The earth always surprises.

Steam rose delicately from the summit of Popocatepetl, the smoking mountain, Don Goyo. The snow level from the afternoon's thunderstorms had pushed all the way down to the treeline, about 3500m and the whole top of the mountain up to the 5452m summit. Lightning flashes across the sky to the south, the deep gray clouds streaked in cracked lightning. The clouds rumble. The steam from the top of Popo curls down, pushed by the downdrafts into the cloud rimmed summit. Curtains of gray, alternating shades of rain falling, drift in to obscure the summit.

Mountains have a serenity about them, a measure of silence, patience. The way clouds move about their distant heights, slowly, deliberately. But the puff of steam rising from Popo changes quickly, mounded one instant, pushing back into the sky against the clouds in the next. From the top of the apartment building in Cholula, surrounded by the impatience and clutter of civilization, of dogs barking, cars roaring by, families laughing in apartments, the hum of the city. In the distance to the north and east, the rim of clouds ended and further in the distance the thunderheads climbed high into the reddening sky of sunset and at that distance motion began to cease.

The earth is in as much constant motion as us humans in our ant-like cities. Plates are moving, subducting, building up pressure, forcing up magma. Images from Chaiten in Chile this week remind me of the immediate fury, and looking at the silent Popo I know it will change. All around me in this city of angles, of rooflines, treelines, water tanks, doors slamming, horns blaring, tvs squawking all would cease and turn to flight if Popo truly came alive. I study the mountain for a quiet moment, the church in the foreground coming alive with light as night falls. The city begins to settle into night rhythms, but there quiet in the distance stands Popo, smoking in the dying light.

The earth always seems to surprise us. Earthquakes spring from only general assessments of threats and hazards of the plates moving, as only volcanic eruptions rise from swarms of earthquakes, subducting plates, and building lava domes. There are those surprises, like Mount Saint Helens in 1980, or Paricutin in Michoacan in 1943. Paricutin began as a fissure in a farmer's corn field that grew over nine years into a 424 m cinder cone. The farmer was said to have kept plowing his field as the rift widened and grew worse on the 20th of February. Mount Saint Helens had only the old man Harry Truman left at Spirit Lake by the time it blew, but when it did, it blew. Where were you when the mountain blew, ran the line on the t-shirt I got visiting my grandparents in Portland that summer.

The earth always surprises us. I read today in the LA Times an editorial by Bill McKibben, quoting James Hansen the climate scientist "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." The feedback loops the climate scientists said existed, do. McKibben quotes Hansen again, "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Silent, there stands the mountain, the snow creeping slowly up the slopes until the snow and the water that sustains this valley are gone. Will it be the rapid thunder of the earth's fire, or the slow build up of our ignorance?

A few errant raindrops scatter across the roof. More lightning runs through the underside of the clouds in the south, toward Atlixco. Popo stands silent as the gray rain clouds drift across the ghostly white slopes. I look at the church that rises in the night framed against Popo, built on the aspirations of religious feeling for the assumption of a better world. Built to worship all that is around and in us. In the darkness outside the window as I write, I hear the sounds of singing, of a congregation in worship. There in the night with the sound of crickets, the voices of a people united in song. The wind ruffles the trees, but the mountain is silent. Fast or slow, the world is changing.