When the Earth shook

We have all been hearing and seeing the reports of the biggest earthquake in a hundred years in Turkey and Syria. We have heard stories of how birds were very disturbed the evening before in the area, but no human listened to their distress. We have seen videos of buildings collapsing onto themselves taking all their sleeping victims with them into heaps of rubble. We have seen the rescue teams desperately trying to help survivors before they became victims of the cold and of hunger and thirst.

But it was not until I heard an eyewitness account of a friend who was in Gaziantep that night that I could truly visualize what happened. She was in an earthquake compliant hotel, and still the paintings on the wall swung around and around, every part of the hotel was shaking as they walked down to the lobby in their pajamas and saw the devastation around them. She said the earth felt like it was waves of the ocean, and she will never again take the solid earth for granted. She wants to kiss the solid earth now wherever she goes. This reminded me of what I used to say: that I want to kiss the ground here in New Jersey where I feel safe from human destruction, such as bombings as in Palestine or Syria or Ukraine, or gangs as in South America, and even natural destruction as in other parts of US.

In that moment she recounted that you forget and you just are numb with shock, no thoughts, no words. You don’t even beg or plead with God for your life. You are just a witness to the awe of the Universe. The earthquake lasted two minutes but felt like eternity…