I’ve been struggling with insomnia the past 10 days, so I am awake at odd hours. My sleep pattern is in total disarray, not to mention that my mind wanders to places I never knew existed. Needless to say, parallel dimensions are very real to me, especially when I begin conversations with animals. So when I actually do succumb to sleep, it is a welcome defeat to a long and arduous battle. It sounds awfully dramatic, I know, but this is the state of mind I was in when the earthquake struck at 05:11 with a 5.4 intensity on the Richter scale. It was an earthquake that affected Portugal, Spain and Morocco.
I am no stranger to earthquakes, having experienced them in Mexico and the Philippines but it has been decades since the last one. Something jolted me awake one minute before the earthquake struck and I cannot pinpoint what it was, so I’ll chalk it up to hypersensitive premonition or something completely different. Be it as it may, I was wide awake when the house began to shake and I knew it was not a dream nor my overactive imagination. Definitely not the way I imagined my Monday morning to begin.
Once the wave had passed I lay still in bed waiting for the aftershocks. According to the Instituto Português do Mare e da Atmosfera (IPMA), there were two registered aftershocks but the intensities were too low on the Richter scale to be felt. Portugal is prone to offshore seismic events due to its proximity to the African and North-American tectonic plates, or to be more precise, the Eurasian and Nubian plates, something that never really interested me until today. In a similar manner, it never occurred to me how vulnerable Portugal is to Tsunamis, given its geographic location on the Atlantic coast. The IPMA issues a tsunami warning only if the incident is above a 6 on the Richter scale, so we are out of danger at the moment.
Being too stunned to go back to sleep after the earthquake, I began to correlate the incident to our psychological need to undergo an emotional earthquake in our life from time to time. How often do we get stuck in a hamster’s wheel going round and round with no particular purpose? Or why do we keep sliding back into a a situation that we know is detrimental to our growth and progress? For some it takes hitting the bottom of the barrel to galvanise them into action but for others it takes a metaphorical earthquake to remind them that they are still alive and have so much to live for. These random thoughts continued until the dawn broke and I watched the changing of the light guards, as night handed over the skies to daylight. The day began.
Today’s blog entry on The Esoteric Frog: Feng Shui Tips: Peace Lily for the Bedroom
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