African Violet
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Sunday morning, the thirteenth day of March, 2011, a calm, sunny morning here on the Cape and Islands, a far cry from the devastation in Japan at this hour. The African Violet you see in the image above is for the people of Japan and the loved ones who lost their lives to the violence that is sometimes offered up by nature and her powerful arsenal of weapons that occasionally make life on this little planet hard to cope with, as evidenced by this massive 8.9 quake, Japan’s largest and the fifth largest recorded since seismic activity first started to be recorded, at the onset of the twentieth century. Our thoughts and prayers from Cape Cod and the Islands are with the people of Sendai, as well as all of the Japanese people this morning, as there is little we can do from this vantage point other than that, although we wish we could do more… Search and rescue teams from the U.K., Italy, China, the United States, among others, have descended upon the area to access and get to work rescuing anyone they may find in the devastation, as the death toll continues to rise at this 7 a.m. hour on the east coast of the United States. Again, our thoughts and prayers are with them ALL. I lived in California for a good part of my life, going to high school in Los Gatos, a town 50 miles south of San Francisco. Before that, when I was only 12 or 13, we lived north of that city in a town called Petaluma and I, like many I’m sure, have always been in great fear of nature’s most unpredictable fury–the earthquake. Every morning my father would wake and take a bus from Petaluma to San Francisco to work at his job. I will always remember watching him walk to the bus, down the hill from our home in Petaluma, to the bus station that would take him into the city, wondering if I would ever see him again. For the fear that arose when learning about earthquakes at that young age of 12, and the fact that northern and southern California were both due for “the big one”, 300 years past due, was always present, and irrational as it may have been, I asked God himself to take me before he took my father. Of course, that is not up to me personally, and the “big one” never came, however, it has always been in the back of my mind, as I have traveled the “Ring of Fire”, a horseshoe like 40,000 kilometer ring around the Pacific Ocean, chalk full of Volcanoes and tectonic plates that shift from time to time, and when they do, and we have, seeing what the world witnessed yesterday, a major shifting of the ground, we see violent movement that is capable of taking down a skyscraper, a bridge, or, as we saw in Sendai, an entire city. The Tsunami, a Japanese word that literally means “harbor wave” in Japanese, that was created by this tectonic shift called an earthquake, created a wall of water that was 10 meters high, and if you were able to see the footage on just about every television station around the world, you will have seen the utter destruction one of these ‘harbor waves’ can cause, picking up ocean liners, trains, cars, trucks, buildings, not to mention people, animals and plants, and tossing them as if they were merely children’s toys, scattering them like so many leaves in the wind. Both the southern San Andreas fault line, the meeting of the two “American” tectonic plates, with the major focus on the “pacific plate” in southern California, and the area from San Francisco all the way up the coast to Vancouver, British Columbia, is overdue for a “big one” of it’s own, 300 years overdue, and thus, we are all watching this epic disaster and wondering, “are we really ready for a quake of this magnitude?” I hope some responsible people in Washington D.C. are assessing that question with some degree of intelligence right NOW. For more on today’s events in Japan, I will be tuning into my favorite “Sunday morning talk show”, “This Week, with Christiane Amanpour”, on ABC, who will be LIVE in Japan at 9 a.m., EST, and I wish you and yours a very safe and warm Sunday morning, along with the people of Japan, whom I pray find peace and some degree of GOD’S LOVE coming out of all of this turmoil, we are all with you in the GREAT SPIRIT. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
