Though it’s hard to think
how we will make it through the winter,
it’s not so hard to deal with every day –
get up, perform the work at hand,
persevere through darkness
and through cold,
be graced, be blessed,
by glimpses of the light
This is how we’ll get through –
one day into the next,
grand plans dimly in the background,
committed to the way this moment plays.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 30, 2020
It could be a small thing.
It wouldn’t have to be something like
the raising of a barn
or a transformation in consciousness
It could be the view across a field
just in one moment,
or the huddle space
where the fire is warm
while the cold air
creeps around my back
It could be a small thing I notice
that shows, nonetheless,
the sweetness of our lives.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 29, 2020
They didn’t think they wanted to get up,
absorbed, as they were, in arranging
the little curlicues of what they called their lives
Which always seemed to promise:
Sometime, somehow, they’d get it right
and win the prize of fortune, fame, delight
They thought it was annoying to be prodded,
even unfair, as it perhaps distracted
them off their game, made them miss their win,
plus it was fearsome to be demanded
to be more than they had ever been
And yet, when they finally awoke.
They had no more words to describe.
The things that looked like onerous demands
were simply invitations to arise,
to inhabit the vast regions of their being,
to humbly wield their quintessential power.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 28, 2020
I’m forced to remember
I can’t do this alone,
can’t toss my thoughts high enough
to scale the peak,
can’t get the answer
from random imprints of emotions
I’m forced to remember
answers have nothing for me –
I need the deep suffusing
of what knows me.
I need to give up my projections
and let myself be shown.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 25, 2020
And what would I not offer,
when everything I bring
is caught up so immediately,
transfigured, brightened, multiplied,
illuminating what I am,
revealing and bestowing
my heart’s desire –
When would I not come
to the place of offering –
What would I want to leave behind?
I will come.
I will remember
it is my natural state
to be full of thanks –
my breath and nourishment,
cause and purpose for my leaping –
I have been lame so long
but now I’m free.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 24, 2020
An hour until sunset,
and the fog returns,
swallowing the hills again,
and then the trees,
just like this morning
before the few hours around noon
when the sky revealed itself
the very definition of blue
and the sun coaxed the temperature
a few degrees above freezing
The fog closes our landscape in,
leaving us here among the rafters
failing to hold up the sky
as darkness falls.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 21, 2020
The poemless feeling starts as yawns,
then marches on
like a road that leads to
the inside corners of a box,
like a day
that runs out of ticks,
or they grind down
and the next one
simply never comes
It doesn’t ask for diagnosis,
just for bed.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 20, 2020
As I talked about it
I remembered
how the Allness can reveal itself
within the darkest emptiness,
within the fact that even
when you take away everything –
everything you can think of,
everything you can name,
everything you can imagine,
all you can desire –
the Allness is still there.
In that presence is everything –
even what you might call nothing
can’t take it away.
It is the Love that stands
when everything is gone.
It is the Love that finally
is all you ever need.
©Wendy Mulhern
November19, 2020
It’s a series of small tasks –
some have an order,
more than are possible
want to be done last –
we push them along
as well as we can
The hours tick on tiptoe –
we’re always surprised
when well after ten
there are still more last things
But we’ve done it enough
that we move along calmly,
trying to get all the edges pulled in
and early tomorrow
we’ll pick ourselves up,
load up the truck and head south.
©Wendy Mulhern
November18, 2020
