This morning a little after 5:30, a 5.2 magnitude earthquake rattled many Midwesterners out of bed…not literally, but it did surprise and jangle a few nerves.
It was time for us to get up and we were awake, just not out of bed yet. Around 5:30 we heard some sounds which we couldn’t identify–I thought it sounded like our house sounds sometimes when the temperature changes, and things crack and creak; Michael thought it sounded like plaster cracking. We checked around to see if anything was amiss. Finding nothing so, we might have written it all off as a fluke or a product of morning brain fog (odd, though, that we should have the same fog) had I not turned the radio on to catch the news.
The call-in lines were abuzz with people telling what they had experienced a few minutes earlier. It didn’t take long to surmise that we’d experienced an earthquake. It was confirmed shortly thereafter by the experts who monitor such things.
I’ve just been listening to the afternoon news and people are still talking about it.
I wonder: What if I’d not turned on the radio or talked with anyone else about what we heard/experienced? If such a thing was even possible in this communication saturated culture, we may never have known our region had had an earthquake. It was the conversation in community that brought shape and understanding to the circumstance.
Life has its earthquakes. Some are quite obvious–you don’t need anyone to tell you when they’ve occurred. Then there are those deeper ripples in life, like this morning’s quake. They happen, we notice something a little different going on, but, without shared life, we may ignore the evidence and write it off as nothing significant.
The analogy breaks down here, but I’m thinking this: It may well be that sharing the “tremors” of my experience within community may help me avoid “the big one.”
