On this night she parted the mirrored surface with a smooth blade rippling the lake into one hundred and eight low waking strokes. She liked to glide across as noiselessly as the stars and lock her gaze upon the silvery willow arced over the dock; she focused on the other side. Draped in robes of green and gold brocade, the switch of her paddle billowed cool air through her sleeves that wafted up through the neck lifting hair from the frame of her face with each stroke. The soft rush of a distant falls murmured beneath the whistle and chirp of frogs. This night was sweet with jasmine, gardenia, and hyacinth. And in the last darkened hours before dawn, Tara began to hum.
Nearing the edge, she withdrew her paddle and placed it at the bottom of the boat. Coasting toward the dock the boat slowed sending the closed buds of indigo utpala lotus blossoms spinning on their pads as she passed. Then the glass surface of the water began to tremble, each reflected star twinkled faster until the vibrating images broke into rippling, then rumbling; then rocking, the boat threw its paddle at her feet. She, acting fast, plunged the paddle into the lake to steady the small craft against the sudden tumult of waves. Voices cried out against the disturbance. Every frog, bird, beast and bug let loose a shrill wailing that deepened the rumbling growl of the earth in its quake. The boat in the mish mash of waves retreated from the dock. Tara stood fast at the stern with her oar ruddering for balance until she made her way back to the wooden seat to paddle madly amidst the waves for the dock. Receding quickly away from lands edge, the water pulled and pulled at the boat until she was once again back at the lake’s middle. Her shoulders and arms burned so hot with pain she could paddle no more and she was sucked to the stream that fed the lake into the sea.
Tara turned the bow with the direction of the flow and headed into what had become river rapids of lake draining full force into forest. As the lake emptied, the water lifted her high among the branches; the only way to keep the boat from splintering into a trillion shards against the huge trunks of cedar and kiawe was to paddle, hard. Tree-top sweepers full of nests, webs and monkeys reached across her gushing path as Tara beat her way through the watery maze of canopy racing the river to the end of its riddle. The wind propelled her as much as the suck of the sea and then she saw it. Looming, colossal, impossible—the empty shoreline reef of what had always been the ocean. She rode the waters just as far as she could until the water drained over crags of ocean floor. The small boat sat balanced between two arms of coral. She waited. Nothing made a peep. In the absence there was only the silent reaching of tentacles in empty tide pools for water that wasn’t there. Then sunrise, sirens, screaming.
When the sea returned it was not the giant wall she had expected, not the cresting emerald chariot of Poseidon but an enormous, angry, roaring spill as if the heavens had taken a mighty breath of air that pulled the oceans up with them and, exhaling, released the contents of the sea in a chaotic mixture of roiling jellyfish, crabs, coral, sands, and cold. As the frothing liquid wrath spread out before her, she glanced back at the coast to see throngs of o-shaped mouths agape with awe and she remembered what her father had seen on the day she was born: he saw the pains involved at birth. He saw old age, sickness, and death. He saw suffering. Here were these same beings still suffering because they lacked what they wanted, because they were burdened by things. She saw them seeking love but creating death, and she saw them trying to avoid suffering but running headlong into it. Her father, Avalokiteshvara, had dedicated the whole of himself to liberating all beings from the sufferings of existence, and since he saw there remained uncountable suffering beings, he had begun to weep. His tears flowed down, and kept flowing until they had created a vast lake. Then out of this lake—the liquid incarnation of Avalokiteshvara’s compassion—arose a blue utpala lotus, and on this lotus appeared a 16-year-old girl in the form of a goddess. This was Tara.
Back over the stern of her boat, Tara saw the rubber-necked bodies on the banks finally turn their backs to run. The buildings of the indelible city so stern in their landscape would soon meet with the deluge of a power that would vent its spleen with an eerie equanimity. The purge and melt of the rising gush would pour in, around, over, through, into windows, doors, ears, mouths, eyes. The waters would strike fires, terrors, mirrors and blows. Some would escape most would not. When the torrent overtook her, the boat shot up and out from under her feet and Tara went spiraling into the flood. In the whorl her limbs were freed from their robes. The strong morning sun shone deep through the cold jade wave and Tara opened her eyes to green. She spread her arms wide riding the manic currents collecting houses and temples, factories and schools, swing-sets and slides, shopping baskets and cars. She washed up to the surface with streetlights and tangles of wires still surging with volts like fragments of laundry in spin cycle only to be sucked below in the agitated jumble of trees, bodies, and bicycles. Fierce in her assemblage, she saw everything, everything, everything join the savage deliverance of tsunami.
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