It’s past my bedtime, yet I’m sitting on my deck in the near dark bundled up in a blanket, and I’m involuntarily gasping every minute or so.

This goes on for over an hour. In fact, it happens 44 times a second, the world over. No, it’s not the 4th of July, it’s the 11th. My dog refused to go outside for her bedtime relief session and is now cowering in the bathroom.

I was awestruck by a mega-watt thunderstorm that actually went on for several hours. The lightning displays were way beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Since this region has the lowest incidence of lightning strikes in the country, this was especially notable. At most, I hear a few good rumbles tumble down the Olympic mountains each year and perhaps see a distant bolt. But this was indeed like an Independence Day show that didn’t seem to stop. It makes me realize how much I miss seeing this spectacle.

And this storm was BIG—I could see forked lightning up near the San Juan Islands and then closer over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But I could also see bolts over the Cascade Mountains to the east and much closer, all around me until it was overhead. While zigzaggy lightning is always beautiful to look at, it’s those broad flashes of intra-cloud lightning that are so startling. You just don’t expect to see your nighttime world illuminated so suddenly and violently—and so repeatedly.

I was enthralled and sat there until after midnight, gasping and applauding the dramatic show. And finally, the sky split open and a hard rain fell, as it rarely does here. It’s such a primal event and reminds me how inconsequential we are, how little our plans and dreams mean in the bigger scheme of things. I always wonder whenever I witness something so dramatic in nature what early people thought about such events long before there were scientific explanations. To some Native Americans I suppose thunderstorms often meant much-needed rain was on the way. Then again, they might also portend flash floods. Did you know there is actually a form of divination by lightning—ceraunoscopy? (How did we ever live without Wikipedia?) The Hindus, Etruscans and Babylonians found signs in the sky of great interest and believed they could read omens in thunder and lightning. A related and still-common practice that even I enjoy, is meditation on cloud formations.

For me all this electrical force is stimulating and feels like change is in the wind, as if Mother Nature is stirring the soup pot of our lives with a lightning bolt.

CONTEMPLATIONS

• Does your life need stirring up right now?
• How do you react to thunderstorms?
• Do you need a good jolt to complete some project—or even to start one?
• Is your life at some impasse, do you need the cleansing action of a downpour to surge through your day and reveal what is essential and what is not?

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