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
Well, it would be the same hubris
to say I heard the call
but failed to answer
as to say
that only I was called
as if the calling
were a voice I could refuse,
as if, on hearing it,
there could still be anything else
I might prefer to do
as if there were a me
with any purpose or existence
beside the magnitude
of what I’d understand myself to be,
what I’d embody
in answering the call.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 17, 2020
Try this out, just for a moment –
being satisfied with what you are –
not in contrast to any others,
not in reference to a former self
Inhabit this – and not as an exception –
Have reference only to your present self –
What you are is just what feeds this moment
with the delight that glints through all its folds
This is enough! In fact, it’s overflowing –
Let its lightness billow through your form,
let it lift you up and take you flying –
you can come back down
any time you want.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 15, 2020
In the space between
what I think I believe
and what I really,
there is room for falling
and also room for reckoning,
the evidence being clear
in my face and in my actions
and how I move through the day
What I am believing
casts its shadow
across who I think I am
and what is happening to me,
and if I don’t like the shadow
I can change it,
but only as I change what casts it
Let me look up,
Let me draw no conclusions
from tricks of the light.
Let me look up
to realign myself
with what is true.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 14, 2020