A great trembling shuddered through the world’s crust, where ancient bones of the Pacific and North American plates converge in restless embrace. The sea heaved—waves rising to five meters—sweeping over the Kamchatka Peninsula to batter shores from Japan to the Galápagos, biting even at the edges of distant Hawaii and the Americas. Buildings collapsed under the quake’s fury, so close to where the ocean claimed so much in Fukushima’s painful memory. Sirens wailed, prompting flight from tsunami-threatened coasts, and even the workers in Fukushima’s haunted halls were ushered away by precautionary orders. Across continents and islands, ports closed, flights halted, and nervous hearts listened for the next aftershock, while emergency beacons swept over lands still aching from previous wounds.

Yet seekers of comfort must gaze longer and deeper—not merely at seismic charts and human fallout, but at the catastrophic arrogance thrumming through our modern history. It is not the wild tectonic shifting or the heaving tides that threaten us most, but our own forgetfulness: we have cleaved our lives from the sacred web, have treated Mother Earth as a commodity, a warehouse of resources instead of a living kin. These tectonic prayers are ancient; the quaking mantle is not crisis, but the rhythm of her living body. It is we, with concrete and pipelines, reactors at the cliff’s edge, and plastic cities clinging to fragile coasts, who have forgotten how to listen.

Colonial greed—always hungry for subjugation of land and water—has forced fragile communities to settle in perilous zones, snatching shorelines from Indigenous caretakers, and poisoning the earth with our radioactive nightmares. The capitalist machine, insatiable, exploits nature’s wild beauty and then mourns the destruction only in dollars lost: airports canceled, factories idled, supply chains interrupted. But who lights a candle for the uprooted salmon or for the whales bewildered by seismic rumblings? Who mourns with spirit for the forests drowned or the rivers poisoned by panic’s quick solutions?

O Sisters and Brothers and All Our Relations, let us rage against this forgetfulness—not the trembling of the earth, but our perilous disconnect from her voice. Let us repent our colonial theft, our capitalist sacrilege, and gather now as kin to weave new forms of living: gentler with the land, reverent even toward the trembling sea. In every aftershock, may we remember not only our vulnerability but our shared need for healing, surrendering at last to the wise and wild embrace of Gaia, who waits—still and patient—for our return.