Feel the Earth Shake

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Yesterday, the earth shook. At dawn, many of us in this country, from the south coast to the midlands, woke up in terror. I woke up. I got up. I went to see the children. They were sleeping well. All of this took my time. And I never slept again. I wrote until messages, messages and calls began to come. Many people came, and as dawn came, a wave slowly formed. I responded to the answers as if I was venting. As someone who still had time to participate in the formation of the wave, I wrote messages to the most important people and I made some calls. For the rest of the day, I lay dormant, as if the shaking earth was asking something of me.

I noticed we asked each other friends or family if we felt the earthquake, if we felt it coming to wake us, if we were scared, if we went back to sleep. We asked questions about feeling the ground shaking, and I noticed in that question there was an expectation of community around shared feeling. We felt it together, in the face of the shaking ground, we missed feeling it together.

The morning question “Do you feel it?” constitutes this Together Our foundation is our solidarity in that moment when everything is shaking, and the memory we leave behind, a memory that is revived by sharing, like a sober persistence. This issue asks us to participate together. But more than that. This issue is a concern for others. Without leaving anyone a word, together, let the floor be covered with everyone’s feelings.

Feeling the ground shake is extraordinary, and it requires witnessing and a solid foundation in what others are feeling. Not only because we in the grogginess of the early morning may hesitate to interpret what is happening, but because when the earth shakes like this, the earth is shaking us, and its vibrations must be supported, sustained, and welcomed. With sensitivity, open hearts, and a shared journey, we are called by the question, “Do you feel it, too?”

If there had been a big earthquake, this question about how we felt wouldn’t make sense, maybe another question about how we survived would make more sense. Yes. But in this feeling between nothing and everything, as in almost everything, we saw what was originally missing: looking at each other, listening to our shared feelings, giving ourselves time for this commonality to arrive and resonate in our thoughts, and then. changing attitudes, allowing us to act differently.

“We are only parts of nature, but we wish to be considered as a whole,” wrote Immanuel Kant in his famous reflections on the Lisbon earthquake. “We do not want to accept the general rules that nature follows; we want everything to be determined for ourselves.”(1) A quarter of a millennium has passed, but these ideas are still current. Even in the most mundane sense, Kant gave us the best idea of how we should think about the built world we live in – “Is it not better to say first: it is reasonable to have earthquakes, but it is unreasonable to build luxurious buildings!? The inhabitants of Peru live in houses with low stone walls and upper parts made of thatch. Man must adapt to nature, rather than expect nature to adapt to him.” (Same as above）

Now that we have thoroughly shared tips and a survival manual for dealing with excessive earth shaking, it is also important for us to keep in mind what it feels like when the earth shakes: the earth is our floor and we are its ground. It is very important.