If a butterfly's wings half the world away can cause a hurricane, what then a lover's sighs? The arctic gyre spins constant, around and around, the current deep beneath the Northern ice.

The weight of the wind compresses the Southern land, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi awash in wind and waves. How much is the force of the wind?

Beyond fathoms, immeasurable, and the earth erupts in the West. Tensions and seismic release. This is no static system; the firmament shifts. Stand ankle-deep in the ocean churning and feel the sand slip.

Tectonic plates grind in great subduction zones, the slip of the Pacific plate beneath the North American plate buckles and cracks the inland mountains. As it slides down and beneath, magma and internal heat and the pressure of the surface melts the folding sea floor and it bubbles up again to the surface, miles inland. Molten rock. Transformed into liquid. Lava.
Bubble, bubble, toil and touble.

Beautiful and treacherous with skree fields and lava flows and pristine snow cap, the South Sister has bulged and puffed out her sides. St Helens in the Northern Cascades rumbles her response from deep within the earth, and she awakes from her brief slumber.

The earth has been talking.