F.A.T.E. - From All Thoughts Everywhere

Let us meet this with a tsunami of giving,
Let us each be nameless drops in a great wave of support,
For this is a chance to define our shared humanity,
And reclaim our common lot,
Let us find within an epicentre of love,
One that registers 10 on the Richter Scale,
Let us summon a shift in our perceptions,
As we rise up from humbled knees,
What then would we leave in our wake ?
If not a changed landscape, a better way, a different world.

(On the five year anniversary of the tsunami natural disaster that claimed over 230,000 lives in Asia, I am posting this poem in memory of all those who were directly affected by this cataclysmic event. I wrote this poem as an attempt to feel for an appropriate response to such an overwhelming yet distant experience. The title is taken from a passage in the book 'Conversations with God' where it suggests that acts of fate, like a tsunami, are actually a summation of many millions of individual thoughts that coalesce to generate 'real world' experiences. This thinking is based on the belief that we are creative beings who have the ability to 'move mountains' through our thoughts. Sounds crazy I know but we have all heard the phrase 'mind over matter' and this is simply an extension of this everyday phrase. It's as crazy as every truth for which our 'flat earth' egos are not yet ready to deal with.  Anyway, the poem issues a call for a different manifestation of fate, a tsunami of giving, an opportunity to use the tragedy of the tsunami to come together and define who we are and who we want to be on a global scale. And in this way too, the summation of our thoughts, words and actions has a similar power to that of the tsunami wave - itself a summation of many million 'innocent' particles of water moving in unision. Nature reminds us that this depth of collective expression does have the power to 'change landscapes' , internally and externally, inside and out. And we did give - six days after the tsunami hit a total of £1bn of aid had been pledged to victims of the disaster, a huge wave of money, a huge wave of humanity. A hint at the possibilities of the human spirit?)