When Lightning Strikes
Photo by Michael Bath - copyright
In childhood, I’d anxiously watch out of the windows, looking up, startled when lightning’s diagonal spear flashed, its bright point aimed at the ground—not our house I hoped, nor our maples, the tilted blue spruce, or the copper beech I climbed. I’d count seconds until the thunder, then look at my dad, who’d approximate the distance before the storm would be upon us. No television. No going further than the screened porch.
In A Flower for God I tell of a different kind of lightning. “I was in seventh grade. In math class, fourth seat in the row closest to the door, sudden blinding flashes of light across my field of vision scared me, so I raised my hand to go to the girls’ room. I decided to have the office call my mother. The eye doctor said I needed glasses for far-sightedness, but had no explanation for the lightning, as I thought of it, which hadn’t returned.”*
Next, living with my husband and daughters in western Massachusetts where the renovation of our kitchen had opened half of the back wall for a full view outdoors, on this particular night a thunder and lightning storm was in progress; I was watching out a window. Paul was in the kitchen standing inside the sliding glass door that led to a small back yard, a single-car garage, a child-sized square of garden, and woods, when he yelped. Lightning had struck a tree that crashed inches from his chest—scaring us. He was so close to being harmed by shattering glass and the tree’s thrust.
Then, in a period of depression, following a relationship that failed after a divorce I had initiated, I was unable to get out of bed one morning. My daughters, fifteen and twenty-two, looked in until the older one wisely asked if I wanted her to call my psychologist. Upon hearing her response, I immediately submitted to going to the hospital (grateful for direction, if a bit fearful, as were they). “The benefit was not visible as we rang the bell and entered the lock-up unit of the psychiatric wing, my third time of being unable to function. Moved after a week into the residential wing, for the second time in my life I saw sudden, blinding flashes of light that this time brought me to my knees. Crawling to my bed I rang the bell. The doctor said it was a drug reaction, but even without knowing what had happened, I knew he was wrong.”* Recognizing the repeated incident of seventh grade, I still didn’t know the cause, but I rejected what I had been told.
Four years later, I met Foster Perry,** shaman, healer, author of When Lightning Strikes a Hummingbird, and leader of a workshop where I felt more alert to his style of presentation than to my presence as a participant. By that time I had been through many healing experiences—yet—when Foster loosely took my hand and, speaking casually, opened my memory to a past life, I screamed and went limp as gripping my hand, he controlled my body’s involuntary slide to the floor. Afterwards, I read of how his being hit by lightning and not dying had instead been an awakening to his being a shaman and healer. I now returned to my experience of crawling and dragging myself up as not the aberration of a mental patient, but as a benchmark in an awakening—unassisted by those unable to see outside of their knowledge and unwilling to allow uncertainty.
Foster wrote, “I had to be hit by lightning to know the Earth’s love. I had to learn there was nothing more important in the universe than to love every sentient being.”** Following this thought, I considered that I had been given experiences meant to change me. Ultimately, driving on I-91 one day between the city of Springfield and the Connecticut River, I heard myself say, “God is in the asphalt,” and recognized that I was different with an unexplainable but clearly noticeable change.
Now twenty years later, when it’s about to become January 1, 2015, I open a book that I’ve read twice before for a third reading—Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. This time I gape at the first line, suddenly reconnecting with my own experiences. “Lightening has struck me all my life. Just once was it real….Other times I’ll feel the lightning strike and wonder why it’s come. Sometimes I don’t understand, but accept what the lightning tells me, for the lightning is me. It entered me when I was a baby and never left.” This story is not mine, but I believe I experienced a transmission through lightning that grew, gradually changing me to live by valuing an inner knowing that while not verifiable by conventional means nevertheless is a source that I have protected and held onto.
My realization is, “Both looking outward and looking inward hold answers, but we may look outward too frequently at the known when looking inward will open the unknown to us.”
* A Flower for God to be published in 2015.