In this world of shifting shadows
things may be predicted
but nothing is promised. You can be gone
just like that
and what was the point
of everything you strove for?
Which doesn’t change my practice
of putting each foot down, doesn’t change
my proof-gathering sense
that what is done in love
will have results,
and love will always make sure
to take the steps needed
so the results come.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 23, 2022
The sun and the company invited us
to fly down the day
like it was a long grass hill,
our arms out wide,
embracing the air as it rushed by,
trusting our feet to navigate,
trusting the curve of the hill
to bring us out safe
Birds in the oak tree celebrated
collective being,
singing, flying, returning.
We celebrated too,
Life having its way of calling us
just like that.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 5, 2022
And when I look up from my pages
the evidence is everywhere –
The psalm of geese
calling and curving
through the foggy frosty morning
The murmur of the fire –
its warming flames
an acclamation of release,
the gratitude to be delivered
into a lighter phase of being
A road into the brightening day,
fog lifting to reveal the opening –
steps enough to know the way
to place my feet – feet flexing
in anticipation, journey awaiting.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 27, 2022
Sometimes an image comes
in the colors you see
when your eyes close –
the purples where the lights were,
the glinting nets of dark green
Sometimes an image comes
while you’re looking at something
like rain from the roof edge
dripping, bouncing its drops
into a hole it has made in the earth
And you’re looking at that
and thinking of depth,
and the infinite care
of the Life that will stay with you
throughout the gravest of stages –
whatever can show you – and you alone –
so you will see it, how it is still there
And will make sure
you come to know it
in the fully satisfying way
that it knows you.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 11, 2022
A persuasion as delicate as
the scent of spring – the subtle catch
it has, on my hope, my longing –
would certainly be the thing
to lead with, the thing that would encourage you
to look up, look away
from rutted tracks, unthinking expectations
And see soft tendrils greening,
showing, by their reaching,
the existence of something we can’t see
but which they know is there
by the way the force within them
sends them hopeful and confident
to their source of nourishment and strength.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 10, 2022
Life told me
there’s nothing I need
to prove to anyone,
Life told me
there’s no way it can lose
What I may see as precipice,
as last chance, as desperate race,
it sees as gentle presence,
all the time in the world
and no time at all –
time for its sweet lesson,
taking us each by the hand,
inducting us into the secret
of its being all that is.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 4, 2022
I love your happy pictures,
your confident success
and the feeling of security
because you have arrived
What is this braided shadow
that I feel? – that everything I see here
will be shaken
one way or another,
but it will be OK
It will be shaken till you know
your worth is not dependent
on this or any other points
you have achieved
They will be shaken
but with infinite compassion
so you feel
the vastness of the blessing of your days,
that your joy is not dependent
on things that can be lost,
and your goodness what can never fade away.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 3, 2021
In the vision I saw
the high saturation of Spirit –
it was nothing pale, nothing you could miss
Its color made the daily objects
almost hard to see, so washed out
they were, so ghostlike,
while Spirit filled the whole canvas
with bright rays of power,
becoming the obvious substance
to walk in, to speak of,
to use for all motion and action,
to be for, to be about,
to live in.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 30, 2021
We live in this great adventure
(for certainly our life is more
than plodding doggedly toward death)
Life must ever be adventure
(or why would we persist with it
day after challenge riddled day?)
We live in Life’s adventure
(or we could say that Life’s adventure
is what we are)
Adventure we see unfolding
just like life unfolds,
branching and fusing
and moving all kinds of mountains,
as we live out what we are
and find out
what we will be.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 15, 2021
And if I thought I might fall
through the cracks of the day,
tumble between the tasks,
blown by an ill wind of complaint,
if I thought I might be discouraged
by its unrelenting howl,
there is always the ground
There is always the intense
springing of life, through the soil,
through the grass, through my feet.
There is always the recognition
of how great the “we”
of all life, how layered and irrepressible
it is, how it sings in the deer’s taste of grass,
in the flash of a bluebird’s wing,
how it rests in my breath
while the day’s lullabies
prepare a place for me.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 11, 2021