Love touches every surface
as eagerly as water seeping
into soil, finding each tiny crevice
and filling it suddenly
Love goes in infinitely small,
embracing every grain of thought,
of being. The intimacy of being known
closer than I ever could imagine,
of knowing something by the way
it touches me
opens me out
like a chestnut frond —
so much unfolding
from one little bud.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 27, 2015
“They shall teach no more every man his neighbor saying ‘know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, saith the Lord.”
We shall not teach
the steps for finding goodness:
try this diet, exercise or meditation,
renounce your ego to become enlightened,
adopt these habits of communication,
release your fears, embrace your shadow
We won’t be offering
all those helpful paths
to fix yourself, to heal your life
to find out who you really are
Because you’ll know.
We all will, from the inside.
We’ll know the bright joy
that springs up within
permeating everything
bringing forth dynamic understanding
opening the infinite dimensions
of what we see we’ve always known we are.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 24, 2015
My soft-shod feet
fall quietly
along the pavement,
then the gravel, then the curb I balance on
A metal door rolls open to admit
a young athletic cyclist
into a dark spire of glass and steel
that makes its statement
between the water and the freeway
shadowing the scruffy grasses
where homeless people pitch their tents
I walk along the edges of the city,
don’t see many people, though the land
is all but absent underneath the influence
I walk along the edges of the system, too —
not caught up in the hum of jobs and money,
not forced to be here, not incarcerated,
not forced either, to buy in
to all the ways that I could be constricted
I feel a watchfulness around my eyes
but not much commentary. A phrase
flits through my thought:
“so many different flavors of slavery”
but I don’t pursue it
There’s a way I walk through here
where I see something else —
the power inherent in each set of eyes
to melt away all kinds of walls
through the simple and singular truth
of I Am.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 21, 2015
Love is the elemental
impulse of everything,
the kernel of desire
that seeds all life
and brings it forth,
the essence of
the negentropic drive
propelling the development
of all life forms
and the grand dance
of all of them together
Love is all-encompassing permission
for things to be
what they are,
constantly, just where they are
in every now.
Love is the joy
that celebrates each being,
the profound attention
to all the fractal unfoldings
of each entity, the delight
in the harmony of all
Love is the listening,
Love is the witnessing,
Love is the blessing
Love is cause,
Love is motive,
Love is why.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 14, 2015
That precious part within,
Held in a small, dark place
encompassing the infinite,
The birthing place of
all we may attain
Will hear, unerringly,
when it is called by name
It will rise up, surprised
to find itself, eager
to live what it is called to,
endlessly relieved,
intensely grateful
to have been called —
To thus be sure
of its existence
and that the promises
given it before the world was born
will be fulfilled.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 8, 2015
Why would I even want
any of this
to be about me?
Why would I promote
a limited identity,
weak and needy,
piteously bargaining
for some (no doubt unearned)
acceptance, recognition?
Who would not prefer
to be in service
to the bright upwelling
of delight, affection,
the overflow of wonder
and the clear intelligence
uplifting both of us
when seen in you, in me?
Why would I not give up
that which holds me chained and cramped
for this divine permission to be free?
Hence this work each day
to set my self aside
for that which glows
as you, as me.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 6, 2015
We leave our notions
of ourselves, our lives,
splayed and empty
like abandoned puppets
(How is it possible
we thought they were alive?)
We start inhabiting
(with this expansive breathing
and each breath’s surprise)
the place in the dynamic
cause and effect,
impulse and follow-through
where all we fiercely hoped we’d be
is, indeed, ourselves
And the command we wield
of our existence
brings dazzling forms,
eternal, iridescent,
into view.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 4, 2015
Light answers light —
the brightness multiplies
Heat is not the same:
heat flows towards cold —
the same desire perhaps
but different mode
Heat spreads its blanket out
towards all who seek it,
cooling down with distance,
still too generous to hoard
We make heat inside —
we make it from our substance,
from our thoughts.
We feel and feed the small fire
that warms like coals
somewhere behind our hearts
So we come to know
the essence of this gift,
the little inner furnace
by which we recognize the sun.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 3, 2015
photo by Eric Mulhern
As we roll down the landscape
like wind-riding clouds
exulting in our stretching
and our shifting
and our effortless progression
through the expansive blue
There’s no need to remember
the shells we left behind —
how rigid they were, and how fragile,
and how essential we somehow
thought they were
No need to consider going back,
for everything we ever were is here —
our substance and our power,
now finally liberated
can take their place
in heaven’s sphere.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 25, 2015
What’s required here
is to not be distracted —
The same old hand waves,
of course, will be employed,
and the frantic flashings
of threatened loss
if things should go a certain way.
You’re right to be on edge, we’re told —
The stakes are high
But none of this is true.
The only thing required
is to maintain the steady focus
of what puts us here, of what
maintains our being
The only thing required
is to be quite sure
of our inheritance —
the substance that outweighs the world.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 24, 2015