Tsunamis in the House of Wholeness

I first wrote about the tsunami of 2004 fifteen years ago, but that story was not done with me, nor I with it. Slippery, shape-shifting, it keeps evolving, as all living beings do. This is my attempt to understand, more deeply, the nature of Story, and how it functions to make our world.

The stories we are living now can feel overwhelming; a daily onslaught of chaos and suffering. The Deva of Story reminds us that we are the hands and feet of the Sacred, making the world’s story. What we do matters.

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This is a story about Story. And a tsunami. And wholeness. And how these hold each other, how they weave into the world’s story.

For most of my life, I’ve been in a profoundly intimate relationship with language, in love with Story. I read constantly, lose and find myself in the immersive alchemy of stories that breathe a freer air.

And I write to enter the house of wholeness, to explore its secrets, to discover the stories that live in the shelter of its walls.

Some days, I wriggle in through a half-opened window. Or climb a nearby tree, crawl out on a limb, and fall in head-first through a hole in the roof. Writing, for me, is curiosity and adventure. And sometimes transgression, breaking and entering.

When I first sat down to write today, I felt that familiar urge to cross the sunny courtyard of everyday; to grope my way through the overgrown gardens surrounding the house of wholeness; to find and push open its cracked and creaking front door. There, in a hallway filled with quivering shafts of dusty light and musty shadows, stories breathe quietly. I hear them before I see them. Fragments. Memory; imagination; will-o’-the-wisps rising from the floorboards. A fractal weave, fascia of the world.

December 2004. I was visiting my sister in Bombay. The day after Christmas, while we were still asleep, a tsunami roared across the Indian Ocean destroying everything in its path.

Why this story? Why now, more than two decades later?

No matter. This is the story that brushes against me today. I follow it down a long hallway, up several, increasingly narrow staircases to the upper reaches of the house of wholeness. The dust makes me sneeze; I scribble frantically, trying to keep up with the story. Each sentence reveals a sliver -– a gesture; a heel lifting off a splintery wooden floor. A glimpse of bright hair; hollow cheek. Thrum of distant laughter. Whiff of sandalwood.

What I understand now, all these years after the tsunami washed away thousands of lives, is this: The tsunami was an event, a violent, tragic event that took place primarily over the course of several hours on Boxing Day, 2004.

But the story of this tsunami began long before, seeded in the extractive rapaciousness of colonial imperia, followed by catastrophic climate change triggered through unfettered global capitalism.

The story unfolded over weeks, months, years; a gradual revelation that only emerged as my heart expanded and crumpled, broke and bloomed, becoming year by year tender enough to meet the story whole and unafraid. Becoming, through the scouring mercy of everyday life, through choice and action, creative collaboration and surrender to the necessities of wholeness, soft enough, spacious enough, to discern this story’s true lineaments; to understand something of its place in the community of stories that make up the body of our world.

That morning, I had just come out of the shower and was towel-drying my hair in the guestroom at my sister P’s home in Bombay. My scalp tingled in the flow of cold air from the juddering air-conditioner. P flung open the door and blurted: “There was a terrible earthquake in Indonesia. A tsunami drowned hundreds of towns and villages. In South India too. No-one knows how many people died. It’s all over the news. I’m going to phone my friends in the Maldives to see if they’re okay.”

Turning to go, she stumbled and steadied herself against the doorframe before rushing out.

Later that evening P’s friends, Tanny and Nilu, came over for dinner. Tanny was the admiral in charge of naval rescue operations for South India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

All evening, while the rest of us picked at our food, and talked, and worried about what was happening out there in the tsunami-ravaged countries that ringed the Indian Ocean, Tanny was on his cell phone. Organizing relief supplies. Deploying rescue ships. Fielding phone calls from frantic parents.

Cabinet ministers, diplomats, billionaire businessmen — those who knew Tanny well enough to have his cell phone number — called and demanded that the navy send out ships to collect their children and bring them home. These young men and women had been vacationing at beach resorts which may or may not have vanished under the sea.

Over the clink of silverware on dinner plates, we heard Tanny explain, over and over, that the navy was needed elsewhere; that the young people would be rescued by plane and helicopter; that he would call the parents back as soon as he had any news. His voice was soft and deep, coaxing, reassuring.

Hours later he dropped into his seat at the dinner table, exhausted. His dinner, congealed on its plate, remained uneaten. Wrinkled eggplant slices. Grains of rice stiff and bristling. Wilted romaine lettuce.

Later still, that night, on the TV screen, the same few images played over and over. Great swells of bruise-coloured sea. Bits of timber and unidentifiable flotsam bobbing on the waves. People running, crying. Frantic men and women looking for family members.

And the death toll, on a banner that scrolled across the bottom of the screen. 2,500. 12,000. 45,000.

I didn’t sleep that night. Or for many nights after. My body knew what my mind refused to comprehend. Every one of those deaths lived in the twanging of my nerves, in muscles and ligaments rigid as driftwood.

The Tuesday after Boxing Day, I had lunch with my older sister, Nivi, and my 90-year-old aunt, at a Chinese restaurant in South Bombay. Nivi looked worriedly at her watch. “I have to get home by two o’clock,” she said. “I have to change for a funeral at three.” She sighed. “If it were just a one- or two-person funeral, I could wear what I’m wearing now. But it’s a five-person funeral so I must change into a funeral sari.”

“Yes,” my aunt said. “Nivi’s poor neighbour! He lost most of his family. His brother and sister-in-law, one of their twin boys, his mother and sister, all drowned in the tsunami. They brought the bodies home from Sri Lanka this morning. The other boy is still in hospital in a coma.”

I went into the Ladies’ Room, which reeked of eye-watering disinfectant. No tears, but I retched up a mouthful of bile and washed my face. This was closer to home; but still not close enough to break through the glacial firn that had crept over my heart.

On the plane home from Hong Kong to Vancouver on New Year’s Eve, an entire section of the South China Morning Post was devoted to the tsunami – one page per country. The death toll had risen to 160,000. More photos and stories. Interviews with survivors.

I tried to sleep on the plane, but my mind remained watchful while my heart pounded painfully in my chest. I wondered if I was having a heart attack.

And then, at last, I was home. Exhausted, wired, tremulous, I hugged my 17-year-old son. So tightly, for so long, that he finally kissed me on the top of my head and said, “It’s okay, mum; I’m here.”

Days later, a wild, January snowstorm slammed the west coast. The wind howled, juddered the windowpanes, blew loose shingles off the roof. The power went out. And stayed out for the next fourteen hours. The house grew bitterly cold.

Sick with the flu, I huddled under my down quilt. I couldn’t feel my nose or face. My ears burned. Maybe trepanning would relieve the surging pressure behind my eyes!

I phoned my son at his dad’s house. Just to hear his voice. To reassure myself that he was still there, still okay. He was patient with me. We talked for a while, hung up the phone.

Then, finally, tears. Snotty rivulets slithering down my upper lip; my heart a heaving sea.

I cried for the souls wandering, bewildered, in the post-mortem realms, unprepared for the sudden, violent truncation of their lives, not knowing where they were, how they got there, or what would become of them in this alien terrain. I cried for the ones left behind, those who survived, cold, hungry, homeless, bereft. Terrified. For parents who didn’t know whether their children were still alive. For our fragile, fragile lives. For this frangible Earth, our home.

The next morning, with the power back on, the house warm again, I showered, dressed, and got to work, joining the assembly of Devas and other beings whose focus is healing and restoration from catastrophic events in times of collective unravelling. We’d worked together for several decades, by then – there was a process in place for events such as these.

As always, once immersed in work, I felt calm, clear-headed, ready to do whatever was needed. My most urgent task was to accompany those who had just died: reassuring them; letting them know where they were and what had happened to them; helping them release the traumatic imprints of their catastrophic deaths; helping those who were ready, to complete karmic cycles from the lives they had left behind; linking them with allies who would walk with them through the post-mortem realms.

It was the most human of tasks, accompanying the newly dead, and deeply humbling. Even among the shocked throng, there were those who naturally turned to comfort their neighbours. Among them were human and more-than-human beings, animals, birds, sea creatures, plant life, entire landscapes destroyed by the raging sea.

Once the newly dead were safely in the care of their companions, I joined the Devas of the Elements, Devas of healing and completion, Devas of the countries that had suffered the worst of the tsunami’s depredations: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, the Seychelles, and many others.

Together, we tended to the land and seas in and around each of these regions, to release shock, fear, trauma, death energy and more. The field in which we gathered included physical and non-physical beings. The Devas, architects of form who hold the blueprints for all life in their care, brought love and power, and the precise patterns with which they restore order in places of chaos and devastation. Physical beings, including local fisherfolk and villagers, indigenous elders, eco-activists, ceremony holders, NGOs and disaster relief organizers like the Red Cross, laboured to do the same on the ground.

Like most collective projects, this one remained ongoing; we participated in it for a decade or more after the tsunami had subsided. The work required responding creatively, courageously, to the evolving needs of the region and its ecosystems. Love in action.

I am inexpressibly grateful to have been part of this endeavour, and others like it. And I’m reminded yet again that we each have skills we can contribute, resources and care we can offer according to our capacity, no matter how dire or overwhelming the situation. These gatherings, which happen whenever and wherever disaster strikes, are collective enterprises of healing, solidarity, and restoration. They bring together the best of human ingenuity and Devic power in service to the work of community repair.

As I enter this particular story, it enters me viscerally, so that the body of Story, its essence, pattern and form, its structure and function, mingle in the matrix of my cells.

Working together as a community, we experience the power of cohesive, collective action, which brings to life a healing story for this region -- one that is in harmony with the soul of the world, and the pattern it holds for this particular area of our miraculous planet.

The story that emerges from our efforts doesn’t gloss over the destruction that has taken place; it traces it back to its origins, and renders the forces of entropy inert through clear intention, and generative, purposeful, unified action on behalf of an evolutionary vision of what this region’s future will be.

Our world is burning; for decades now, we have been setting fire to our only home. We have poisoned the Earth with chemicals, choked our seas with plastics and oil spills. We have extracted and exploited that which was given to us to love, to cherish, preserve, and protect. We have broken the compact we made when we arrived here, one species among a million others: to live in peace and harmony with all beings; to offer our gifts for the benefit of the whole; to cherish the gift of life, all life, as the presence of the Sacred.

The gasping oceans, whales starving for lack of food in waters too acidic to support that which nourishes them, pelicans choking on microplastics, dying fish — these live in the house of wholeness too. Whatever happens to them happens to all of us. Each species decimated, each song and genome and culture obliterated, is an irrevocable loss. Those losses live in our cells, their molecules swim in our bloodstreams, their silenced heartbeats score deep crevasses in the world’s Story.

We live the destruction we have wrought.

That beautiful sea and coastline, black as a bruise. Those magnificent birds, built for air and flight, trapped by the gravity of oil on their wings and plastic in their bellies. I’ve cried, and raged, and mourned their ravaging.

But each bead of blood in my heart knows wholeness too. I cannot gather up the pain of the world and hold it in my belly. It cannot be healed there — it can only damage that inner shoreline, bring death to that living sea. I am responsible for keeping my inner world healthy and whole. The quality of my presence — the peace or conflict in my heart — is my offering.

It’s an exquisitely delicate relationship, this response of my heart to the need of the world. Because the moment I forget that the Sacred is in the world as well as in me, my little self sinks under the impossible weight of a million tsunami-ravaged lives.

Then I am no longer part of this generative gathering, no longer a source of blessing and radiance, of healing and love. Instead, I stagger around blindly, stunned, bruised and bleeding. A casualty of violence, adding to the fear, chaos and confusion around me.

So, I pace myself. Assess my capacity honestly and serve in the ways I still can. At age 76, facing increasingly complex health challenges, I no longer have the stamina to contribute in the ways I have for the past sixty years. My intention remains clear -- to do what I can when I can; to be, in the simplest way, a source of kindness, support, and nurturance. And in my everyday communion with the Sacred, to work with the realm of the unconditioned, to shape and amplify its immense creative power through collaborative practices with the Devas.

These days, in despair and in gratitude, my prayer remains the same: May we love, cherish, tend and protect our beautiful Earth and all beings who live here. May we love and nurture the Sacred in ourselves and in our world. May we serve wholeness with glad and grateful hearts. May we be sources of love, peace, justice, provision, creative joy, and abundant blessing.

The story I’ve been trailing through the house of wholeness leads me to a sun-scooped rooftop terrace. Here, she stops and turns to face me. Blinking in the sudden light, at first, I see only her silhouette. Gradually, she comes into focus. Beautiful, ragged, her hair a cloud around a face seamed by sun, wind, sorrow, laughter. The set of her mouth is a twist of iron. In the depths of her eyes, in her frayed fingertips, all the stories that have ever been, all the stories yet to be, are alive and whispering.

A slanting, late-afternoon light quivers along treetops and bushes, gilds the glossy black feathers of a raven lifting off from a heaving branch; his grunk-croak scores the afternoon. Crickets percuss in the dilapidated gardens far below.

It’s been long neglected, this house that births the world’s stories, that shelters us throughout our lives with such exquisite tenderness. It’s been ignored, shunned, dismissed, its presence deliberately obscured by human arrogance, human greed; by vision too pinched and transactional to comprehend the breathtaking generosity of the Sacred in the heart of our world.

The house of wholeness offers hospitality to its desecrators too. We live within its sheltering grace, whether we revere or defile it.

Here, on a rooftop parapet in the house of wholeness, Lady Tsunami and I lean against each other, co-conspirators catching the last rays of the setting sun.