The Achilles Heel of Cultural Hegemony
The Call of the Wild
Entrainment
As I tend the endangered plants beside the shed, a heavy rumble rolls in—deep and insistent — like a giant machine beneath my feet.
At first, confusion grips me. The sound swells, the earth trembles, and clarity dawns: an earthquake is arriving. The ground heaves in rolling waves.
I watch the footings lift and sink as the quake surges beneath, but what astonishes me most is how the tremors animate the columns from the foundation upward.
The columns lose their solidity, vibrating like tuning forks. From the exposed rebar, a strange, metallic rhythm pulses — a song of earth and steel.
In that moment, I had no inkling of the disclosures that would unfold in the aftermath.
By persisting and heeding the moment’s call, I received a gift from Pele — an environmental signal, a kind of Zeitgeber, a regulator of nature’s timing. In chronobiology, entrainment means a signal that resets or synchronizes the rhythms of living things. Light is usually the best-known external timekeeper.
Yet sound vibrations — like the peal of distant bells, songs drifting from a high tower, or the steady tick of a metronome — can also synchronize living systems. That event on the lava field granted me a kind of geo-synchronicity, a reset that attuned me to the greater rhythm and flow of nature.
