Richter

Written January 14, 2011

Photo credit: Hans Isaacson

0 – 4.9. Micro, minor, light. Not really felt, and if felt, rarely causes significant damage. Up to eight thousand in a day…

Some are so small, it’s like they never happened. There’s a tiny tremor, and then a slight shudder. Not much in the way of evidence, really. Only a photo frame that needs to be set upright. Maybe a strange dream that someone was shaking the bed. No one even thinks it’s worth mentioning. We just wake up in the morning, or come home from work, or climb the stairs from the basement after sorting the laundry. Life goes on, more or less unperturbed.

6 – 6.9. Strong, major, great. Can cause devastation in areas several thousand miles across. Averages once every few years…

Some are so enormous, they split towers. The earth opens wide, exposing entrails that aren’t really meant to be observed by anyone, and bodies fall in. Things disintegrate to their fundamental elements. We are tired, injured, and in shock. But our immediate need for shelter and sustenance doesn’t allow us to contemplate our loss for too long. To do the work with cheerfulness would be asking a hell of a lot. But for those of us who live, everyone agrees on the protocol for what needs to happen next.

We
clear debris,
dig and pour foundations,
build newer, better designed structures
and reinforce,
(reinforce!),
(reinforce!!)

Breaking news of the incident snakes through homes at dinner time like ticker tape, stimulating an onslaught of sympathy and generosity. Fundraisers are organized. School children participate in letter writing campaigns. Celebrities lend manicured hands to The Cause. Despite the hardship, there is a pervasive aura of excitement over the prospect of doing things differently. We’ll do it better this time! It is always a labour of love and hope. A lesson in neighbourliness and solidarity. The blind instinct to rebuild after having lost everything is as powerful as the drive to breathe.

(10.0. Epic. Has never been officially recorded.

Apparently, they’re extremely rare, unknown even. But I’m pretty sure I’ve known one or two in my time.)

5.0 – 5.9. ???

It’s much harder to know what you’re supposed to do with partially standing structures. A beautiful staircase leading only to empty sky. The low stone wall encircling a deep pit from where a garden was violently torn. Destroying them feels so wasteful. Using them feels so unsafe. We peer at the still recognizable evidence of our lives and try to imagine happiness without them. We fight the urge to cradle them back to life and risk being cut by the sharp, fragile barnacles of nostalgia that still encrust them. We refer back to the years of math lessons telling us unequivocally that

something (is at least) > nothing.

Taking that first swing is the hardest work we will ever do. It is the loneliest work we will ever know. People can only watch from a safe distance and speculate that we probably should have built better homes in the first place. We take wrecking ball to stone and saw to bone, turning the traces of our former home steadily to dust while others continue building extensions and gazebos, and we wonder about our sanity. But when the dust has finally settled, we survey the vastness of space we have just cleared around us. And there is a glorious, exhilarating lightness that comes from coming completely undone, untethered from the structures we have spent our entire existence clinging to. There is great beauty in the breakdown, so much power in our pieces. From all that we thought we had emerges all that we truly have. The courage to let go, the work and the solitude, they are so critical to our revelation that, against all logic,

nothing (in point of fact) = everything.