Featuring stories from the Asian tsunami and aftermath, the book will delve into ten phases of attending to life-altering events on physical, psychological, and spiritual levels.
Personal account and commentary will trace the inspired leadership of the Indian holy woman, Amma, her immediate actions at the onset of the tsunami: evacuation of 15,000 people, medical aid, providing shelter and food,consoling, mass cremation, clean-up, and later the rebuilding of homes and fishing boats, and the restoration of the human spirit.
The book will explore the ways calamity (or threat of it) can forever alter one's approach to life, with a look at the importance of local community and of self-inquery.
Stories and interviews expand on the various views of life and death, and life after death.
December 26, 2004. Amritapuri, Kerala, India.
A lone pole-driven canoe carrying a European couple on a pleasure ride, glides along the backwaters. Coconut palms line the banks; a white bird soars. On the opposite shore, my friend and I, and a handful of Sunday visitors, wait in the hot sun for the small motor ferry to carry us across to the ashram on the Arabian Sea. The pleasure canoe drifts alongside the ashram boat jetty and moors; the man helps the woman step out, and they stroll towards the ashram.
Seconds later, dark gray water surges through gullies, shoots into the backwaters, capsizing the pleasure canoe and dumping debris in its wake. A village fisherman shouts, waving his arms. Many who’d been waiting for the motor ferry run away. I’m transfixed. Where is all that water coming from and why? Then it dawns on me.
“Was that a tsunami?” I ask Indian man in his Sunday best.
He’s walking away, slowly, head down, looking pensive, he nods. “Yes.”
“We better get to high ground,” I say to him and my friend, “I think another wave is coming.” We head down the pathway to the ashram’s four-story computer school, five minutes away. A group of students saunter along in front of us. “We need to move quickly,” I say, all the while imagining giant waves from movies I’ve seen.
Meanwhile, on the peninsula across the backwaters, minutes from the ashram complex, the Arabian Sea waters have receded to about forty feet beyond the average tidal mark. Visitors, ashram residents, and villagers delight in the strange phenomena, the exposed expanse of beach.
A messenger comes running—“Quick. Get away. Run to the ashram. Go up to the second and third floors.” The ashram’s PA system blare, an announcement in eighteen languages for everyone to climb to the upper stories of the temple building or ashram flats, and for visitors to move the few cars parked by the ocean. 10,000 guests had gathered for a special Sunday program, and another 4,000 Indian and Western ashram residents had been engaged in their daily routines.
We wait for what becomes known as “the killer wave.”