How do you hold on as the world rumbles and rolls?

From the earth, in the form of quaking, comes the the planet’s visceral voice.

Pay attention!

Your mind, taught well, thinks safety, wonders whether to duck, cover, and hold on.

Doors and windows rattle, your heart, too.

The body remembers its aliveness.

Before you can decide to act, it’s all over.

Later, dusk arrives, and you step into it, looking down at your two feet still holding you up, carrying you forward.

As you walk, you watch for millipedes busy this time of year, wandering as they do, part random motion, part on a mission. Strange solo beings, they glide on many more legs too fine to see. Viewed as one scene, they look like tiny black ribbons flung in all directions.

Surprise, there in the shadow of Christmas lights are seven millipedes side-by-side, their segmented bodies pressed close, still and silent, something more than solidarity.

Your body floods with tenderness, knowing there are a thousand ways that love shows up. Why not millipede love? Or at least, mutual comfort or consoling?

The Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, translated, wrote, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

You kneel, not to kiss, but whisper, “Is this how you hold on, together, as the world rumbles and rolls?

There is no answer. Your voice asking, is the answer.

Yesterday an earthquake, 7.0.

It hit in the Pacific, off of our far north coast of California, what I think of as the West Coast’s elbow. Compared to the 6.4 in December, 2022, that shook books from my selves and broke pictures, it wasn’t as dramatic as it could have been. Hurray.

Later came the poem-like snippet above, added to my e-journal, using Bear app, which let’s me capture thoughts quickly The farther along in life I get, the shorter the half-life of my scribbles in physical journals. Writer’s block is not my problem. It’s so much wanting to be expressed, coming through me, that my hand can’t keep up—the language on the page looking more like Arabic than alphabet.

As for the quake, ironically, I was taking a late morning shower (a caregiver’s stolen moment) at the time the earth shook here, where three tectonic plates come together, and like yesterday, wrestle.

When the door started rattling, I thought it was my Tabby boy breaking into the bathroom. Living with bouts of vertigo and dizziness that come and go erratically, I just leaned into the hot water raining down on my back, eyes closed, and accepted the ride.

Floaty and warm and peaceful.

Until my husband, who can no longer move quickly or hear well, rolled open the pocket door, his breath and words worried and stressed and loud: “Are you okay? You okay? You okay?”

To which I shrieked, totally startled in my wet cocoon, before I understood what had just happened.

Turning off the shower, I replied, “Yes, Sweetpea, I’m okay.” Apparently he’d called out, but with the water spraying down on my crown, burbling over my ears, I hadn’t heard him.

“Are you okay? I asked.

“Yes, but it scared me. It scared me when I didn’t know where you were. I was alone and forgot you were here.”

He closed the door, and I listened to his now-familiar slow shuffle back out to the living room, his chair, and the telly with a tennis game, probably Carlos Alcaraz. I like to kid him with, “Enjoying your son Carlitos?” He emotionally adopts certain talented guys in the sports world. First was Tiger Woods, and these days Carlos and Jonathan Kuminga, among others. His own sons are either dead or lost, so I’m grateful he has these others to root for, to cry with when they score big.

I turned the shower back on to finish rinsing away the remaining soap. Mind and body had shifted perspective. My own little inner quake.

A sense of urgency took over to check on him further, to survey the house, to make sure all is safe and stable again. We all like that illusion, don’t we?

Then that little being within, whom I like to keep in the present, but can fly into the future, asked: Who will worry about you when he is gone?

Yes, there are a thousand, technically more than a million, ways that love shows up.

One is in real time. A husband navigating his end of life, rattled by an earthquake, feeling alone and wanting his wife, safe and near.

One is in memory time. A wife some years later, rattled by another earthquake, feeling alone and wanting her husband, safe and near, then buoyed by this moment, this memory held close and real. I see her, smiling.