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Jiggling Earth

We lose perspective about the earth, living on it.
When first we sent astronauts into space, they and we
were entranced at seeing our everyday from far away.

A couple of years ago, I rented a big roto-tiller to loosen a part of the yard for flowers.  It nearly killed me, seizing at the soil, and leaping forward like a mad bull.  It almost threw me over the machine.  It did skin my arm.

But the earth, even at its stoniest, is a trembling thing.  The rocks bend at the edges of the tectonic plates like bacon, slipping down and sliding up, shaking.

A geologist said that we can best imagine the consistency
of earth if we think of it as a very large ball of jello.
It heaves, and shakes, and trembles, and slides.

Another large earthquake just occurred near Japan,
not as dramatic as the huge one, recently, but big.
A couple of hundred years ago, a big earthquake
occurred in mid-America, causing the Mississippi River
to re-route, and even to run backwards for a while.

We are like the small birds at one of our feeders:
too small and light to trip the mechanism, thinking
little about how small we are, how plastic is stone.
.

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