Ten Thousand Things
And a Million More Beyond the Veil
There is a feeling of ten thousand things arriving at once — and perhaps a million more waiting just beyond the veil.
Everything is felt.
The beautiful and the unbearable.
The sacred and the profane.
The pulse of possibility and the ancient ache beneath it.
All of it arriving simultaneously, without permission, without sequence.
Silence is what I crave, but the collective is booming — an explosive frequency of disruption, revelation, and new possibility, if such a thing can even be measured. The heart pounds at record rates, as though the psyche itself has become too charged for the body to contain. The nervous system begs for a shutdown.
Not sleep nor rest. A hard reset.
Reboot, if you will.
Or go to the desert, because the desert has been calling your name.
It is difficult to pray with one knee inflamed by a thorn, or some other foreign exchange between flesh and the unseen world.
Still, we kneel.
We call to the winds — the familiar ones, the oldest and closest of friends. We ask them, no, beg them, to carry away these ten thousand things.
And the million more.
Take them.
Carry what we cannot.
For now, we sit in the strange stillness after a car accident, coming down from the rush of adrenaline, shaking without knowing why. On the surface, everything remains calm, almost unnaturally so — like the collective soul holding its breath.
But underneath —
there is a storm.
A vast psychic weather system moving through the body.
It wants out.
It wants to break open the doors of the self and spill into the night.
So we listen.
We surrender to the strange music of it all: the terror and the tenderness, the grief and the ecstasy, the collapse and the becoming.
We greet the song of the southern shores as though an Eastern storm has crossed the entire world to arrive from the west.
And somewhere inside that impossible collision —
Everything is alive.
Everything is speaking.
Everything is felt.
Or perhaps nothing is speaking.
Perhaps the wind is only wind.
and the heart is only a heart,
beating because it must.
And perhaps this, too,
is sacred.
~Ani Po
