A few years ago, now a little over ten years ago, while I was still a student, I had to undergo an emergency surgery.

Surgical intervention, urgently, because only the surgical option was at that moment still possible, to treat and stem, and...

Because “Mademoiselle”, Miss, had waited too long, and it was now necessary to intervene quickly and so.

A surgical intervention, which nevertheless remained, considering the scope of the possible, a relative surgical intervention in itself.

A surgical intervention however, which required and required a general anesthesia.

I still remember, and among other things, the surgeon, who just before the anesthetist started counting to me to 5, for you know... making me falling asleep deeply. Well the surgeon … I also remember and I believe, that, with sincere benevolence and emotion, said to me, that if I had been his daughter, he would not have forgiven me, for having like landed  and arrived alone in the emergency service, and by walking moreover (I believe that it had particularly driven him crazy), to have held on so long, and to have gone before too, the rest of the day, to that damn philosophy exam, to dissertate for hours, while I had and was suffering on the other side and at the same time physically, very silently moreover, but much less silently and much more hastily in my body however and in that same period of hours, ...

From now on, there was no more choice, to stem the evil: the surgical intervention was necessary, and with, in this case, a general anesthesia.

1… 2 3 4 5 …

Temporal ellipsis.

In the early stages of my awakening, I remember that the very first sentence I said was:

"I can not breathe. … I can not breathe."

They explained to me that it was normal, the stretcher bearers I remember. They told me and they explained to me that I was waking up from a general anesthesia.

Then, one of the first things I was taught beyond my condition was that...

The Earth had shaken. The Earth shook.

“Mademoiselle, Miss, during the time and the night, when you were asleep, … the Earth shook.”

We were in March 2011, and a few hours before, had taken place, the seismic, tsunami and nuclear disaster of Fukushima, in Japan.

I was dumbfounded. D u m b f o u n d e d …

A seismic fault and a time fault. An emotional flow too.

The Earth had shaken. The Earth shook.

Dumbfounded.

In many ways.

Dumbfounded probably and in fact, from waking up from a general anesthesia, but also and with it: waking up and also already feeling the first reconnections to my body and its pain, including surgical pains, and then, for a few more weeks, pain and healing treatments.

But … immediately, in the present instant,  and beyond all that, I was undoubtedly dumbfounded, and even more, … otherwise.

Dumbfounded.

Dumbfounded by a reconnection to the world. Dumbfounded by  a return to life, to Life, to lives, to the world, to the pulsations of our very Earth.

And this one... The Earth... The Earth had shaken.

Epicenter and drama in Japan, Land of the Rising Sun, along the Pacific coast of Tohoku.

An earthquake of magnitude 9.1 Mw and a maximum intensity of 7, on the Shindo scale.

And as certain archives still remind us, if the main and most destructive earthquake took place on March 11, 2011, it was however from March 9 that the earth had begun (slyly) to shake in the region.

Other and parallel temporal ellipse.
And, once again, and the whole mixed up: seismic fault and temporal fault.

I was all the more disturbed, in and of this reconnection to the world, reconnection also to its temporality and its temporalities, beyond, my temporality and mine temporalities, somewhat suspended, in particular for a few hours, due to the fact, literally and clinically, of a condition and a state, … of having been, between two worlds, into an in-between, of having been between life and death.

And yet, it was nothing.

Perhaps still dumbfounded, perhaps somewhat weakened.

Already also, as yesterday as today in and through Life, always a bit between a here and an elsewhere and other elsewhere, ... I was, me,  very much alive.

Alive and in the process of reconnecting to the world, including its news, events, moments, facts, connections, and resonances, among others.

In what it can be the most beautiful, but also the most dramatic.

I will never forget, I believe and at least, I think, among other things: that experience, those memories, that chronology and in particular, that sentence that was said to me, then that I said to myself, repeated, and which still continues to come back to me so often and in certain circumstances even more:
“The Earth shook.”

The Earth shook.

Friendly Yours,
Pina