I’m not responsible for showing up
for the bad dream. I’m not responsible
for fixing it. I don’t owe it
attention or due diligence –
I can let it go.
I am responsible
for my allegiance to the light of day,
I am required to let it guide
all of my perceptions, all my decisions,
feel its illumination from inside.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 7, 2022
This dream has no power
to make decisions,
This dream
holds no tricks
up its sleeve,
This dream has no mind
to chain a link of cause, effect –
This dream holds no destiny
All.the dips and turns I see
which in another frame
I could call fate
are just the subtle tippings
of myriad beliefs –
there is no law on which they operate
What holds us steady,
what guides us on our course,
what gives us every meaning,
every sense of purpose,
shines through from realms
we only sometimes glimpse –
the riddle of the infinite unseen.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 1, 2021
Your being gone
tells me acutely
all this is dream,
all this is dream
I see its edges —
see where the tapestry
meets the loom,
the threads I chose,
how they were woven,
how they have made
what is depicted here
It isn’t sorrow
so much as recognition —
how what I thought and feared
became this picture,
and from this standpoint
my hope is greater
that I will see, sometime,
all that is real.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 14, 2019
Because the pitching waves
and all the raw winds
and the destruction, and the sharp shards
were merely shadows,
shapes projected on our forms
We had been frightened
thinking each dark image falling on us
was a wound, a defect, or a dread curse
that we must overcome
But then we saw the same pictures
on everyone, and started to suspect
none of these flaws
had been internal
We started to reflect
on all the light within
and we became uncowed
by flickering shadows
So we became serene —
we have no battle.
Our sight is clear, our day is clean,
and we are free.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 15, 2018
Two crows fly in tandem
like double vision
till their landing,
geese speak like hinges creaking,
and run when chased,
reluctant to take flight
I wrap my mind around the whole day —
there may be tricks of light
but reality rests in every plane,
on every surface,
heavy like ripe fruit
ready to drop to my touch,
ready to be tasted.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 27, 2018
Let me lay down the confusion
that has beset my years,
let me recognize
our lives were never about this
We are not tokens, moved along a board,
we are not pawns nor rooks nor queens
nor even players.
The realm we move in
has always been the infinite —
not mind within the body
but body in the mind —
our consciousness reveals
the size of what we are
It may be hard
to come to this life knowing,
and have the knowing steadily displaced.
We won’t be always fooled,
we will shine clear,
and what we are will surface in our days.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 25, 2018
When we thought we walked on solid ground,
our world was full of dramas —
so many things that could go right or wrong,
and underneath them,
the persistent weight
of hopes that never quite vaulted
to their victories, and the resultant lowering,
over weeks and years,
of the ceiling of our possibilities
As we began to learn that substance
is something else,
that what we thought we walked on
was separating, like melting floes,
but we were still standing,
the dramas, too, took on a different meaning
Things still matter to us deeply
but not so much for turns of plot
as for the places, shining through everything,
where our truth transforms the story,
where we prove that we are free.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 23, 2016
I feel what’s real
has been here all along —
it sometimes stood in shadow
beside everything that we were striving for
And sometimes in our clamor
we would wholly mute it out,
and sometimes in our prayer
it would sift in,
subtle as light between branches
lapping limb shadows
across the other trees,
coming into quiet focus, recognized as substance
by the joy that rises, and the fullness
And happiness turns out to be so simple,
not needing anything but presence —
presence and welcome, kindness and acceptance,
the free gift of loving you
just because you’re here,
the many-dreamed essence suddenly clear.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 16, 2016
Here I find myself
walking through the set again,
asking myself, how and when
can I get myself to someplace real?
— Where, when I ask,
What is my role? Whose lives
does my livelihood support? —
I’ll feel the ground
beneath the answer,
the solid good
of my days,
and how it nurtures others,
I’ll taste the sustenance
in that support
And then I ask myself,
Are not the lines of light here?
Don’t I have power, right now,
in kindness I may extend,
in how I see people true?
Is not deliverance
in having no excuses,
Is not the ground I seek
in every heart?
©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2016