Barely home, and we’re flying again,
touch and go, capture and release,
yet something else, when we consider
our progress down the ever flowing stream
We home in on home each day,
each day, we find it new,
and if we’re lost on any given evening,
there still is time to settle in,
to find our place
And in the morning, off on new adventure,
we’ll know we can touch home at any time,
home in the kindly tended refuge
of being known in ever-present Mind.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 2, 2019
Days like this
bring out the memory
of hibernation. We take naps
on the couch, we wake up
to mammalian smells
and dark that fell
while we were sleeping
Our brief trips outside
have sweetened the warmth
of our dwelling,
the fire speaks to us
in familiar tongues.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 31, 2019
Mist hides the distance,
rain knocks against the house,
we turn on lights against the dark and cold,
a fair-dealt day of winter
eliciting our fair response —
napping, dreaming,
drawing close to family,
seeking the inner light
each holds as beacon,
seeing the radiance
of our harmonic shine.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 5, 2019
You can go ahead
and set those worries right down
in the hall. You don’t need
to carry them upstairs
Come in, relax — every part of you
is welcome. We will thoroughly enjoy
all that you are
Even Awkward, that funny half-relative,
can feel at home here.
We don’t take him too seriously,
which comes as a relief to him.
I saw him settling in, with new ease,
leaning in to the surrounding laughter
We’re glad you found us. Whether you traveled
five hours in a sleigh, or six in an airplane,
or ten minutes across the bumpy winter grass,
your coming makes our circle rounder —
your presence is desired.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 27, 2018
The road home was clear —
red lights streaming on ahead
but not too many,
no fog, no rain,
music to soothe
and some to keep us wide awake,
navigating traffic, hills, and bends
The road home is clear.
(We’ve learned, for now,
not to talk about it much —
it’s solo, after all,
and not negotiated)
When we arrive,
in some sense, in some aspect,
we may share with each other
what we have gained.
The road home
may not be always clear,
but we will own it,
we will persevere.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 12, 2018
Outside and inside,
two kinds of evening glow,
and there’s one thing —
really only one—
you need to know
As sun’s last light
paints orange above the hills
and the fire has finally
driven out the evening’s chill,
there’s one thing —
really only one needed —
to make the warmth stay,
to make it real
Heaven and earth
may be the same playground
where the children of the house can romp.
They are never uncompanioned,
never left alone,
they’re always celebrated,
always home.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 9, 2018
The bite of breeze
and the smell of earth
and the fading warmth
of the late-appearing, early setting sun,
a time to feel
rich in my domain
and glad of others’ work well done
The land is holy,
full of so much life
that flows so quickly
into any opening
I don’t know what kind of bird or animal
made the trilling, cooing sound
off in the distance
between the noises of machinery
but it sounded sweet,
it sounded like home.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 8, 2018
We can also find pleasure
in aesthetics, colors combining
in journals, in fabrics,
musical artistry, broadcast for viewing,
planes of reflection, hum of appliances
One could spend time indoors
in a place like this,
hardly missing the somewhat tame outdoors.
There is time for this
when the rain pushes in,
and there’s gratitude,
gratitude for shelter.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 26, 2018
There are many ways to come home —
driving a truck north through the rain,
building a fire, centering thought
In each place called home
there are needs to meet
and ways we are met
So we have come home,
today, as many days.
Tomorrow we will come home again,
from where we have been,
in tomorrow’s ways
We seek the same thing
and we find it,
ever the same, ever new.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 26, 2018
In this damp afternoon
you long for home,
and it seems so far away —
removed in space
or else in time
And the memory
(or is it imagination?)
of walking into a place
and feeling you can relax
since you belong here,
since you are loved,
is as palpable as thirst
It can feel like
we don’t understand
our place in time, in this time,
with these currents of culture
so profoundly disconnected
The big trees that thrive here,
trunks heavy and mossy,
leaves fluttering, turning,
have their own sense of time and place
that we could take shelter in
if we knew how.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 6, 2018