A Swiftly Tilting Planet

I woke up to today's big news of the earthquake on the Nazca plate (in southern Chile). Not clear how much of a mess it made and how much life is lost, because it was in the overnight hours and communications go down during events of this magnitude. It's one for the books, an 8.8 er with a really long - people are saying 90 seconds - release of energy to the surface. 90 seconds of the earth roiling and bouncing under you must seem like an eternity. I hope the damage is not too extreme. I always have mixed feelings about these kinds of events, my fascination and my compassion warring for attention. I love watching our restless planet from a safe distance and I'm every bit a nerd, following the science "gossip" as geologists parse out more knowledge and understanding after a quake. The Nazca plate has a planetary counterpart in the Cascadian plate off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. That plate is frozen with very little quake activity on it; which generally means that it's due for a big release of all the energy and stress that's been building unrelieved for the past hundreds of years. I worry about that. When it goes, that could be a apocalyptic event for that part of the nation, but will have an impact on us, probably beyond my ability to imagine. And I'm also concerned about the human implications of the current quake - for the people I don't know, the Chilean citizens and the people of Haiti too, whose ongoing plight may very well be eclipsed by this latest disaster. I worry on a personal level as well - there's a tsunami warning up for the entire Pacific and Sarah is off in the archipelago of Malaysia - away from her Hanoi home and out of touch with her New England home. I can't do anything about that, of course, only breathe and believe that all will be, and all manner of things will be and all will be well and all manner of things will be well. All will be well. My prayer - with a nod to Julian of Norwich - for Sarah, for the people of Chile, for the people of Haiti and for us all.