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When the earth moves suddenly, we all stop. The poet Govinda Das wrote – kamala talajala, jivana talamala: this life is tottering like a drop of water on a lotus flower.

In Nepal there will be many stories of those who survived, who barely missed a collapsing building, who were one minute absorbed in their everyday life and the next in a life upturned. There will be communities who come together in the face of tragedy and families forever torn apart.

Why? We will ask again and again. And what is the nature of this earth planet that cruelly dishes out a fate so desperate to thousands?

The Gita teaches that the world is a place of suffering, and there three main sources of that suffering – our own mind, other living creatures, and nature itself.

Nature is powerful. It’s strength can kill us in a minute. And yet the earth is also known as our Mother. Mother Earth – she provides nourishment, and shelter in many different ways. The problem is that we don’t take care of our mother very well. We neither respect nor protect her. We are so caught up in the pace of modern civilization and the incessant demand for more, that the earth becomes a disposable resource for our greedy selves. Use it up and throw it aside.

This leads to an unbalance; that is a dangerous thing. The earth, like ourselves, is a living entity. The Vedas explain that we must live in harmony with the earth. We must honor and respect her gifts, her energies, her resources that sustain us, and her personhood. We must wake up to the responsibility we have as citizens of the earth and walk upon it with a new consciousness.

There will always be those who don’t care. The selfish ones who will extract, frack, explode, excavate, mine, drill, pump, blast, pollute, dump and over-fish, factory farm, slaughter, and take down forests without a single shred of concern for the damage done and the imbalance created. Imbalance that will one day explode in other ways.

We are not so different as individuals. We too will crack if our life gets out of balance, if we deplete ourselves, run ourselves to the ground, stretch ourselves thin, and live for all the wrong reasons. We will either collapse into ourselves or explode onto others. If our body, mind, and spirit are not balanced by being nourished, protected, and respected we too will be a danger.

And, just like the earthquake, we won’t see it coming. It will explode on an ordinary afternoon and deliver a painful reminder that our life is out of balance. Stop now and make the change. Keep body and soul in harmony. Keep a strong spiritual practice. And most of all pay attention to how the way we live affects us, others, and the earth itself. Otherwise we will pay dearly for an unconscious life lived poorly. 

Source:http://iskconofdc.org/when-the-earth-moves/