Vachon Imagined

Mini earthquakes happen in our bodies all the time.

Someone compliments us. Earthquake.

Someone criticizes us. Earthquake.

Someone ignores us entirely after we’ve spent three days crafting the perfect text message. Earthquake.

Sometimes they are not even in the room, but memory is. Life is. A passing thought is. The ground is always shifting somewhere beneath us.

We have very little control over the happening itself. The tremor arrives before permission is granted. By the time the mind has convened a committee meeting to discuss whether we should be offended, we are already offended. The body has cast its vote.

The difficulty is that when we are deeply identified with what arises, we mistake pride for a person, anger for a self, fear for an identity. We say, “I am angry,” rather than “Anger is happening.” We say, “I am afraid,” rather than “Fear has entered the room and appears to have unpacked its luggage.”

Yet once someone begins to know who they are in peace, in salvation, in liberty—not achievements to be earned but gifts to be received—something changes. The earthquakes still come, but they no longer convince us that the entire continent is collapsing.

When I first moved to Northern Virginia, I was terrified of the traffic. If you’ve driven here, you know that every commute feels less like transportation and more like a group project where nobody communicated beforehand.

Truthfully, I still get that way.

People drive like drunken NASCAR drivers who are simultaneously late for a meeting, answering a text, solving a personal crisis, and auditioning for an action movie. Somehow I’m supposed to remain calm, collected, and spiritually enlightened while a pickup truck materializes three inches from my bumper at eighty miles an hour.

Fat chance.

The reality is that I experience mini earthquakes every day.

Someone becomes overbearing. Earthquake.

Someone offends me. Earthquake.

Someone practices a hypocrisy they are completely unwilling to see, and suddenly I’m experiencing seismic activity large enough to attract federal attention. That one has always been a big one for me.

The funny thing is that most of these earthquakes are invisible. No emergency broadcast system interrupts the day. No reporters show up. No one gathers around saying, “Did you feel that?” Yet internally, entire civilizations rise and fall before lunch.

What I have noticed, however, is that the explosions happen less frequently the more I allow them to pass through.

The more I stop treating every emotional tremor as breaking news.

The more I speak simply to speak, rather than to be agreed with.

The more I allow weather to be weather.

Because that is what much of life feels like now: weather moving across an open sky.

I cannot control the movement of the clouds.

I cannot stop the wind.

I cannot negotiate with a thunderstorm.

Believe me, I have tried. It turns out the universe is remarkably uninterested in my recommendations.

Life arrives.

Thought arrives.

Emotion arrives.

A memory from fifteen years ago arrives at 2:17 in the morning and suddenly wants to discuss something that was settled during the previous presidential administration.

Everything arrives.

But nothing stays.

I can influence the climate in which these things pass, even if I cannot prevent their arrival.

And perhaps that is a different kind of control altogether.

Not the control of domination, but the control of surrender.

Not the control of force, but the control of understanding.

The moment the earthquake is seen without becoming the earthquake.

The moment anger is allowed to move without appointing it king.

The moment fear is allowed to speak without handing it the microphone.

The same mind that built the monument is the same mind that can dismantle it. The same conditioning that constructed the prison can participate in its undoing. The same consciousness that became entangled can become free.

How beautiful.

How catastrophic.

Mini earthquakes do not come to bury us; they come to reveal what remains standing when everything false has fallen away.