About six months ago, I began to feel what I describe as the “Earth Rumbling” under my feet when I go for a walk. Not as a geological or seismic activity, but rather a distress signal, a vibrational warning that something is wrong.
Some empathic people can perceive shifts in the planet’s energetic state, particularly during times of collective trauma, environmental destruction, or geopolitical upheaval. The Schumann Resonance is a real electromagnetic frequency produced in the cavity between the Earth’s surface and ionosphere. In metaphysical circles, spikes or changes in this frequency are often cited as the mechanism by which people feel physical sensations, including vibration, dizziness, or a sense of unease, especially during periods of global stress or heightened collective emotion.
Drawing on Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, some believe that when enough human suffering, fear, or conflict accumulates, it manifests as an energetic disturbance that sensitive individuals can feel physically. The body becomes a receiver for collective emotional states.
Many indigenous traditions hold that the Earth responds to human behavior. Greed, moral imbalance, self-centeredness, or disrespect of nature causes the land itself to register this. It is a divine or cosmic alert system warning that something significant is shifting in our world.
You do not need to be psychic to experience this. Just look around you. The nervous systems of the aged, the young, children, nature, and animals are on fire. Living things are in a perpetual state of anxiety, fear, and wondering when the next (fill in the blank) will drop. If you are not experiencing fear, you may well be in a state of anger—even if you don’t think so, or think it is justified. But usually, anger is our ego, borrowing the language of justice to dress up tribalism, fear, unfairness, or wounded pride. Simone Weil wrote that force — including the force of rage- consumes everyone it touches, the wielder as much as the victim.
I went for a walk this morning through a path in the forest and listened. Here, the trees spoke and showed signs of distress. When something is attacking the tree from inside, it manifests these visual bumps, attempting to push whatever is killing it out of the trunk. If it fails, the tree dies, rotting from the inside, its outer bark preserving the husk of what once was. The illusion of a tree.
People who sense this shift have been prompted to pray, act, speak out, or prepare. Yet there is collective handwringing. A pervasive sense of what can I do? This isn’t about political rightness. It’s an existential crisis that, left unaddressed, destroys the future of what has been built across generations. Paraphrasing from Matthew 12:25 – Any entity — a person, a family, a nation, a civilization that is fundamentally at war with itself cannot endure.
Do not fall for the assumption that only large-scale action matters. This is partly a distortion created by the media. Rage sells. It is also a contagion that spreads rapidly. It casts the illusion of feeling something. Alive, purpose, relevance.
Yet one person can and will make a difference. Each of us, with every action, creates a ripple effect. One raindrop, combined with others, can end a drought or cause a flood. Collective human behavior is the aggregate of human choices that create the mood of a home, a community, or a nation.
One person can hold the line on truth in their immediate circle, refusing to normalize what is not normal. Where morality is not ever shifting to accommodate any ideology, party, consensus, or justified when your heart speaks otherwise.
One person can keep despair, cynicism, or rage at bay, shining as a beacon for others that there is a pathway forward.
The fabric of civilization requires us to tend to the people right in front of us, without qualifying their race, religion, sexual orientation, political leanings, or any other filtering excuse we’ve constructed to create an “us” versus “them” mentality.
I walked further along the path and came across a heart gathered from stones. I stood there for a moment, studying that heart. Someone had walked this same path, felt what I felt, and rather than carrying it home as despair, left something behind. A quiet act. An anonymous one. No audience, no platform, no social media post to amplify it or get recognized for it. Just stones arranged with intention. A reminder that love does cover a multitude of sins. Where we don’t weaponize failures, retaliate, or tally grievances. Where we interrupt sin and seek to forgive and restore. Our deepest human response is to see others through the eyes of compassion, despite the twisting in our guts. To acknowledge that even the most minute sliver of ideological intersection reminds us of our shared values, the breadcrumbs of our path back.
The earth was still rumbling under my feet as I made my way back. But there was something more. There was comfort in knowing that people would still leave hearts made of stone on the forest paths for strangers they would never meet. A testament to the million moments of humanity and grace. To something worth protecting.