Last night, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the image of the Japanese tsunami hitting the Sendai foreshore. I was at a gonging session, surrounded by mood music and lighting, gongs, drums, bowls, everything focused on relaxation and meditation, but I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing black water. Since Friday night, when I first heard the news, I have trawled the Internet, newspapers and television for updates on how this terrible situation has affected the Japanese people. I’ve saturated my psyche with images of those terrible waves. Coming after three months of natural disasters - the big freeze in the northern hemisphere, floods, cyclones, bushfires and the Christchurch earthquake - now there is another earthquake, tsunamis, volcanic eruption and nuclear power stations near melt-down. We don’t just get the news, it’s repeated over and over and over again until we, too, are overwhelmed, inundated, the waves coming in on us.
