Sometimes I feel like I’m a paper person,
all my learning, all my skills,
spelled out across a flattened world,
who now, through some necessity,
has been punched free,
my shape no match for rain or wind,
stepping out trembling
And yet, here where my feet touch stream,
I start to feel
maybe in this world I’ll find myself
finally real.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 11, 2018
This is the truth of you,
not in limbs or joints
but in the way your joy
meets the envelope of your being,
the smooth and moving
line of connection
that vaults you into praise,
to the delight of days,
to that expression
that slipstreams your life like a sail,
thrilling you forward.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 1, 2018
The day has its gifts,
they require of me no planning,
just the openness to see them and receive
My worthiness
requires no earning,
just the willingness to be
open eyes to bring the moment home,
grateful heart to notice where I’ve come.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2018
Save, or I perish —
that is, hold me,
for your holding
is what makes me what I am,
Your thought of me defines me,
my movement and my voice,
my love, my focus, my desire,
my strength —
this is all your great idea
So I am not
(though it come back and back
like a recurring dream)
a crier on a mountain,
whipped by wind,
my voice blown back,
noticing whatever truth
I climbed up here to tell
is lost
My words, my song, my truth
come from you —
they are not lost,
for you are making them
new in each moment,
fresh as each morning.
I learn myself from you.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 27, 2018
One day you’ll wake up feeling fine —
the dread that sullied
so many of your early mornings
gone — you’ll feel, within,
the strong light rising,
pure as blackbird song
For this, this bright upwelling,
is what you’re made of,
what you’re made for, too.
The thin veneer on which anxiety is etched
must wear away,
leaving nothing but the true,
which overcomes,
which carries all the days.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 17, 2018
As to the question of
why I am here:
I am here for this moment,
here for this healing,
here for the cup of
whatever fills my day
The puzzle piece I am
is not improved
by trying to make it more
like other pieces
that have already fit in.
The puzzle piece you are,
likewise, will not be helped
by alteration
It is not mine
to choose another cup
but to drink this one
and be satisfied.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 3, 2018
We will claim our purpose,
we will walk in it,
we will be as one with it
as it gives us power
and we propel it forward
We will be inseparable,
for, in fact, how could it be otherwise?
How could we be here
without our calling,
and how could our calling
exist without us?
©Wendy Mulhern
March 31, 2018
There is no way
(boxes within boxes,
sea bottom, barnacles)
you can close off
the deep bright light within you
(white brilliance, color sparkles)
no way you can keep it
from burning through all the barriers,
no way they can stop it
from claiming its source and home
in the infinite light it is one with,
the ever luminescent truth.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2018
Though I can never know
the machinations of another’s thought,
though I can’t know
the mazes their heart gets lost in,
I can know the nature of the heart itself,
that clear and liquid thing
whose surface trembles
but whose inner depth
if full and pure and still,
quenching every thirst that finds it,
sending out its searchlight signals,
waiting to be found.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 8, 2018
In my loved communion
with hot water at end of day,
I think of this melting
and the next one
(as sight and feeling
drift into dream)
the necessary daily dropping
of all the contexts
that seemed so fixed
and so important,
to let the sweet unburdened
energy of being
once again assert its rightful place.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 1, 2018