Venture Beyond

The earthquake hit on a Wednesday afternoon. I found out the way most people find out about something this large — messages arriving from everywhere, all at once, overlapping. I read them standing still. I was already in my day, already fully awake, and then suddenly I was in something else entirely, something not real, not possible.

I want to be honest about what the days that followed looked like, because I think honesty is the point. Wednesday night I collapsed into it — into Instagram, into X, into the relentless scroll. I was in shock, still I cried hard, but not in a straight line. That's what I want to share, because I think it matters more than the grief itself: none of this moved in a straight line.

In the days that followed — really, within the same minutes — I could be watching footage of government teams blocking rescue workers from entering collapsed buildings, feeling rage move through my body like something physical. Because this earthquake is not only the earthquake. Most of the buildings that came down were built with standards ignored, corners cut, decades of corruption embedded in the concrete. The hospitals receiving the injured have almost no equipment because those budgets were gutted too. Venezuela is a seismic country. A quake of this magnitude was always a matter of when. And a government that knew this chose, year after year, to waste the resources away. The earthquake became a terrible exam that revealed every single one of those choices. And then the next post would show a two-year-old being pulled from the rubble alive, and everything in me would shatter open in a completely different direction. Hope, joy, grief, fury, anger, awe, tenderness, despair — not in sequence. All of it at once, pendulating wildly from one extreme to the other, sometimes before I had even processed where I had just been. Many friends told me they had spent hours doing the same — watching, crying, cycling through every emotion available to a human being within a single hour.

That is not a breakdown. That is the full range of the human experience, moving at full speed.

Thursday morning I knew I needed to do something with my hands. So I went to volunteer. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday — keeping the phone to the minimum I could manage, trying to make sure the time I had was going somewhere useful. And that's what I saw from almost everyone around me: the destabilization first, and then the movement toward action. The need to be useful to someone. The refusal to only witness.

Part of my family is in Venezuela, and many people I care for deeply are there too. The particular ache of being at a distance — safe, with a standing house, a life that kept going around me — is real, and I am not going to minimize it.

Here is what I could not have anticipated: the scale of what mobilized. Almost eight million Venezuelans live outside the country now, scattered across every continent — and from every corner of the world, they poured in whatever support they could offer. In Miami there were more volunteers than tasks needed to be completed. That alone was beautiful and extraordinary. But then governments showed up too: El Salvador, Mexico, the United States, Israel, Germany, Colombia — each sending actual rescue teams, equipment, resources, official solidarity. Two enormous movements happening simultaneously, one born of individual love and one of collective responsibility, together creating a level of response that I genuinely believe would not have been possible for any other country in the world right now. Only Venezuela has millions of its own people stationed everywhere, already present, already ready.

I have no doubt that this was divinely orchestrated. I say that not because I always understand what divine orchestration looks like when it arrives as devastation — I don't, and I have stopped pretending that I do. Some souls were meant to be there. Some were meant to survive. Some were meant to leave this earthly experience in this exact moment, for reasons that are beyond what I am capable of comprehending. But I have no doubt that all of it was written, that all of it holds a lesson, and that as time passes we will begin to understand what this meant — for everyone who lived through it, and for everyone who didn't.

What I know clearly, and with absolute certainty, is that whatever the lesson is, it is being delivered through love. The love that showed up was staggering. People going into rubble with bare hands. Strangers carrying strangers. Communities organizing in the middle of chaos. A country that has had nearly everything taken from it, still showing up for itself with humor (yes, Venezuelans are so amazing that I saw humor and singing) and solidarity and a refusal to shatter that I find, honestly, extraordinary.

I have cried from pain and anger this week. And I have cried from something I can only call broken awe — at what human beings are capable of when everything is stripped away and all that remains is each other. My heart fills with such love and awe at the solidarity and support.

This is the full range. Not grief first, then anger, then awe — in some tidy sequence that makes the experience manageable. All of it at once, within the same hour, sometimes within the same breath. That simultaneity — that capacity to hold the lowest and the highest at exactly the same moment (the grotesque and the sublime) — is not a flaw in our emotional design. I think it may be the whole point of it. To stay present with what's difficult — without suppressing it or being consumed by it. Standing this close to impermanence has a way of clarifying things — returning you to what matters, asking you to inhabit your life more fully. And what I keep finding, on the other side of all of it, is love. Love is what remains. Love is what prevails.

This month at Seekers Circle, that is exactly what we are holding space for: the full range of the human experience, and what it reveals about who we actually are when life asks everything of us. As part of this, we joined a group who is offering free support to anyone who needs it right now — because that too is the full range in action: people showing up from wherever they are, pouring from their own grief and care into service for someone else.

If you are Venezuelan, or love someone who is, you are not alone in this. And if you are carrying your own version of the full range — your own grief, your own awe, your own something-that-doesn't-have-a-name-yet — you are not alone either. Be compassionate with yourself through it.

I am still praying for everyone under the rubble. For every family waiting. For every rescuer giving everything they have. And I am here, in the mess and the awe and everything in between, with all of you.

Let's be in it together through this.