We will gather seeds,
we will gather scions,
we will gather the miracle
of ripples on the river,
the intersection of ducks
with all that physics,
light’s answer to the waves’ summons
We will be fed
by what we love
all through the winter —
the love will always be
what nourishes us,
however it’s presented
And we will feed others,
sometimes before we know it —
we will feed them
with our love.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 10, 2016
We are left no choice
but immortality. The time has come
to step into our true nature,
or rather, to stand clear in it
while the winds of these times
blow our illusions away
All the things we thought we were
are now so imperiled, so compromised,
that there’s no point in parsing out
the things that have gone wrong
But what we’ve always known inside
about our worth
gleams forth as miracle
right where we were thinking all was lost
and we will rally
around that bright truth
and it will save us
in more forevers than we need to count.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 9, 2016
You, too, can find a high perch
to catch the sun’s rays
before they touch the water,
before they dance in myriad refractions,
before they break up the majestic blue
You can bask in the splendor of your feathers,
their hue, their shine, their iridescence,
you can claim this moment
before anything is proclaimed,
you can have this bright hush
to take in as you will,
as long as you are still.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 8, 2016
The energy that makes you,
that holds you as a standing wave,
your essence ever moving,
your particles suspended,
can never cease from being what it is
and so can never drop you
The pulsing of the fact of you
continues unobstructed —
no other source exists,
no other impulse
Your pure intention, lightly clad,
is more than match
for any armored machination,
as a pile of dust, however mammoth,
is no match for a breath of wind.
Look how strong you stand,
look how unmovable —
Goliath never stood a chance
against your truth.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 7, 2016
There may be many false starts
to the story. It’s said the place you enter
forms the pattern, the narrative determined
by the angles and perspectives
of the starting view.
That’s why, maybe,
we have to make so many tries.
Finally we find the launch point
where all the story lines align,
we find the motivation, we find the cause.
So it’s important to look again
when viewing a life. To look again
and again until the cause comes clear,
to not settle for a story
of misalignment
Each life after all
is here to bring a grand influx of light,
like heaven, like dawn,
illumining collective understanding,
showing us each, showing us all
why we are here.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 6, 2016
Rain outside,
Schubert within —
the old man taps his toes
as if in rapture
though I don’t know
what he really hears
We have a cozy place —
we’ve made it out of walls and paint
and music, heat, and light,
and presence and kindness
We are teaching ourselves
the art of home —
how to design the spaces,
how to build them,
how to provide
for all the flows we want to come through
We built this house
with hope and imagination.
Our young family emerged
and flowed through it,
filling some spaces, not using others
in the way we had imagined,
moving on, leaving behind
the cavities its movement carved,
the flotsam from its ebbing presence
We are teaching ourselves
what to take with us, what to let go,
how to make a house that fits how we live,
how to live so that our home
grows up around us in support.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 5, 2016
I want my legacy to be
of joy, of insuppressible
open inquiry, of kindness
and of comfort
I want my children to inherit
ways of being, not frayed and dusty
tokens of attempts to make meaning.
I want them to delight in their days
and their essential contribution
They don’t need
what these delusive times
would call wealth,
they need the richness
of water from rock, manna from sky
and the exhilaration of co-creating
all of life’s light.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 3, 2016
Sometimes when we get close
we scrape at the edges
of grief and longing, we
let out great sighs, which
have no words to fill them
Sometimes in grief and longing
we grow distant, wishing, perhaps,
to spare each other from the same thing.
Then as we come together,
we notice how deep,
how strong, complex and tender
is our bond,
How much we are committed
to throwing our weight
into the small boat of our hope
and rowing with all our strength
that we may steer it, finally,
to the long sought shore.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 2, 2016
“You don’t stand a chance
against my prayers”
— Robbie Robertson, Ghost Dance
Let’s understand this.
The coarse bravado
that says prayers are useless
has only won provisionally
when those who hear it let it in
and in discouragement
don’t pray
When beings pray,
the contact of power
brings infinity into the place, the moment.
There’s nothing that can overcome it,
for its whisper also speaks
within the silent walls of hearts
Prayer can speak to
who was called enemy
from the inside
as epiphany, as common sense,
as what they’ve always understood.
They can’t stand against it
because it speaks as them.
In this we are one, in this we win.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 1, 2016
Everyone seeks truth.
It is our nature.
Of course our curiosity extends
to all the realms we know —
our curiosity thus proves
the presence of all the realms
in which we seek the truth
To seek the truth is tantamount
to striving to survive:
truth is inseparable from being,
so everything that’s living
lives in truth
And what of lies? And what of self delusion?
And what of petty desperation
that seeks to hide its essence
lest it be found and killed,
and what of that which seeks to kill
in order to conceal the truth?
These cannot live,
they can’t sustain themselves,
they can’t continue to be seen as truth.
Sooner or later, they snuff themselves out
since Truth and Life are one.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 31, 2016