I find myself afraid,
I won’t assume that fear has won –
what it lacks in intelligence
it tries to make up with sheer persistence, it’s unoriginal, but tries to hide that
with ubiquity.
yet neither of those ruses makes it true
I won’t be afraid,
for truth has both intelligence and presence,
and is well able to win the day.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 26, 2022
I keep going down
looking for a truth
that’s bigger than your fear,
looking for the edge of the rock,
a place to pry it up,
for once I have the size of it,
I will find the all encompassing
blanket to wrap you up in –
you in, and the fear out,
the hole it came from gaping
like where a tooth was lost,
the ground around it soft …
I might do well to notice
that what can comfort you
has been here all along –
I can never know the size of it
but I can know for sure
it is enough.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 10, 2020
We may look and find the place
where fear was painted
up in the mauve underside of your scales,
making your protection prickle,
making you uneasy underneath
We will hold you so gently
as we rinse you clean,
all of that pigment
making it take a long time
till the water runs clear
You will feel it then,
the knitting together — yourself
with yourself, the relief
of the new clean place,
the integration, now that there is no foreign substance,
the power rallying within
You can rest now
and let yourself absorb
what it is to be fully you.
You’ll reach out open
to make the true connection,
the flash through you
and us
that lights the land.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 23, 2020
Back to the loop again
of learning
not to be afraid —
it’s not that difficult,
though it may seem so
in the echo chamber
of my benighted mind
I free myself from there
by tracing, in my thought,
the circle that enfolds us all,
that leaves out nothing,
so everyone, and every cause,
surrenders to the fact of being loved.
And in the all embracing love,
there is no fear.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 30, 2019
I heard without a doubt
(my Creator told me
clear as the blue shine on the floor
stretching to the boundaries
of all my being)
I heard without a doubt
that at the very bottom of my tears
there was nothing there but goodness
Why then, was I still afraid?
Did I still believe my life rolled out
in some realm other than
the one my Maker owned?
Did I think I might be comforted
but not healed? Saved but left alone?
Surely (my Creator told me
this morning as I watched the tiny
crescent moon start its traverse
across the brightening sky)
Surely you couldn’t think
I’d leave you in a realm I didn’t govern!
Surely you can feel: It’s not
that I deliver you from evil
so much as that my all-present goodness
always governs all events —
Yours, too. Yourself, your family
and every fact unfolding in this day.
And that’s why, in my goodness,
you don’t have to be afraid.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 16, 2017
You don’t need me to be with your fear,
you need me to go with you to where
you have never been afraid,
where you are so sure
of your place among
the forces that move everything,
where you own the free walking
down the winds along the high hills,
and the swift soaring
between craggy canyon walls
and the profound stillness
of the center point
from which you know how you will move
I hear the raw keening
in your cry of fear,
but through the static
I also hear your clear tone.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 8, 2016
The fact that I wrote something
doesn’t mean I really know it,
and even when I feel
within my deepest core
(Lord, I believe)
something is true,
it doesn’t mean I really understand
But coming round again and again,
things start to get clearer
(help thou mine unbelief)
and eventually the swollen, writhing tail
must cease to sweep away the stars,
must fall, jellied and lifeless
as a tail a lizard lost,
before the hand of Truth.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 5, 2015