A tub full of failure
considered in the evening hours
is just a story about me,
one I can kick off,
climb out of,
let down the drain
My creator does not
demand reform of me,
but only that I come to myself,
only that I let Love’s truth
be what it’s always been for me.
I don’t even need to let go –
what I was clinging to dissolves
like dream into the day.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 9, 2023
I get that stupid moments from my past –
ungainly words, unhealing silences,
don’t need to send a wound
down through my presence
We all deserve to be forgiven
for being out of touch, and for revealing it,
caught in the embarrassment
of our obtuseness,
tumbling suddenly
from what we thought was grace
While no resolve can guarantee
that I’ll do better,
this truth I have discovered:
my acuity can’t navigate
these fraught relations,
but Love, with ample grace,
smooths everything
And all of us are loved enough
that we can shine it to each other,
and innocently manifest the wisdom
that lets us share our love as we intend.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 25, 2023
Beauty returns –
smoke dispersing overnight,
welcome coolness
blowing in from the north,
real clouds and real blue
supplanting yesterday’s haze
And I feel fine,
as if I’ve been forgiven,
as well may be,
as promised
in proportion to my love.
©Wendy Mulhern
August 18, 2023
The pretensions don’t matter.
All of us may show them –
the defensive or proud propping up
of what we think we should be,
the hapless implications of these constructs
on what we think of others
what we think of ourselves
We don’t need to deal in these things,
don’t need to buy and sell, compare,
determine, tally –
these things do not pertain to us at all –
one glimpse of truth,
and it doesn’t matter
what any of us have been propping up –
we fall like kindling flames
upon the truth of our pure selves
We light up the place,
we warm to what we’ve always longed to share –
nothing we thought we were
has anything to do with it –
we burn, and are reborn.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 3, 2023
I turn to You
because Your light
is broad and deep and strong enough
to catch me up completely out of reach
of all the shaming jeers and lofty judgment
which dogged me both from outside
and from multiplying echoes here within
Those voices called me either hopeless
or in need of so much work,
my restoration
would be miraculous
But You – You see me
the way I’d forgotten
to see myself
until you showed me
and it rang so true
that nothing else could trouble me at all
So I remain here, free and whole,
astonishingly safe from condemnation,
and in this refuge, my accusers fade away –
I’m here with You
in fog-disolving day.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 18, 2022
Am I allowed to come back to
happiness as a normal state?
Am I allowed, despite naivete
I have been disabused of,
despite egregious flaws
of which I’ve now become aware,
to live a day in simple joy?
And maybe many of them,
day after day (like I’ve been doing)?
Can it be real that I have left the fear behind
(the fear of falling to my deserved demise)?
Here at my center,
a tender truth is telling me
stay here. Stay here always
to learn this yes.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2022
I have been severe with myself
(though maybe not as much as I deserve)
I have needed this reckoning
to see the many ways I’ve come up short
But then I keep on finding this release
that cancels out the penalty
with a surfeit of fine grained joys,
appreciation at the smallest scale,
a permeating of respect
that grants to everything
its time and place,
and in this governance
there is forgiveness
for me and everyone who’s lost the way.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 21, 2022
This is how you are vindicated,
this is how you are washed clean,
this is how you are lifted
A truth bigger than your arguments,
a goodness with no argument at all,
a love that loved you
before any quid pro quo,
and loves you now
touches down, becoming
everything you ever thought about,
all you ever wanted.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2022
I’m thinking about
all the sorrows of the world –
the big and little heartbreaks,
chasms of loss, and trauma
walled up and sealed away, hidden
deep within the mazes of forgetting,
leaking out at unexpected times,
fluids of shame, embarrassment,
spumes of rage and helplessness
I’m thinking about
all the sorrows of the world,
all the tears that strive to cleanse,
all the keening, calling for connection …
and thinking what it could mean
if everything can be turned,
like a page, like a dream,
if everyone could be released,
allowed to flow home
to their native wholeness,
more than forgiven – rendered innocent –
ultimately untouched by any story,
fully seen, delighted to be known.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 19, 2021
In the pre-dawn hours,
tossed on a sleepless shoal
by the roil of dreams,
trying one more toss
in hope of finding peace
I was delivered
by a rolling cloud of light
that bore my innocence aloft
as on a pillow –
the reassuring rush
that who I am
is fully acceptable,
that whatever sordid stories were enacted
in my dream or in my waking,
they didn’t need to stick to me
I could be carried on this truth:
that I was made to be
exactly what I am,
and will be so maintained,
and guilt and worry could fall away
like fog from rooftops –
the sun would shine on me
and show me free.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 20, 2021