Kindness overcomes confusion,
and being lost, and grave distrust
Kindness lights the way
to step between the layered lies
and not be caught –
it blows those webs away
and leaves the song of ancient memory
on lips and skin
The memory of who and where we were
before there ever was a tale of wrong,
the memory of who we’ve always been –
kind because we are
all of a kind.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 26, 2023
Now that I’ve quit
the business of judging,
how you comport yourself
makes little difference
We all deserve mercy,
and we all have the stature
to grant it. And maybe that
is the greater role
we all have longed for –
mercy over judgment,
universal ease.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 23, 2023
For after all, what are we about but
kindness?
It’s our best sense of ourselves,
our best hope. It is what fills us up with sweetness,
enough in a moment to last a day,
enough in a day to rocket us
clear up to the stars
So how could we ever think
there is some score to settle first?
(I would be kind if only others
weren’t mean to me)?
We’ve never really been about reaction.
What we are comes only from ourselves,
and what we are is kindness,
that dear embracing wisdom
which resonates within as deepest truth
and solves everything.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 17, 2023
It well may be
you can find kindness
anywhere. Still,
there are some places not to go
when you are searching
for someone to be kind to you
(They spit you out!
They don’t give you a chance
to speak for yourself! They speak
to their assumptions about you –
they never see you at all!)
Of course the best way to find kindness
is to be kind.
Then you can find it anywhere –
if not in others
then at least in yourself.
From there it tends to multiply …
©Wendy Mulhern
July 13, 2022
Entitlement is not
a happy state of the heart.
Those who are whole
desire to do their part –
they are fed by what they give –
to be a giver is to live
Compassion feeds the soul
and saves us
from swallowing the shadowed insult
of someone’s expectation to be served.
They may be arrogant, disparaging, insensitive –
compassion makes us whole.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 11, 2022
Attending to the tasks of care
makes space for easy kindness,
time to listen, time to hear,
time, once again, to find us.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 24, 2022
I can remember lakes of kindness
and jumping into them,
and the light that powers smiles
soaking in, and filling up, flooding me
with an abiding wellbeing
Some I could return to often,
some were more like puddles
but were enough to light me up
There were dry patches, too.
I could go for long times in between ablutions,
sustaining as they were,
and because I still could access them in memory
But the richest thing is when
I can create a lake for others –
when I do that, I never lack.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 5, 2022
A way to find safe harbor
is to be one – this I feel today,
having extended welcome,
and still basking in the comfort
of that simple act
More than words and gestures, I think,
the heart behind it –
that offering served to open the way
for me, too, to sail in
to where the breezes and ripples
are kind.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 8, 2022
Let me slip in
with calm confidence,
let me slip into the cage
with no fear of the snarling beast
I will bring nothing with me –
nothing of pride, nothing of judgment,
I will go with trust
that nothing that I am
can be attacked
and that my fearlessness
can bring the needed evidence,
my love
can bring the needed peace.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 7, 2021
I come around again to peace –
Is it cued by the music?
Or by the still place that I made
from working breath and body?
Or is it sweet forgiveness, knowing all of us
are here, and all desiring
this same sense of release
and homing, and being wrapped in kindness,
and being kindness itself,
ever able to forge its way
across the deep.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 29, 2021