Tag Archives: spirituality

Love and Magic: Three Enchantments

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 I.
When people love
they make magic
Everything living responds to it
Land rises up at its touch
Joyfully bends as it bends them
Brings forth a beauty
that calls forth their love again
making both ever more rich.
II.
In the dance of love
The will does not reside in either entity
It hovers in that charged and potent
mystic space between them
When they move to follow it
it’s nothing like
the simple, hollow closure
that comes from exercising one’s own will
It’s an exhilaration
and it brings a jubilation
and a satisfaction nothing else can fill.
III.
Magic is real
It is the dance of love
Everyone who loves creates it
sparkling in everything they touch
Others, when they see it, know it
Even if it’s nothing they can name
That which has been loved
will lift them
Bless them so they’ll never be the same. 

©Wendy Mulhern
March 27, 2012


(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Into Spring”)



A Wee Bit O’ Green

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Almost spring
Almost Irish
Altogether blessed
By seeing for a moment
that all inclusive motion
River of the whole bright universe
Carrying us all 
in its ecstatic fall of joy
Everything suspended in its current

Flowing with it, we don’t sense its speed
Or how its ever-presence meets our need
Yet if our ears once notice its resounding rush
Or if our skin once feels its equipollent push
How can we help but feel transported, lifted
And in the miracle of life, supremely gifted

Almost spring
Almost Irish
In the rare, transcendent view
that senses nature’s ancient blessings
ever new.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 17, 2012


Waking up is hard to do

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Waking up is hard to do
Not only in the so-called morning
in the shuffle of avoiding
the pre-dawn alarm

Breaking an illusion takes
intensity of focus
and a steady concentration
and a willingness to shift
and notice:

What I thought was solid ground
is not
And where I thought I stood
I really wasn’t
And all that I was sure was real
All that I’d strung my hopes across
has never been what held me up at all

What I am, and what I’m standing on
is something else.  It has a different gravity
It follows different laws.
The brightness of awakeness overcomes the force
of every predetermined lockstep course
and every limitation we surmise
that drains the light and laughter from our eyes

Standing up for light
may be a struggle
Waking up is hard to do
but worth the trouble.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 14, 2012


Soul Retrieval

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No, no,
This is not the promise you were given
Mountains of detritus,
Self-enforced confinement
Stress and tracks of weary years
Across your face

No
This is not your course
The clock-enforced conformity
The envious and jealous stabs within
Reflexive judgement,
Passing down the curse
Of being conquered

However much the rules you’re taught
claim to control
You never could be severed
from your soul

Hold with me now
Together, let’s sing your song
It leads you back along the lines of longing
To where you’ve always sensed that you belong
We’ll all converge there jubilantly thronging
At home as if we never had been gone

Let our eyes now feed each other’s embers
Resurrect our light so we remember
What had seemed so lost from us, so far
Who we’ve ever been
And who we are.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 14, 2012


(background music: Max Richter, “Embers”)

Beam me up . . .

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The place beneath my breath today
is full of lights
Brilliant as pointillist dots
that seethe and swarm and dance
and form a scene
too close for me to see
But when we sit together
Lights reflecting lights
and multiplying
Then the scene appears
So clearly scrying
That which lifts us up
and sets us flying
out beyond old limits, fear defying

So many lights! Lighter than air
Light enough to lift a whole dream
into lucidity, light enough to stream
through solar systems
Light enough to beam us
Beatific
Pulsing clear and true
across the night.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 12, 2012



Serving Light

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In this temple of the dance
You can put off your shoes
and join the sacred rite
Enter anonymous into the holy trance
to be a vessel, bearer of the light

(You’ll choose it for the way
                                        the light transfixes you
         Fills out your being, flowing from inside
                   against your skin
                                              suffusing you
         until you glow and radiate
                       and float in brilliant bliss
                 across the room)

Moving then in service to the light
Your eyes can touch another’s, and ignite
The signal can be passed from hand to hand
Each one who joins will cause it to expand

You may come back to find your boundaries shifted
Your thoughts now finer, softer, lifted
Buoyant, like all things light has sifted
You’ll see yourself anew as blessed and gifted

(Not that you ever have to look at it this way
This is the work, but it is also play!)


©Wendy Mulhern
February 10, 2012



Idols

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Winds of Spirit
Sweep my thought
It’s time to cast out idols
Those who ask for time
Those who ask for blood
Those who ask for tiresome daily ritual
Who say they have the power
to save my sorry life
or, if I fail to worship,
occasion my demise

But they know nothing, and their mouths can’t speak
The life they offer is anemic, weak
And Spirit shows me, right here, what I am
Exposing all their noxious threats as sham

I will not worship
the god of appearances
I will not worship
the god of social norms
I will not worship
the god of shopping bargains
I will not worship
the god of health concerns

Winds of Spirit, sweep my soul
for I am made to worship 
what is true and whole
That frames the space for all that’s free and wild
And holds us each as Life’s untrammeled child.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 6, 2012

(background music: Max Richter, “Haunted Ocean”)

Deliverance Prayer

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Deliverance Prayer (background music “The Blessing” by Isaac Shepard)

Bring my soul up out of Egypt
Walk me step by patient step
out of the patterns that enslave me
Release me from the lockstep
that doesn’t look
that is afraid to seek the kinship of a smile
 
Teach me to spin out on the leaf edge
of the wind
and twirl into the knowing
of the infinite variety —
Intricacies which Life has ever blessed
 
Let me no longer follow
the commands that run them over
that allow us three or four straight norms at best
Unclamp my feet from marching
Free my toes
to find the subtle footholds
midst the wildness of the river
 
Free the rivers, too
and let us all please tumble brightly
down the perfect, wild, unchanneled 
course that we were born for
Let us know each other 
deeply, truly, freely
 
Bring my soul up out of Egypt
That I may worship
My Good.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 3, 2012
 
photo by Edward Mulhern
 

Love, reconsidered

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With everything in order
—all confusion put to bed—
it’s time to reconsider Love.
Love that shines from everywhere
to everywhere.  All points illumined
and illuminating.  Love that causes
everything, and stops at nothing.
Love that puts all stories of
a point-sourced love to rest;
Love that always blesses
and brings forth the best.
Love that lets no failing fester
but reveals
all that must be brought to light
and so be healed.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 28, 2012



Emptiness

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Only things that can receive
can be empty.
Consider this, O hearts, O arms —
The grand capacity of your design
How expertly you have been made
To hold, to take in
shelter and contain
To heal, embrace,
and then release again
To empty, fill, and so engage
in life, the grand enacting of creation
Exultant in its endless generation.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 27, 2012

(Picture: Jennifer McCurdy, “Gilded Vortex Vessel”; photo by Gary Mirando; background music: Max Richter, “From the Rue Villin”)