Sri Lanka: Tsunami Two years on
Out of the womb of sightless night – bring out the word of healing strong
Colombo, 26 December, 2007
Two years after Sri Lanka faced death and destruction of unimaginable proportions there is much soul searching. Many are the questions being asked — where did the aid money go, how many houses were built, how many are more to be build, what went wrong and what did we do right, did we forget the people concentrating on statistics?– the search for answers continue…. One thing for sure we couldn’t do was to unite the people of this land. We did unite very briefly in the immediate aftermath but that was just a very very brief moment.
This morning before I started on the track back to Hikkaduwa, I needed to read again a poem sent to me by my father many moons ago. In it he wrote about a Buddhist monk he knew who lived in a hermitage close to Hikkaduwa – Polgasduwa. The monk, he wrote was weighed by asthma as I was then, but worked hard at his studies to forget his asthma. Years ago my birthday gift to my father was an English translation of “Visuddhimaga” – the original. [a Buddhist Pali Canon], which is now lost forever. In the preface were these poems this monk had written one night at 2 a.m. because he believed my father said of “wearing out than rusting out.”
Out of the womb of sightless night – bring out the word of healing strong
And put to flight the evil thoughts – that stood betwixt the eye and light
Where lies, friend, the golden mean? In giving up
Where’s the heart forever clean? In giving up
Where is life at its best seen? In giving up Where reaches one peace serene? In giving up
More on the trek back South on Tsunami’s second anniversary follows…
