Can you feel the Earth quaking?
Fault lines as old as the word “America” are groaning so loud that we can all hear it. Even those who never knew that Earth has always been speaking. Even those who forgot how to listen to the force that births people and planet; that’s breath is the weather, and that’s story is history.
Soil cracking from a drought architected by industry. Crops wither under a sun that’s just too hot. Beneath the parched earth there is a thick wet swamp: a noxious stew made from the blood of the natives, the sweat of the enslaved, the tears of migrants, the black oil seeping through its veins. A Hades we created and tried to bury along with our plastic that now corrodes the foundations upon which we have built our civilization.
Can you feel the Earth quaking?
Ancestors who suffered unjustly scratching against the coffins of made of lies taught as history in order to trap their power. Here they come rising; reminding us of what lays underneath our shopping malls and highways.
Here they come rising. Dancing in circles to drum beats that change time. Sharing medicine in touch, song, and plant that often makes us vomit and weep as it heals us. Here they come rising to meet people who have remembered, or never forgotten, their connection to the unseen worlds.
Can you feel the Earth quaking?
Ancestors who inflicted violence writhing in turmoil. Untended to by their children who have learned they don’t still exist. Disconnection and denial just heightening the fear, confusion, and woundedness that severed them from their true humanity in the first place. That led them to commit violence that is as utterly inexcusable as it is easily understood.
Like the traumatized youth turned bully. Like the desperate child turned thief. Like the abused and misled turned murderer. Hurt people, hurt people. How hurt do you have to be to decimate civilizations?
Can you see them? Haunting their descendants who now commit and enable more crimes just to avoid witnessing the wreckage of their ancestry. Can you feel their moans? Ripples of pain moving beneath our feet shaking houses to the ground. Can you hear them screaming? Desperate to be seen, remembered and healed.
Can you feel the Earth quaking?
Reminding us that we are all subject to its whims; that the distinction between oppressed and oppressor is about as useful as any other binary our minds create. Dams of rationalization crumble unleashing a flood of truth through financial districts and suburbs. The facade of democracy rinses off like cheap paint beneath a pressure washer revealing the Leviathan of fear, control, and wealth that many already knew was there. The veneer of political freedom lays muddled on the pavement and the industrial Medusa demands its wage slaves chant “free market” as they clock in and march dutifully to their death.
Can you hear the great American self-defense mechanisms echoing in the street? “Meritocracy, we get what we deserve! Individualism, everyone for themselves! Capitalism, when we fight each other, we all win! Consumerism, true happiness is just one shopping spree away!” Do you see the masses contorted into a false posture of power and knowing to hide from the challenging terrain that all humans must walk through?: the doubt, the hurt, the longing, the loss. Do you see them cowering in sight of the struggle to be fully human, to be grateful for what is, to take solace in the divine abundance that the native heart always knew was here?
Can you feel the Earth quaking?
Can you see those fables of security and safety that we let lull us to sleep fall down the chasms? Will you look down after them with me? Do you see nothing but the fear and unknown that we had lacked the wisdom to confront? It reminds us that our society was only ever as stable as the illusions it was built upon.
Do you remember the fairy tale of prosperity? The one many choose to believe in order to avoid confronting our addiction to consumption, to hide from how we desperately extract and gorge anything and everything? We are never satiated, always fixated on the next shiny toy, men in suits wander the streets itching their necks the next moaning “you got that next hit of progress?” The high lasts just long enough to distract us from how far we missed the mark. How far we are from what we could be. How simple it can be to have what we need. Here. Together.
Can you stay still enough to know that it’s not in your head, that the whole Earth really is quaking?
Can you feel this moment hanging in the ether? The fear surrounding us like an electric storm so constant we don’t notice. The despair that comes as we look into a night that seems more vast than our faith. The grief that runs deeper than the mind’s ability to comprehend, and challenges the heart’s ability to persevere. The loss so complete that we doubt that wholeness is possible and the emptiness churns in our stomachs. The panic as we struggle to accept the inescapable. Are you here with me? In all the dimensions, seen and unseen?
Stay still my beloved. Hold my hands while we feel the Earth quake, the friction rumble, the fissures explode, and the buildings crumble. Meet me at the fault line. Come close so we can whisper in each others ears “This is how mountains are made. This is how mountains are made.”
There are plenty of us that have been living here for generations; watching the birth of peaceful valleys, inspiring peaks, and majestic canyons. Join us. Love this earthquake while we ride the rifts up into the mountains to get a view of something that more beautiful than our conditioned minds can believe is possible. Come close and be still. Hold each just tight enough. Breathe deep. Love with a reckless abandon and know that the mountain is coming.
I’ve been there. To the mountian. Anyone can go there because time winds in spirals and the future already lives in the hearts of the people. Many have prayed their way to the mountain top. Our comrades have built stairways up mountain sides that most of us can not yet see. I have been listening. I have been watching. You can too. You can come to after the earthquake
Come to where the light and darkness dance creation to love’s heartbeat and stardust sparkles in the air and outlines all the people with halos and wings. Where ancestral wisdom guides hands back into the earth to give our collective mother the massage she so desperately deserves. Where hearts guide fingers to gratefully coax forth all that we need to live.
Where the skin of the people is so covered in the fertile soil of collective work that pigment becomes irrelevant. Where we still sing songs, tell stories, pray prayers, and dance dances that could have only been birthed by from unique cultures, histories, and people’s transcendence of suffering. Thousands of beams of light that we love for their color, honor for the history, and praise for their uniqueness arise from one source refracted through the prism of humanity into a rainbow of incomprehensible dimension.
I know you can already see it. Taste it. Listen, hear the song ringing through the air proclaiming our universal impulse to say yes to love, yes to connection, yes to sweet surrender to the holy and the true, even in the face of struggle many of us cannot comprehend. We can bow low in reverence to the powerful love that flows through each of us and sit at the feet to learn from those who know how to be a vessel for it. It is here. We can be it. Even while the Earth quakes. Especially while the Earth quakes.
I have been there. You have been there too. Do you remember? When you saw hearts guide bodies into service of each other, when we rested in wonder at the abundance and guided those fearfully fixated on imagined scarcity back into awareness of the love that is holding them.
Do you remember when there was no master or manager telling us what to do because we were all following an ineffable wisdom greater than any one of us? Do you remember when sharing our gifts freely and taking care of each other honestly felt so good we cannot believe it? When we sat at long tables savoring the universal love that infuses each morsel of food and nourishes so much more than our bodies?
Come with me to the mountain. Be brave. Look with your heart. See how we have made playgrounds from the rubble of fallen institutions that convinced us we need them to survive. See how there is no one in control because the One guides itself. There is no human hubris trying to dictate and dominate in order to hide its vulnerability now that we learned to recognize open wounds as portals for love’s ambrosia to enter; now that everything is a constant healing. See how souls of those who had no choice but to become soldiers are gently caressed back into the softness of a child’s smile. Those who they wounded rise strong, vibrant, and joyful. We all dance together. Tribes serve the divine that resides within each other. Our enterprises channel energy back into the people and the Earth so that it may be as strong and thriving for our children as it is for us.
Reparation. Restoration. Returning.
Tears and rain bring a fresh clarity. Mourning releases grief to bring a new day. Repentance builds trust and clears space in our heart for a new way. Courageous honesty rebuilds connection. Care is medicine for the caring. The line between the giver and receiver dissolves and all that remains is the gift.
Come my love. As you are my love. I need you here looking into my eyes as the earth quakes so we can have the faith to ride it up to the mountain.