When disaster comes unexpected, we discover the strength of our underpinning faith. Such was the destiny of a mother in Armenia:
When the earthquake hit, a mother and her child plummeted several stories as their apartment building crumpled. They were trapped in a tiny space in the basement barely able to move amidst the rubble. Dressed only in her slip and pinned down by beams, the mother --- thrust into a long, uninterrupted silence -- comforted her child for eight days and eight nights with her love. When the child had finished one jar of jam that had landed near them, she kept begging her mother for something to drink. Realizing they would both die without water, the mother scratched as far she could reach and found a shard of glass. One by one, she cut her fingers and hour by hour, she fed her child her own life blood. One the ninth day the rescuers found them. Out of the cold, dark prison, they were raised to new life.
In this one microcosmic miracle, the love & faith of the mother, the trust of the child, the prayers of the family, friends and neighbors, the concerned commitment of the rescuers, the silent contemplatives of the world were all united heart-to-heart by macrocosmic Love. "The secret of spirituality is the uncovering of this kind of life exchange, this very real and very visible interconnectedness that makes all of creation ONE."
There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.
~ Pema Chödrön in THE WISDOM OF NO ESCAPE: HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF AND YOUR WORLD
