Quakes n' 'Clipses

WHO KNEW THAT ONE OF MOTHER NATURE’S SPECIAL SIDE HUSTLES IS DISLODGING US FROM SELF-SEPARATION?

Photo by Jongsun Lee via Unsplash

I was lying on my back when the earth shook. No, this is not my attempt at “romance” fiction: I was in a movement class in NYC when the earthquake in NJ rattled a fair bit of the greater NYC metro area and beyond.

Having lived in L.A., I’m not exactly a stranger to earthquakes. Thankfully though, my memories of the ones I’ve experienced are benign. The earthquakes themselves were unmistakable, to be sure, but there had been no significant damage afterwards and Angelinos hardly had anything to say about them either.

Not quite the same can be said about this recent quake on the east coast. A week later, we were still talking about it. “Where were you?” “Did you feel it?” “Did you hear it?” Regardless of whether the answer was “yes” or “no,” the conversation felt like we were bonding through shared experience.

Where was I that recent and fateful Friday? As I said, I was lying on my back, in a special conditioning class geared for dancers. Gyrotonics and Pilates apparatuses, among other equipment, were scattered about the studio. My legs were hooked up to cables (not the electric kind) and I concentrated on maintaining my alignment as I moved my legs up, down, around, etc. My focus inward, I was more in touch with sensing myself maintaining steadiness as my legs moved through space than sensing that the space was moving around me. There were several others in the studio with me, in the midst of their own movement moment.

“Did you feel that?”

“What waaaaass that?”

“It’s probably the Kundalini yoga class upstairs. They do jumping exercises sometimes and they shake the building.”

We all chuckled. Twenty minutes later, I left class and was met by several text messages from different parts of the country asking me if I was ok, given the earthquake. 

Clearly, we hadn’t been jostled by the exuberance of Kundalini yoga, after all.

The interactions I had over the next few days nearly always came around to the quake.

“How much did you feel?”

“What did you think it was? I thought it was [insert own crazy hypothesis].”

People were relaxed about the event and interested in each other’s experience. There was a lightheartedness about the topic, almost as if the quaking had cracked open the invisible walls of self-preservation with which city-dwellers tend to surround ourselves in order to live (with less danger and overwhelm) in a crowded, concrete jungle.  Sharing experiences and connecting over the earthquake was easy, even after we understood the source of the rumbling and shaking was the highest seismic activity NYC has seen in about 140 years. We felt lucky and wasted no time adopting the event into our litany of city living. We regarded the quake as a quintessential urban character, like the radically noisy neighbor or, say, a genus of jumping yogis.

The weekend passed without much more than some expected aftershocks and Monday dawned. It was the day of the much-anticipated Solar Eclipse. I kept running into the same batch of ladies, who like me, stole out of work for 30 minutes to track down eclipse glasses, which we hadn’t managed to get our hands on earlier. After coming up empty a half dozen places later, I went back to my apartment, printed out a DIY eclipse viewer from Warby Parker (who deserves figurative props for their literal one), crossed my fingers and went down to the corner to find a good spot for not looking directly at the sun.

Seeing so many people gathered on the sidewalks, all in anticipation, was indescribable. People from offices, residences, restaurants…everyone stood alongside each other, sharing in excitement, curiosity, and desire to see something extraordinary. Something for which their screens could not do justice. We all chatted about our viewing apparatus, or lack thereof, and kept tracking the time and movements for each other. It is a solitary act to look through a pair of lenses. Many of us did not have glasses, and as peak time approached, I wondered what would happen.

As the eclipse progressed, people looked up in awe… and then those with proper viewing glasses shared their glasses with someone who didn’t have any. People asked total strangers if they could borrow to peek, and glasses were freely lent. I benefitted from two well-equipped individuals, one a retiree resident and the other worked in was part of the staff of another building nearby. We took turns looking through their special lenses and marveled. It was joyous. The community of that corner— it personified city life at its best. In between moments of witnessing Nature dazzling us, I looked around, taking in our corner and the other corners of our intersection. I don’t know which sight uplifted and inspired me more: the movement in the sky, or the peaceful crowd standing still and looking up at that sky in unison. Something about coming together to turn our gaze upward… there is a power in that which feels brighter than anything that can block the sun.

Now, if we can just remember that even when we are in between celestial events and other natural phenomena…