It stops being a thing you are trying to do.
It becomes a present fact,
the sun touched moment
a reveal of something timeless,
something always –
the truth of now’s perfection
enduring through eternity,
and you realize
you never need to leave.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 4, 2023
Winds come up,
the storm has started its journey,
expected to arrive tomorrow.
Scents of freshness and fall
brush across my spirit,
lifting me, making me breathe deep
I fly like time
backwards into the embrace
of so many falls, so many fresh turnings,
seeing the seasons whole,
seeing life timeless,
every moment known, and loved,
at once.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 22, 2023
Wind sweeps the afternoon towards evening,
doors rattle in the house,
we, too, could be swept,
taken by time down months and years
We try to stitch ourselves to the moment,
hold ourselves in place that way –
be doing something, or feeling something,
but ultimately noticing:
if it were our work to invent ourselves,
we wouldn’t see the point of it
The Mind that holds us
has a grand laughter
that makes us feel at home,
secured in joy, in something
so much greater than ourselves
that we can laugh, too –
laugh and let go.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 17, 2023
It’s very strange, she said,
All these people going into the past tense.
Yes, I said, and when I look around
to see the people I knew,
it’s their children who are at the ages I remember
So many people we knew once,
but don’t recognize –
it doesn’t feel like the march of time
so much as having suddenly
passed through a curtain,
being on the other side
continually surprised
to find myself here
Generations slide together.
Grandchildren occupy the place
where children were.
Children move into the full and swift passage
where time doesn’t seem to move –
careers are built, own children raised,
unexpected lurches
send lives on different courses
And we come together here.
The formerly absolute gates
of inclusion and exclusion
are gone,
their specter just a shadow
I can step over …
We all are drenched
in the moment’s richness,
the layered colors of foreshortened time.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 10, 2023
Maybe it’s not important,
the roll of days, the roll of years –
we are not stuck on them –
our lives move forward in the stride of Spirit,
our gains swift rides of capturing the wind,
and revelations, slow unfurling as a sprout,
coming present like the dew
in the dip of late night’s coldness,
suddenly apparent when the morning light
finds it on the grass.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 10, 2022
Lest we exchange the worries of summer
for the worries of fall – worries of fire
for worries of cold and wet –
let us remember
each day has space for stillness,
each hurtling revolution
has time for many lifespans,
and dreams float timeless
in the sea of thought, which itself,
though it may shift with tides
is ever vast enough
to see us home.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 5, 2022
The pool of regrets
is a deep one. You can be washed
in many colors of sorrow.
You can feel your whole past
roll over you like a wave,
pulling all linearity out of time
Even if you don’t wallow,
don’t steep yourself in story,
it will color your view. It’s OK –
refracting light waves
bring depth and beauty to your days,
and to your character.
You will be prism and pool
to those who find you.
©Wendy Mulhern
August 15, 2022
All of this is so beautiful,
and so temporary
that any sense of walls and roof
protecting or defining me
seems absurd
Other definitions and protections
fail as well, leaving me held
in what must actually support me,
learning from its presence,
what it is, and what I am.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 24, 2022
Waves like days roll in,
each one a fluid confluence
of wind and tide
and things we can’t see, undersea,
each one worth watching
from where it forms
all the way to shore
and while it dances the sky reflection
up the beach
And the freshness of this one morning,
the one we’re riding on,
breaks through our waiting senses,
splashing its delight
all the way through us.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 20, 2022
Fill my day with something new –
winds across the grasses
assist them in insisting
this is the only now they have –
they will sing and bend and turn
and send their all-important seeds
each on its own journey
It is soul work, it is adventure,
and they do it now as if they were
the only grasses to ever live,
and indeed, as the only ones they see,
that could be so for them
except the ancient hum
intones its timeless song
along their shafts.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 18, 2022