Cultural Energy News Flash

Update 10 pm Mar 2: Pat McCabe reports on Facebook: "Lyla June may be getting evac-ed out of beautiful but bouncin' Chile 2-morrow!!! Stay tuned!!"

Update 11:40 pm Feb 28: Pat McCabe reports on Facebook that she spoke to hear daughter Lyla Johnston this morning: "Thank you God - She's in the hospital at last - thank you God again - and being taken care of. She's pretty banged up. She has two fractures in her pelvis and three fractured vertebrae but she was in great spirits and wants to finish her term. Thanks everyone for loving and thinking about my daughter. Keep sending her healing vibes and safety for the rest of her stay and her trip home."

Report by Lyla Johnston in Santiago, Chile from Facebook

Life is Very Short: Chilean Earth Quake 8.8-February 27, 2010

Feb 27, 2010 at 6:10 Feb 27, pm

"i get it now! you just need a heart a brain and courage! thanks dorothy! (and of course those are all obtained through belief that you have them). Now I just need to get back home."

one last line for my face book addiction and I laid myself down.

Yesterday my father told me that he was no longer scared for his daughter since I escaped the San Andreas fault that Stanford stands on. I thought to myself, but didn't say, that i was actually living on a more active fault line now.

Yesterday I was riding the subway, wondering why of all of god's creatures, it was those silly monkeys who received a brain enlargement, and what have we done with it...Then a man stepped before me with a tattoo of a man evolving into a monkey. His shirt said sex and death. I took it as a sign, and followed him since he was getting off at the same stop. He walked up and down stairs, looped around, not seeming like he had any particular destination. I lost him in a crowd and found myself in front of the tarot man at estación Los Leones. So I sat down and told him about the machine these monkeys have made and how i couldn't figure out how to dismantle it. He told me the Earth knows when there are too many of us and that she will clean herself off with earthquakes and tsunamis and the like, when she needs to. I felt inside me she was going to do this soon.

I bought too history books by José Bengoa and sat down to read them last night. The history of the Mapuche native society in Chile begins with a grand catastrophe, terremotos, marremotos, tsunamis that forces them up into the hills. those that did not make it turned into fish.

I knew something was going to happen. Of course, I didn't act on it or stow myself away in a bomb shelter, I just laid my head down and began to go to sleep in my 20 story apartment complex...And sure enough, the bed began to shake. I jumped up and ran out of the room. My host-mother let out a scream. I decided I should go out on the balcony that it might be safer. But there were 17 more concrete balconies above ours so that seemed like a bad idea. I ran back in and yelled for my host-family. Meanwhile the shaking began to get more powerful, i could tell it was a big one. I ran back to the balcony and looked over the edge. Pretty Far Drop From the Third Floor. The whole damn city was shaking though. I climbed on the ledge. The street lights were bursting. Car alarms were sounding. I looked up at my building and it was just swaying away, it was about to fall. On the rumbling ledge I wondered, is it better to jump all that ways (40 feet) or get my face squished under this damn building. A long ways down... It was like my falling dreams made real. Better safe than dead though, i always say. and I jumped.

I don't remember what it was like falling. But I sure as hell remember what it was like hitting the ground. It hurt about 250 times more than I was expecting it too. I cried out in anguish, still too close to the shuttering building. I writhed away from it rolling side over side. I wasn't quite sure what had happened, but for a few moment I was convinced I had broken my back. I rolled as far as I could until I hit the property gate. I though about squeezing under to get even further, but the rumbling stopped. There I lay in anguish, with the still ground under my body. 'Tents, from now on,' I thought.

A couple other disturbing thoughts crossed my mind. One was, "God Darn, the building didn't even fall! I just destroyed myself for no reason!" and another, far worse than wishing a building had fallen, was "I need to update my facebook status." Absolutely sickening. The guard came to me and asked if I was okay. I said yes. He left to fix a water pipe breakage.

I went to the hospital and laid around in pain with a good number of others in a similar condition. Turns out I have a dislocated hip. That's my own diagnosis, as the doctors didn't really do anything but hook me up to an IV and then tell me to go home.

Mortality really smacked me in the face today. While I looked across to another woman in a stretcher, a Beatles song climbed up inside me and flew out of my mouth: 'Life is very short, and there's no time, for fussing and fighting, my friend.' It is true. The death count is rising and sooooo many more have been injured like I have or worse. With such a fragile and short life why would we spend it in this lonely greed that has hijacked our world economy, politics and society. Thanks everyone for your concern, and remember to love your brothers and sisters. It feels so damn good to love and be loved and you don't have much more time to do it.