Struck Twice by Lightning: Part 1 of 2
My first lightning strike was when I was nine years old. I was in love with the Thunder Beings, as my father who was part Eastern Cherokee, called them. He said they were the largest spirits on Mother Earth and they were responsible for creating the mighty storms. It didn’t matter if it was a thunderstorm, or one that had a tornado in it, or a hurricane, it was their duty to bring the rain…or snow…to Mother Earth and feed all our relations. Without water, my father told me, nothing would ever live on Her. Plants, insects, reptiles, and humans, not to mention all the animals, would die of thirst within three or four days, without the life-giving rain.
I remember when I was around five years old; my mother and I were outside in San Diego area where I was born, and a huge sound split the sky, the thunder roaring and rumbling above us. I remember screaming and wincing, holding my small hands to my ears. She immediately pulled me into the safety of her arms. I was amazed at how calm she was, and I saw her look up at the dark, roiling sky above us. She had such a glowing look about her as she watched those clouds churn, the wind picking up, blowing hard for a few seconds.
“You know what makes this sound?” she asked me, holding me against her and pointing up to the thunderstorm encircling the area.
“N-no,” I whispered, fear still holding me in its grip, although I felt safe in my mother’s strong arms.
“They’re giants,” she said, smiling. “And they’re playing kick-the-ball around up there in the sky. And every time one of them kicks it, they make this sound of thunder that you just heard.” She laughed throatily, the gusting wind swirling suddenly around us.
“Really?” I squeaked, feeling all my fear leaving me, awe in my voice, wonder flooding me. “Giants? There are really giants?”
My mother looked down at me, gave me a warm squeeze, pulling some of my brunette hair off my face as the wind danced around us now. “Oh yes, the largest, mightiest giants in the world. They’re tasked with making storms so it will rain and we’ll have water to drink. Without rain, we wouldn’t exist.”
“Can we see them, Mommy?”
“Oh, they’re invisible to most people,” she said, smiling broadly as another fork of lightning ripped across the sky, cloud-to-cloud.
“Can you see them?”
“No, but Daddy can.”
“Oh,” I said, amazed. “He’s never said anything about them.”
She slowly released me and kept a hand on my small shoulder as she stood. “That’s because we rarely get thunderstorms here in San Diego.”
“Oh,” well that made sense to me. “I’d really like to see one!”
“Just look at the clouds, Honey,” and she pointed upward. “Sometimes? When they know we are aware of them and respect them, they will show their faces. You watch for that. They are very funny and they love to tease us, playing hide-n-seek.”
That one incident set me on a desire to see a Thunder Being! We moved to Prairie City, Oregon, on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. There, we had lots of thunderstorms the first summer after we arrived. I would run outside, stand, the wind swirling and dancing around me, eagerly watching the clouds to see if I could see a face in them. Every time the lightning flashed, my mother had told me that the Thunder Beings were throwing the bolt at an area that needed to be cleansed and cleaned out of dross or etheric debris. She said it was sky housekeeping, and so I pictured my beloved Thunder Beings with a broom, dust pan and a mop.
We moved again to Ontario, Oregon when I was eight. We rented an old farm house, had a milk cow and a small barn where we lived near the mighty Snake River. There was a huge hill of dried manure from years before, and it looked like a mountain to me. Me and my siblings would climb and play on it.
One day, I saw this huge white, black and gray thunderstorm erupt and form west of us. Excited, still in my school dress, I stood outside, watching it, looking for a face to appear in the clouds. I could hear the thunder and I saw the lightning lacing in and out of the clouds. The storm was racing right toward us! I became so excited, yelling to my siblings that a huge storm was coming!
The wind roll which looked like a whitish gray loop around the bottom of the thunderstorm hit me and the wind gusts were awesome! I laughed, running for the manure hill. The wind swirled and my skirt flew up over my waist for a second, but I didn’t care. I laughed and thrust my arms upward, calling out their names, thanking them for coming, the sky ominously darkening.
I loved the Thunder Beings, so badly wanting to see one! I watched the dark blackish-gray clouds churn swiftly, my head thrown back, my hands reaching skyward, the wind tearing mightily at me, making me take several steps backward at different moments.
All of a sudden, there was an ear-splitting sound of thunder all around me! I felt like I was inside one of those huge Native American drums being drummed. A sharp tingling sensation shot through my fingers and my head felt like ten thousand honeybees were running around inside and outside of it. The tingling continued right down my spine and I felt as if my feet and shoes had been jammed down into the hill, my whole body feeling these wild, leaping electric tingles. The world around me lit up and blinded me. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the continuous thunder, felt the vibration of the sound rippling through me, dancing with the fierce electrical sensations racing through every cell in my body.
And then, I blinked, not knowing where I was. I saw I was standing on a hill, a brown hill. I could still the tingles, now subsiding through me, the wind ripping around me, the thunder rolling and our house nearby. And then, the rain came, sudden, hard and drenching. I raced down off the hill, and ran for the house. My father was home and I saw him standing in the open doorway, his eyes huge with shock as I raced toward him, getting soaked by the spate of rain.
That was my first lightning strike. My father had seen it happen. Of course, he was stunned by it, saw the entire manure hill light up in a millisecond sudden, white glow. He said I disappeared for a moment, the white, stunning glow of the lightning bolt blinding him. When it ceased, he said I was still standing, my legs apart to keep from being blown off the hill by the ferocious winds twisting, blasting and encircling me. He was shaken by it, kneeling down, making sure I wasn’t burned, that I was all right. I was laughing, soaked with rain, but still feeling giddy and almost in ecstasy from the after effects of the energy and electricity still circulating within my body.
About a week after that, my father sat me down one day after school. He said he took the lightning strike as a ‘sign’ that I should be trained in his mother’s medicine (a skill or talent having to do with healing and serving the sick) that had come down through my great-great grandmother, on his side of the family. She had been Eastern Cherokee, ripped from her homeland and forced on the awful Trail of Tears. She had escaped near the Tennessee/Kentucky border and at age sixteen, ran to the other state, not wanting to be forced to walk to Oklahoma and put on a reservation.
I sat dutifully, listening to my father’s story of his great-grandmother, and how her medicine had been passed down through the family lineage. He had been chosen in his generation to learn it. And now, in my generation, he would teach me. Never having a name for his medicine, I went into training from age 9 through age 18. But even though the basic tenets of the medicine were ingrained in me, I still had a lot to learn and synchronicity in my twenties and thirties rounded out my education. It was in my mid-twenties that I learned that the medicine that was handed down from one generation to another was actually called shamanism.
I’ll never forget that hot May afternoon in Ontario, Oregon, when I flew up to the top of that dry manure hill to greet the coming, racing storm headed right for us. And yes, after that, I began to see the faces of the magnificent Thunder Beings in the clouds that they shaped and formed, throwing their thunderbolts to Mother Earth, much to my joy.
But my relationship to lightning was not finished…I was struck a second time at age 13…
