Struck Twice by Lightning: Part 2 of 2
The second time I was struck by lightning I was 13. It was a cloudless, sunny day when it happened. Lightning is well known for occurring without a thunderstorm being present—and this was one of those times.
This was 1959. I had just finished Mr. Wolf’s art class and had hurried into a huge, wide hall with six hundred other children, racing to get to their next class. On either side of the hall were hundreds of heavy metal lockers, six feet tall. My mind was focused on the math class, which I always cringed about going too. I loved the teacher, but I had no skills or passion for math. I was lucky to carry a C and always struggled with numbers.
I was in the middle of the hall, weaving in and around other children, my arms full of books, plus my purse. I suddenly saw a bright flash of light come through the ceiling of the area, the bolt struck me in the head and slammed down through my body. The strike threw me and the next thing I felt was me flying through the air, heading for that row of green metal lockers. I slammed into them with the back of my body, lost consciousness for a second and felt myself falling to the floor, my books already thrown explosively all over the place. I landed on my hands and knees, my head pressed against the floor, saliva running out of the corner of my mouth.
I was semi-conscious, hearing kids around me shouting, and upset. Several of them raced to my aid, kneeling around me, asking if I was all right.
No, I wasn’t all right at all. Sounds came and went. Sometimes I could hear someone talking to me, but I wasn’t able to understand what they were saying. I couldn’t think. It was hard for me to know what had happened or where I was. Everything came and went. I felt a couple of kids trying to haul me to my feet and I struggled to help them get me into a standing position. Everything looked out of focus, my vision coming and going. I still didn’t know my name, or what had happened; I was in shock, I realized, much later.
I remember slurring my words, saying that I had to get to the math class. Would someone help me get there? A number of kids had picked up my books, carrying them for me. I was unsteady as I walked. I couldn’t walk a straight line without their help on each of my upper arms. Somehow, they got me into the class and I sat in my seat at the back. Saliva was still running down the side my mouth and I kept wiping it away with a trembling hand. My friends gave me unsure, worried looks and left the classroom. I told them I’d be all right.
I sat for forty-five minutes in my math class and remember only fragments of it. I wasn’t here and I wasn’t there….I felt like I was in a hollow vacuum tube and the voices were far away and unintelligible. I remember hearing the bell ring, announcing the class was over. I wasn’t very coordinated, my books in my arms, trying to stand and wobbling a little. The teacher gave me a concerned look, but I pushed past him and out to the hall where we would have lunch. I don’t remember the rest of the day.
I remember getting off the bus, glad that school was over, but only a vague memory fragment of it. My walking was better, but I still wasn’t steady and sure on my feet. All I wanted to do was get home, scared and unsure of what had happened to me—and why. When my parents got home, I told them what had happened. I saw them giving one another significant looks. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I just felt like I was standing between two worlds or dimensions…fragmented.
I went to my bedroom up in the attic where I could be alone, with no noise to bother me. My hearing was exquisitely acute. I heard EVERY sound. As I sat on my bed, still mentally and emotionally scattered, I had this sudden urge to write a fiction story. The feeling overwhelmed me out of nowhere. I scrounged around for paper and a pen. The drive to write was forceful and demanding. I began to scribble out a story by hand, the information pouring through my brain like a roaring, wild waterfall, unable to barely keep up with it. I saw the characters, I heard them talk, I heard what was inside their heads, and saw the expressions and their body language. The short story was ten pages long, hand scribbled on both sides of the lined paper. I looked at it in new shock, having never done anything like this before.
I remembered the first time I’d been struck by lightning when I was nine, a man’s voice was inside of my head saying, “Someday, you will be a famous writer or artist. You must decide which you want to do.” Upon telling my mother about the voice, she promptly got out her Corona typewriter, and proceeded to teach me how to type.
As I stared at the scribbled story, my mother came upstairs to see how I was doing. She sat next to me on the bed and I told her what had just happened to me. I handed the story over to her and she studied it. She looked at me and then straightened, hands over the story in her lap.
“You’ve been struck again by lightning,” she began softly, holding my widening eyes. “And you’re alive, which I’m grateful for.” She slid her arm around my shoulders, drawing me against her body. It felt wonderful and stabilizing. I began spilling out all my fear, that my hearing was coming and going, that I couldn’t think straight, and I was scared. She held me and told me that what I needed was a nice, warm bath, and go to bed and see how I felt tomorrow morning. I agreed. She stood and carefully looked through my hair, examining me from head to toe. I asked her why and she said that lightning usually has an entry point and an exit point. I’d told her the bolt had come down through my head and out both of the soles of my feet and plunged into the ground. She couldn’t find any injuries or burns on me anywhere. I had large, swollen bruises across my shoulders, midway down my back and across my hips where I slammed full force into those lockers. I saw those lockers the next day when I went back to school, and three of them were bent inward where I had been knocked off my feet and thrown into them.
“Why would the Thunder Beings do this to me? What do they want?” I asked her, my voice thin with fear and confusion.
She shook her head. “Whatever it is, Eileen, is for you to discover as time goes on. Your father has told me stories of young Native American men singing the song to bring the Thunder Beings to them because they wanted their power. There was no power greater on Mother Earth. But,” and she shook her head, hands on her hips, “those that did, were struck by lightning and died. Your father said the Great Spirit does not tolerate selfishness, disempowering anyone, or trying to grab power for their own dark reasons.”
“But,” I whispered, dazed, “I didn’t ask for this….I don’t remember ever doing that, Mom….”
She patted my shoulder gently. “Your father thinks that the Thunder Beings offered you an invitation at nine years old to be with them, that they wanted to train you because you have a good, kind heart. They will show you how to use power in a good way for all our relations.”
“Didn’t the first time I got hit, count? Did it have to be done again?”
Giving me a perplexed look, she sat down on the bed, placing her arm around my slumped shoulders. “I don’t know. But look what has happened since you were struck this second time,” and she picked up my story laying on the bed. “You wrote this because they were working with you.”
“Remember when I was nine years old? And that voice in my head said I’d either be a great writer or artist?”
She smiled fondly. “Yes, and I brought my typewriter out to teach you how to use it instead of this,” and she held up the scribbled story.
We both laughed a little, trading humored looks with one another.
“I guess,” I whispered unsteadily, “I’m supposed to be a writer, then, Mom?”
She sighed and shrugged. “Well,” she said, patting the pages in her lap, her hand over them, “it sure looks that way. Let’s see what happens, okay? First things first. Get a bath and then go to bed. We’ll see what the coming days bring. Pay attention to your dreams, too.”
As Fate would have it, I continued every night, after school, writing like a madwoman and producing another fiction story. They poured through me the same way. From age thirteen to thirty-five years old, I wrote. By that age, after collecting a thousand reject slips from magazines, newspapers and publishers, I finally broke into traditional publishing in the USA. And the rest is history. I chose the pseudonym, Lindsay McKenna, and you can see for yourself the book titles that have poured through me at www.lindsaymckenna.com. I’ve had a highly successful forty-year run writing 185 fiction books for major publishers, Simon & Schuster, Silhouette, Harlequin, HarperRow and Kensington publishers, a New York Times bestselling author two times, and 15 non-fiction books, making so far, 200 books that I’ve written in my lifetime. Go here to see my complete book list: https://lindsaymckenna.com/book-list/.
I had always wondered WHO had thrown that second thunderbolt. I found out at the age sixty. On an internet search, I happened upon a pre-patriarchal myth about Pallas Athena, my favorite goddess. http://www.museumofmythology.com/Greek/athena.htm.
“He gave Athena the Aegis, a breastplate made from the skin of the goat that had nurtured him as a child, and allowed her to use his lightning bolts as weapons.“ She was allowed by Jupiter/Zeus, her father, to throw his thunderbolts. Shortly after the second lightning strike, I heard the goddess talk to me, asking me to build her a stone altar down at Bear Creek, which was about half a mile away from our home. After school, I rode my horse down the dirt road where Harry and David Orchards was, and built the altar in the shallow gravel and rocks of the creek. I had always felt she had something to do with certain valves being opened in the right hemisphere of my brain (the creative side) so that I could write these books. And sure enough, the proof of it was in that myth before patriarchal males suppressed women en masse and turned the goddesses of old into harridans or murdering types, or portrayed them as purely sexual objects by men who always raped them. I was very happy to realize that the goddess who had always been with me was the one who threw that massive second thunderbolt.
At seventy-five years old, I look at the pattern of the two lightning bolts and how they changed my life in unexpected ways. I never suffered permanent injury from those two strikes, except for those bruises on my back where I was slammed into the school lockers. It took about two weeks for my semi-consciousness symptoms to recede and to return fully to myself once more. And funny enough, I stopped dreaming after that second bolt. Maybe the dreams became the books and I no longer had to dream them, but rather write them in my 3rd dimensional incarnation? Who knows?
I’m sure Carl Jung, the psychiatrist, would have a ball with my two bouts with lightning bolts. I’ve read enough of his material, along with others in this field of symbology, to say that what happened to me was working with the archetype, Pallas Athena, and I was initiated by them to write books.
When they say “Life is stranger than fiction,” I can certainly relate. But this is no fiction story I’m sharing with you…my proof is in the 200 books I have written, most of them fiction which were eventually translated into thirty-three languages, with over fourteen million copies sold. I should write my autobiography: but no one would believe it, anyway and they’d say it was fiction I’d made up, haha. If the doubters only knew….
To this day, no matter where I travel in the world, when I land at an airport, there is ALWAYS a thunderstorm and Thunder Beings there to greet me! But that is another true experience for another day!
