One of my mentors once told me that Initiation is the beginning of a relationship with an energy.
This ran counter-intuitive to my instinct at the time. After all, wasn’t initiation a sort of celebration? A congratulations? A kind of already-achieved mastery? A mazel tov, if you will? At which point a door would be opened, of course…but as to what or where, I didn’t exactly know.
I had my guesses. At the time, I was just stepping over the threshold of this formative initiatory chapter in my life. I had already undergone several undoings and rebirths, but this one felt different. I was following an intoxicating calling, a wild energy that had emerged as an urge in my soul and was sending me down some unexpected roads of my own.
The time I speak of was late summer 2019, when I crash-landed at Burning Man after a seminal 9-month pilgrimage seeking out my new ‘homeland’. I had no inkling as to what was about to enter my world or that when I walked onto playa that year that my life would undergo a massive paradigm shift.
(More details on that exact journey here.)
The cascade of events that followed after my exodus from Los Angeles and reached an inflection point at Burning Man only accelerated in intensity afterwards. My desert portal propelled me into a level of existence that felt…unrealistic. Supernatural. Divinely orchestrated – even when I didn’t know how to trust the unfolding.
That is the point of INITIATION, it seems.
You want to move differently?
It will literally require a reorganization of your being.
••• – •••
All of a sudden, synchronicities were directing me towards doors I didn’t have the eyes to see previously. I wasn’t yet inhabiting the reality baseline where experiences like these were normalized, but I recognized that I was being shown other possilibities that awaited me. That is, if I was willing to believe.
Right on time, this Burning Man in particular seemed perfectly designed to initiate me into the next phase of my evolution.
Because of the vast mycelial network of people woven into this camp I happened to meet a man who would become my romantic partner. Because of him, I moved up to the Bay area on a whim. A month after taking up residence in the mountains he brought me to an initiation party filled with stick diviners. Here, on a house on a hill, I intersected with the West African shamanic lineage I would be initiated in two very surreal years later.
It was only November 2019 – two months after that fateful Burning Man – when I received my first divination with my now teacher. Here, in a quiet office in Marin lined with mud shrines, the lightning medicine first revealed itself to me.
••• – •••
Lightning is an elemental medicine, an essence. You might even say: a consciousness. In this lineage, we refer to lightning medicine as COSMIC JUSTICE because its real name is too powerful to say out loud. Since it was called out, this medicine has been teaching me about many things, but mainly –
RUTHLESS INTEGRITY.
For lightning is a medicine of correction at a foundational level.
In order to help you see, lightning will clean. It will clarify. It will illuminate every wall and rotten belief that exists between you and yourself. Lightning doesn’t let you look away from the thing.
To carry lightning is to take my own medicine. CONSTANTLY. If I fuck around, I will absolutely find out. Because lightning will reveal every single shadow. Lightning will reveal and right all imbalance – if you allow it.
(Here’s a way more detailed account of some things I looked away from for too long.)
Over the course of the past several years, lightning has shown itself to me in many forms – mostly coming in as an instructive energy, a RADIANT PRESENCE, that teaches me. While there is much to say about this medicine, for brevity it can be boiled down to: If I act out of integrity, I get spanked.
Because with the power I carry I’m not allowed to move incongruently.
Turns out, one of my initiations over the past few years has been tuning my entire reality to this way of being. Lightning has been a most formative teacher for me, for it has insisted upon an absolutely breathtaking, brutal, and beautiful stripping away of all my untruths and incongruencies.
As my teacher promised me in the original reading: IT HAS NOT BEEN EASY.
I tell you all of this because it is essential backstory for one of the most insane things that’s ever happened to me.
••• – •••
Two weeks ago there was a full moon – a Thunder moon, it turns out. That afternoon a storm was rolling in, but it sounded far enough away that I could take my dog Oba out for a quick potty before the real shit hit.
I decided it was safer to go into the woods. We went in there because I thought it would protect us from the rain. But it wasn't even raining when a humongous lightning bolt struck a tree less than 20 feet from me. I'm talking the kind of EARTH-SHATTERING CRACK that makes you jump in bed miles away.
I have only human words to convey what I experienced out there.
In less than an instant – before I knew what was happening – an astounding shockwave of energy slammed into the ground in front of me. The whole world turned a color I can only describe as BURNING ELECTRIC WHITE. The BOOM of it sent me and Oba 3 ft in the air. Leaves rained down upon us from somewhere above.
I think I screamed FUCK.
Then we ran. I tore through the woods like a banshee in slippery crocs until I got home. I ran with my whole ass heart in my throat.
My body didn't stop trembling for about an hour. Even now, writing this, my bones remember the impact of that energy making itself known to me. I'm still arriving at the fact that I witnessed this and am still alive. That moment has replayed itself in my mind thousands of times. The living memory of that tremendous power has etched itself into my being.
I am humbled beyond anything I’ve ever known.
••• – •••
A few days before the timeless minute that transformed me forever, I wrote a post on what the launch of INITIATION had been teaching me. I thought I had all my cute lil answers! And while I've been going through it in service of holding this sacred portal, nothing I’ve ever known would have prepared me for this blazing telegram from the sky gods.
And while I’m still digesting what it is they said, I have emerged unscathed from the wilderness to share two things:
It is the grounded earth that calls the lightning of the Gods down.