Here in Missouri I am sitting on one of the more important fault lines in the USA.  The New Madrid Fault.  The 150-mile (240 km) long fault system, which extends into five states, stretches southward from Cairo, Illinois; through Hayti, Caruthersville and New Madrid in Missouri; throughBlytheville into Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covers a part of West Tennessee, near Reelfoot Lake, extending southeast into Dyersburg.  I did not know this until a few days ago as I was standing at the stove overlooking the leaf strewn winter landscape and I realized there was not one bird in sight.

I had been enjoying the abundance of birds scratching through the fallen leaves and the crows in their riotous laughing.  The wonderful little House Wren that occupied the cabin and the predators that soared overhead; Red Tail Hawk and a  Falcon of some kind.  They all vanished.  For two days not one single bird anywhere. We took a Hummer ride up on top of the ridge that looks down on our cabin and not a bird to be seen, as far as the crow flies.  It was eerie.  I knew it was about the Electromagnetic Field changing.

So, I did my research on a break from writing about climbing treacherous peaks in Alaska and learning about how athletic prosthetics are made for a mountain climber like Todd, who, with one leg climbed all 50 peaks in the USA.  I learned that birds disappear when there is seismic activity.  And for the two days they were not to be seen there were a total of 6 earthquakes in Oklahoma just hours from here.

Then I had another aha moment.  I had been sleeping better than I have in years while here at the cabin.  I have not been known to sleep well and get up often in the night to get a snack, to write a little more, to do the laundry or to meditate myself back to sleep.  Here, tucked away in the middle of no civilization, there are no cell phone towers, no electrical city grid, no noise, no pumped up Electro-Magnetic field anywhere.

It is clear that my body knows this and with the lack of chronic EM bombardment, absence of city life with it’s electrical overload and the energy of the masses, my body finally rested from the invisible onslaught.  And all the while the birds knew to just move somewhere else until the onslaught of energy that was being invisibly released from the earth had subsided.  They are back in full force today even with the constant rain and the swelling river.

So here is another lesson from the road.  What we love about technology, what we seem to not be able to do without when it comes to computers, telephones, refrigerators, electricity, noise, cars, generators and wifi, is not necessary what our bodies can tolerate.  We must all ask the question that the birds don’t hesitate to ask:  Why would I subject myself to this chronic invasion of invisible energy when it is simply not good for the one and only body I have been given.  That is the question I ask myself.

I am now listening to the rain on the window and wrapping myself in a blanket as I prepare to write about minus 50 degrees on a glacier up Denali, which means “The Great One”.  My body is very happy to have learned a lesson from the birds and I am now sinking into the lessons that a grandfather mountain has to teach a non climber like me.  What an adventure all the way around.