EARTH SHAKING
I first experienced an earthquake standing in my quonset-hut-like house in California. There was suddenly a loss of the total balance, a subsidence of the ground beneath my feet, a rapid hard trembling of everything in every direction. It felt as though the world around me had dived into a swoon. And then it was over.
Californians become familiar and accustomed to these little earthquakes. Down deep below, a geologic fault line runs the length of the state and beyond. The huge tectonic plates that form the earth’s crust, like a scab over a molten pustule, rub against each other, one creeping along the other. Occasionally—but in California rather often—that creeping results in little earth tremors. Such creeping tends to release the stress that, unabated, could culminate in a major earthquake.
We live on a ball whose core is as hot as the surface of the sun. Around that inner core is the outer core, also hot and actually liquid. Above that is the mantle, very warm, with the consistency of caramel. The next outer layer is the crust which includes the tectonic plates that slide over that caramel layer.
We who live on the surface of that crust, blanketed by oceans and land. All living things dance out their lives on that surface. And we are subject to the slowly teeming non-life of the layers beneath us.
But our dance of life is not without its tremblings. We are creatures that emanate ultimately from that very earth with its superhot core, its molten hot mantle, its rocky crust with ill-fitted tectonics, its churnings and upheavals—its volcanoes—and, also, its interactions with the water and air held to it by its mass-generated gravity. From this earth emerged a calescence of particulate inanimate material that initiated the immense chain of evolutionary processes from which all life forms emerged, each with the properties that define life: reproduction, nurturance, survivorship.
Movement becomes a necessity for all these principles. And movement carries, succinctly and derivatively, the movement that has forever characterized the planet, even to its daily rotation and its annual orbit.
Trembling is a derivative, as is life itself, from our moving earth. Indeed, all movement has literally evolved from our spinning, rotating, orbiting, churning planet. Our walk is a cascade of tightly organized repetitive movements. A purposeful trembling.
We shiver when caught by cold air or seized by a frisson of fear: we tremble. We experience heart tremors from love and grief. When we learn to swim we turn a drowning person’s flailing into an amphibian’s cascading movements. Bicycling and running are still other other trembles.
Then there are the trembling pathologies, Parkinson’s disease being foremost. Or the trembling that untuned muscles fall into when over stressed or taxed with fine precision movements that refuse to stay smooth and graceful.
We tremble at life’s most difficult, most challenging, most precarious moments. At such times, among so many others, that the earth returns to us. The grand scheme of movements, planetary, even galactically, is infused in us. Trembling is at its core.
On that deep base we dance out our ever revolving, evolving life.
