January 14, 2005

• Gaia and me

  I’m an earthy person, earthy in speech, in tastes, and inclinations.

  My natal chart is very heavily weighted in the Earth sign, Virgo. 
  There, I have the Sun; the planets Mercury and Jupiter; asteroids Ceres
  and Vesta, and the cometary planetoid Chiron, which New Age astrologers
  have determined is Virgo’s true ruler (rather than Mercury, which Virgo
  has traditionally shared with Gemini until Chiron’s discovery by
  astronomers in 1977).  Another Earth sign, Capricorn, houses my
  Eclipse Point, and Fortuna.

  I don’t know what, if anything, all that has to do with my intimate
  connection with the planet’s shifts and eruptions.  I mention it
  merely because when I think of the relationship between Gaia and me, that’s one of the things
  that comes to mind.

  I have been studying geology and bringing home rocks for as long as I
  can remember.  Also, as far back as I can remember I was
  fascinated with earthquakes and volcanos.   I recall my
  frustration in school when I sought information about these
  phenomena.  I learned words such as “magma”, but I found either
  acknowledged ignorance of the forces driving earthquakes and volcanos,
  or conflicting and superficial theories that didn’t really make sense
  in terms of explaining how mountains are thrust up or why magma flows
  to the surface where it does.

  Never during my school days did I find any mention of Alfred Wegener,
  continental drift, or plate tectonics.  Wegener died before I was
  born, but his theory was rejected by the entrenched “scientific”
  authorities of his time.  Then, through the 1950s and sixties,
  seafloor mapping and petroleum exploration revealed the presence of the
  mid-oceanic ridge and confirmed the existence of “seafloor spreading”,
  the creation of new crust where magma is brought up by convection and
  cooled by seawater.

  Finally, when I was an adult, the concept of plate tectonics became
  accepted by the academics and spread into the popular media, and I had
  that reasonable explanation I’d always wanted for the quakes and
  volcanos, and also for that tantalizing jigsaw-puzzle fit I’d noticed
  the first time I’d looked at a globe, between the Atlantic coastlines
  of Africa and South America.

  Long before then, however, I was attuned to the planet’s movements to
  an uncanny degree.  I can’t remember the last time a big quake or
  eruption caught me by surprise.  Some time in the 1970s, after
  having become familiar with my propensity to “expect” earthquakes, I
  noticed that the intuitive flashes that told me a big one was coming
  usually occurred about ten days before the event.  Sometimes it is
  just a thought.  That’s how it was with Mount St. Helens in
  1980.  I got a general impression of the approximate location, and
  that’s all.

  Sometimes I get more than that.  I hadn’t been back from my
  honeymoon very long in mid-1991 when I woke one morning with a strange
  word echoing in my head:  pinatubo.  It was a new word to me,
  so I looked it up.  My dictionary said it was a “mountain in the
  Phillipines.”  Hmmmm, I wondered.  I asked Greyfox if Mt.
  Pinatubo meant anything to him.  No.  About a week and a half
  later anyone who paid attention to the news had heard of Pinatubo.

  Other times, what I get is a physical sensation.  A few times I’ve been
  jolted so hard I nearly fell down.  I’d say to the family, “Did
  you FEEL that!?!” and they’d look blank and say, “What?”  And then
  a week and a half later, there’d be a big one in the news. 

  Those big, apparently “psychic” or prescient sensations of big temblors distant in both time and
  space are one thing.  My hyperacute awareness of smaller shakes in
  the near vicinity is something else.  I got the impulse to write this now because
  this evening I felt two earthquakes.  I was at the computer both
  times, and each time I went to the USGS website and checked the recenteqs
  list.  One was magnitude 3.5 in the Fox Islands way out in the
  Aleutian Chain.  The other was a 2.8 out in Cook Inlet.

  I felt them.  I know I felt them.  I looked at the clock and
  then went and looked up the time and location, checked the theoretical
  P-wave travel time, and it fit.  I didn’t file a felt-it report,
  though.  People are not supposed to feel such small quakes at such
  distances.  If I were to file a felt-it report for every shake I
  feel, they would either be ignored as the work of a crank or they’d
  skew someone’s calculations of the magnitudes.  I have a rule of
  thumb when it comes to filing felt-it reports.  Either someone
  else in the family has to feel it too, or the house has to rattle and
  creak or my plant hangers swing or something to indicate that it’s
  strong enough to be felt by a normal human being.

  What with “psychic” premonitions of earthquakes nearly knocking me out
  of my chair sometimes, and all the ways I’ve found to investigate and
  confirm the things I feel, or to get bulletins about ones I may or may
  not have “felt” beforehand, it has become impossible for me to separate
  the “psychic” part of my awareness from the intellectual.  I sorta
  think that’s a healthy thing.  Much better, I suppose, to have my
  whole mind in one place, so to speak.

  (image from NOAA)
  Since
  the December 26 Indonesian event, I’ve been trying to remember how and
  when I started expecting it.  For months I have been watching the
  Pacific Ring of Fire, wondering when all those moderate events were
  going to give way to a spectacular one.  Then the Macquarie Island
  quake hit on December 23 and I had a feeling there would soon be
  another big one, but no idea where.

  I had no noticeable physical sensation of either of those quakes, but
  neither of them caught me by surprise.   When I saw the first
  news stories of the big one, I had gone looking for them.  That
  was when the quake was being reported, before tsunami reports started
  coming in.  While (to judge by what I read in the blogs where it
  is mentioned) most people are focused on the human aspects of the
  story, I have been searching out the geophysical reports.

  When I ask myself why I’m more interested in things like this animation
  of the forces released in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas than
  I am in the socio-economic aftermath of the coastal flooding, the only
  explanation I find is that it is paying attention to such things as
  this and the tables listing the subsequent seismic events that might
  clue me to where and when the next one will hit.  That is what
  interests me.

  I’ve got a head full of bits and pieces, and I want to put them all together to see the whole picture.

  

  • 3:27 am
  • 6 Comments