[non-channeled]

Like many people whose eyes, ears, and fingertips are connected by the vast Interwebs, I heard the news of yesterday’s devastating Haiti earthquake via Twitter.

7.0. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge.

And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due to damaged water systems, lack of food and shelter, could raise the figure precipitously.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about this. What I feel.

In 2001, when we all saw surreal footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings that had become part of an iconic skyline, I felt something. That night I lay in bed and imagined helping herald 2000 confused souls into a warm light-filled embrace, and helping tens of thousands more through those first days of shock and outrage. In the days that followed, it became easy. All that shock and outrage got funneled into hating someone and something that someone else decided we should be hating anyway.

That’s how wars start.

But how do you hate an earthquake?

We can’t hate the earth, because it’s our home. It sustains us.

Less than two weeks ago I channeled information about people — many people — choosing to exit their earthly lives this year. In working with this kind of information, I try to remain a little distant and not feel the pain and grief associated with such an eventuality. When just one person dies, many grieve. I’ve protected myself from feeling that on a grand scale. My fear is that I’d be overwhelmed by the immensity of such pain on that large a scale. Many people transitioning? There are 7 billion or so on the planet now. A few thousand here or there doesn’t make much difference overall. Many people would have to be … many.

People.

100,000 beautiful, alive, loving people in Haiti died yesterday, ending lives that had love and pain and laughter and tears. And it wasn’t an ethereal Rapture, where they simply got lifted up into some alternate reality. No, a good many of these people likely died in pain. That’s twice as many people as live in the small city that is my home, and it’s pain that I am afraid to feel.

What is compassion?

I think about Haiti, just as I thought about the Christmas tsunami a few years ago. I hear a big ’should’ in my head. I should be feeling this, because I can. It’s my job, my livelihood, to tap into a global consciousness, or into the energy body of a single person. To me, it’s all the same.

And yet, I don’t.

Last night I approached a woman, older than me, who I knew had been having some physical issues. I asked how she was. I could see how she was, could see where there were energy blockages. I asked her permission to touch her, and I briefly touched points on her shoulders and down her back. I asked about her feet because I could feel immense pain there. I wept, not from the pain but from the sense of it.

I can feel pain without feeling it. Strange, that.

And yet I don’t go to Haiti. This makes me smaller somehow, less human, I fear.

Last night I also wrote a column in which I cried about some of my fears. Fears of my own fragility. In the light of the new day I can see that this was, in some way, an expression of my response to Haiti. I know we all process everything that comes into our being — from near or far, it’s all the same — through our personal perception lenses. That’s not being selfish, it’s being human. We can’t help it. So I transferred the cries of tens of thousands of throats into one cry from a single throat, crying, “Who will help me when I have need?”

I could rationalize that just as children are better off when you let them make their own lives and their own mistakes, that I should keep my virtual hands of Haiti and let things transpire there as they will. I am not Atlas and I cannot hold the world on my shoulders. I have trouble some days with my own piece of the world.

At the risk of sounding trite, or incomplete, I can love. In the end, that’s all any of us can do. For some, love will be a $10 donation to the Red Cross. For others, it’s being airlifted along with dogs and rescue teams to pull people out from under buildings. For still others, it’s prayer. And for others, it’s a blink in the daily crush of living. Who am I to determine which facet of love has more merit?

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Why Haiti???
written by RonV, January 13, 2010

When the news of Haiti was first reported, the comment that stuck in my head was that Haiti was the "worst possible" place for this to happen. It is a profoundly poor place that has experienced one tragedy or disaster after another. In other words, it's kind of the pain pinnacle of the hemisphere. In one video, as the immense cloud of dust unfolded across the ground, a woman was heard screaming that "the world was ending", and for many it was. But in her face, I could see that if her larger Self was a willing participant in this, her character was not. The pain and the tears are as real as it gets.

Nevertheless, that causes me to wonder why the pain is focussed there like that, on one spot of the planet? (It's not the only spot, of course.) And then I realize that whole matter may just be larger than my vision, and my compassion may not be needed nor even wanted. Again, just a nagging feeling that this picture is bigger than I can see. Why IS Haiti so different than say, Germany? Or New Zealand so different than Rwanda?

RV

about ritcher magnitude
written by mike, January 13, 2010

each full point in ritcher magnitude is 30 times more energy let loose, not 10. Long story but the thing is logrithmic actually
anyway 5 to 7 on the scale is 900 times more energy. Take 7 to the Indonesian tsunami quake and that is 900 times what a 7 is, or 810,000 times more energy

THis was bad because of how close to the island it was and they didn't have any modern buildings, look for rebar in the rubble, it isn't there that I have seen. That caused all the collapses.

Founder
written by Anne K. Hudec, January 14, 2010

Whenever there is a disaster we tend to ask, "Why this, dear God?" Well, hopefully we do have an inkling of why. There is no doubt that the Earth changes, as they have been called, are accelerating and will continue to accelerate. Many different possibilities of enrgy shifts are now possible on the planet. We need to understand that the Earth is a spiritual force. As a spiritual force, Gaia wants to keep the biosphere balanced.
A new spiritual technology for the Eart, called biorelativity, has come to this ploanet now. This spiritual technology can be developed to maintain the biosphere. We need to lift our thinking to ask what is happening in the omniverse. I will check out www.groupofforty.com

Haiti
written by lovingawareness, January 14, 2010

(Mike, in the Richter scale one point increase means 10 times the shaking, but 30 times the energy released. So you're both right.)

Ron, I can't help but compare the earth's movements to my own, as anthropomorphic as that is. When I flail about violently, there's definitely heavy emotions involved. So it seems sort of natural that such a powerful release happens in a place with such inequities, intense emotions and repressions. I feel both compassion (and the desire to help) as well as an appreciation of the sheer beauty of the earth. We're so intertwined with it. One can hope that this movement of the earth will bring more worldwide focus to Haiti in a way that helps, as opposed to the invasion a few years ago.

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