There are certain experiences from childhood that stay with us long after we understand them differently. They may begin as simple moments of wonder, but over time they become part of the way we interpret the world. The meaning changes as we change, yet something of the original feeling remains.

For me, one of those experiences has always been lightning.

When I was very young, I did not think of lightning as a dangerous electrical discharge moving through the atmosphere. I had no understanding of voltage, ionization, charge separation, conductivity, or the complicated processes taking place inside a storm cloud. None of that existed in my mind.

What I saw instead were cracks in the sky.

When lightning flashed across the clouds, I imagined that the sky itself had split open for a moment and that I was being allowed to see beyond it. In my childhood imagination, there might have been another universe on the other side, another place hidden just beyond the world I knew. The flash lasted only an instant, but for that instant it seemed as though something normally concealed had become visible.

The Magick of the Gulf Coast Sky

I grew up along the Gulf Coast, and I think the geography had a great deal to do with the intensity of those impressions. Weather there can feel alive in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have watched it happen. The heat, humidity, and enormous amount of moisture coming from the Gulf can create clouds that seem to build directly in front of you. You can watch them rise and expand, becoming larger and darker as the atmosphere changes.

As a child, I did not understand convection or atmospheric instability. I simply watched the sky create enormous structures out of what had seemed like empty air only a short time before. Clouds would grow upward, layer upon layer, and sometimes lightning would begin inside them while they were still developing. A flash could illuminate an entire section of cloud from within, making it appear as though something inside the storm had suddenly awakened.

There was something deeply mystical about watching that happen. The sky was not simply a background above me. It seemed active, creative, and almost theatrical. Clouds formed, shifted, darkened, opened, and disappeared. Light moved through them. Thunder arrived from somewhere beyond what I could see.

To a young mind, it was easy to imagine that these things belonged to another order of reality.

Looking back on it now, I can see how much of that sense of mystery came from the landscape itself. The Gulf Coast had a particular atmosphere, not simply in the meteorological sense, but emotionally as well. The sky could change quickly. The air could become heavy and electric. Clouds could appear to grow almost visibly from one moment to the next.

To a child, there was no dividing line between weather and wonder. The two were the same experience.

When Mystery Became Electricity

As I grew older, of course, I began to learn what was actually happening. I learned that these storms were not mysterious openings between universes, but enormous atmospheric systems shaped by heat, moisture, rising air, wind, ice, electrical charge, and instability.

Eventually, my professional life brought me even closer to electricity. I began as an electrician apprentice, became a journeyman, and later moved into communications technology.

The more I learned, the more electricity became something measurable and practical. I learned how current behaves, how voltage affects a system, how circuits are built, how resistance influences electrical flow, and why grounding matters. Electricity became something I could test, troubleshoot, install, repair, and work around safely.

What had once appeared to me as a supernatural crack in the heavens became something I could describe in technical language.

In some ways, that education changed the experience. Knowledge has a way of removing certain kinds of mystery. Once you understand why something happens, it becomes difficult to see it in exactly the same way you did as a child.

I could no longer honestly look at lightning and believe I was seeing another universe through a temporary opening in the sky.

But eventually I realized something important.

Losing one interpretation does not require losing the emotion that came with it.

That realization came gradually. Like many people, I think I had assumed that growing older meant trading mystery for explanation. We learn the mechanisms behind things, and as we do, the world is supposed to become more ordinary.

Yet the more I learned about electricity, the less ordinary it actually became.

Understanding a system does not necessarily make that system simple. In fact, it can reveal layers of complexity that were completely invisible before. What appeared to the child as a flash across the sky became, to the electrician and technician, an extraordinary event involving immense electrical potential, atmospheric conditions, conductivity, resistance, and discharge.

The mystery had not vanished.

It had changed its language.

When Lightning Became Personal

That distinction became especially meaningful to me in 2001, when lightning stopped being something I simply observed and became something I experienced directly.

That year, I was struck by lightning and went into cardiac arrest.

Obviously, I recovered. Otherwise, I would not be here telling the story.

Still, there is something strange about spending years learning about electricity and then having one of nature's most powerful electrical events pass through your own body.

That experience gave lightning another layer of meaning for me. There is a great difference between understanding something technically and experiencing its force personally. You can study electricity, work with it professionally, and know a great deal about how it behaves, but that knowledge does not fully prepare you for becoming part of the event itself.

A meter can measure electrical potential. A textbook can explain discharge. A technician can understand current, resistance, conductivity, and grounding. Those things are important, and I have a great deal of respect for them.

But lived experience creates another kind of understanding.

For me, lightning had moved from childhood mystery, to professional knowledge, to something that had physically crossed the boundary between the sky and my own body.

That progression has always fascinated me. The same phenomenon had occupied three completely different places in my life. As a child, it belonged to imagination. As an adult, it belonged to my profession. Then, suddenly and violently, it became part of my physical history.

Each experience changed the meaning of the one that came before it.

The childhood image of a crack in the sky did not disappear. The professional understanding did not disappear. The experience of being struck did not erase either one.

Instead, they accumulated.

That accumulation would later become part of how I understood magick.

Seeing Lightning Differently Fifty Years Later

Now, roughly fifty years after that child first looked upward and imagined cracks appearing in the sky, I see lightning differently again.

I still understand the science. I do not have to deny anything I learned as an electrician or technician in order to find magick in the experience.

In fact, I have come to believe that understanding the science can add another dimension to the symbolism rather than destroy it.

When I think about lightning now, I think about potential.

Electrical charge builds within a system. Differences develop. Conditions accumulate gradually, often without any dramatic outward sign. Eventually, a point is reached where the existing separation cannot continue in the same way.

A pathway develops, energy moves, and the sky suddenly lights up.

That process gives me a powerful way of thinking about magick.

Magick, for me, is not made more meaningful by ignoring reality. It becomes more meaningful when reality itself becomes part of the symbolic language.

Lightning does not need to be supernatural to become magical.

Its actual behavior is enough.

Magick as Potential Moving Into Expression

When we work magick, we often begin with something that cannot yet be seen. We develop an intention, focus our attention, create circumstances, make decisions, and direct our effort toward change.

Sometimes very little appears to be happening on the surface, yet something is still developing underneath. Thoughts are changing. Relationships are shifting. Opportunities are being created. Habits are being challenged. Decisions are forming. The direction of our lives may be gradually altering long before there is any obvious outward sign.

Eventually, what began as potential can move into expression.

In that sense, I see a meaningful correspondence between magick and lightning.

I do not mean that the two are physically identical processes. Human intention is not atmospheric electricity, and I see no need to pretend otherwise.

The value is in the relationship of ideas.

Lightning gives me a language for thinking about buildup, release, connection, illumination, transformation, and manifestation.

We gather intention and focus our attention until we are prepared to direct ourselves toward change. We release what has accumulated, whether that is an old pattern, a decision that has been waiting to be made, or energy that has remained stagnant for too long.

In the process, we may illuminate something that was previously hidden from us. We may clear away what no longer belongs, create a connection where there was distance, or allow one condition of life to transform into another.

This is part of what manifestation means to me.

It is not simply wishing for something and waiting for reality to obey.

It is a movement from possibility into expression.

Something begins internally or invisibly, conditions gather around it, and eventually there is some form of outward change.

Lightning Manifests Too

Lightning manifests in its own way as well.

The visible flash is only one brief part of a much larger process. Long before we see it, the storm is developing, charge is separating, and electrical potential is increasing.

By the time lightning becomes visible, an enormous amount has already happened.

I find that idea valuable because many changes in our lives work the same way symbolically. We often become discouraged when we cannot see immediate results. We may assume nothing is happening because nothing dramatic has appeared yet.

Nature continually reminds us that visible expression is often the final stage of a process that began long before we noticed it.

This is true in relationships, creative work, healing, learning, personal development, and magickal practice. Much of the important work takes place before anyone else can see it.

There is intention before action.

There is thought before decision.

There is preparation before change.

And there is potential before manifestation.

Lightning gives us a dramatic visual example of this. What we notice is the flash, but the flash is not the entire event.

It is the moment when what has been developing becomes visible.

Science Does Not Have to Destroy Magick

This is one of the reasons I no longer believe that scientific explanation has to remove magick from an experience.

Science and symbolism are asking different questions.

Science can tell me how lightning forms, how electrical charges separate within a storm, how discharge develops, and why certain atmospheric conditions make thunderstorms more likely.

Those explanations matter because they help us understand the physical world accurately.

Magick asks something different.

What can I learn from the experience?

What does lightning represent when I place it beside my own life? What does accumulated potential mean to me? What is waiting for release? Where am I carrying tension that needs a pathway? What needs to be illuminated? What must be cleared before something new can move through?

Those questions do not compete with atmospheric science.

One gives me physical explanation. The other gives me a way to reflect upon experience.

I think this distinction matters because magick does not have to depend upon rejecting what we know.

Too often, people imagine that science and magick must be placed in opposition to one another. One must be factual, while the other must therefore be fantasy. One explains the world, so the other must somehow challenge that explanation.

I do not see it that way.

Science explains mechanism.

Symbolism explores meaning.

Those two things can exist in the same experience.

Explanation Does Not Have to End Wonder

I think many of us lose something when we assume that understanding a phenomenon means we are no longer allowed to be enchanted by it.

Childhood wonder is often built around not knowing. We see something astonishing, and because we do not yet have an explanation, imagination fills the empty space.

Growing up changes that.

We learn why thunder follows lightning. We learn what stars are. We learn why the seasons change and why plants behave the way they do. We learn chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, geology, and the mechanisms behind things that once seemed almost supernatural.

Sometimes there is a quiet disappointment in that education.

The mystery appears to have been solved, and we may feel that something beautiful has been taken away.

I do not think it has to work that way.

Knowledge can replace an inaccurate explanation without replacing awe.

When I was a child, lightning fascinated me because I imagined the sky had opened into another universe. As an adult, I can be fascinated by the fact that enormous electrical differences can develop within an atmosphere filled with water droplets, ice particles, turbulent air, and changing temperatures until the air itself becomes part of a conductive pathway.

That reality is not less extraordinary simply because it can be studied.

In some ways, it is more extraordinary.

The childhood interpretation and the scientific explanation produce different kinds of wonder. One belongs to imagination. The other belongs to knowledge.

Neither has to destroy the other.

Magick Is Also About Attention

The older I become, the more I recognize that magick is deeply connected to attention.

It is not always about finding something hidden from science or insisting that the world must operate differently from what evidence tells us.

Sometimes it is simply about looking at the world closely enough that ordinary things become meaningful again.

A thunderstorm can be meteorology and still inspire transformation. A flame can be chemistry and still carry symbolic meaning. The Moon can be an astronomical body and still become part of ritual, memory, and reflection. A stone can be geology and still remind someone of stability, age, endurance, or place.

These meanings do not depend on misunderstanding the object.

They depend on relationship.

This is something I believe deserves more attention in modern magickal practice. We sometimes become so focused on inherited symbols, correspondences, and traditions that we forget to ask what the world immediately around us is already teaching us.

What do we actually encounter?

What captures our attention?

What has followed us throughout our lives?

What repeatedly returns to our thoughts?

Those experiences may become some of our most powerful personal symbols.

Geography Shapes Our Magick

Geography plays a part in that relationship as well.

The magick I experienced as a child was inseparable from the Gulf Coast. The landscape, humidity, ocean, clouds, and storms were all part of the experience.

I did not recognize that at the time because children usually do not think of their environment as one possible environment among many.

It is simply the world.

Later, living on the plains of Saskatchewan, I became much more aware of that difference.

The prairie has its own astonishing skies. The horizon can feel almost endless, and storms can travel across enormous distances in full view. There is a sense of openness here that is very different from the coastal atmosphere of my childhood.

Yet I still find myself looking for those particular growing clouds I remember from the Gulf.

Sometimes I see something close to them. A cloud begins to rise in the distance and, for a moment, I recognize the shape, the movement, or the feeling.

Then the moment passes.

There is no nearby ocean supplying the same heat and moisture, and the sky develops according to the conditions of where I am now.

For a long time, those moments felt almost like loss. They reminded me of something I could no longer completely recreate.

Over time, however, I began to understand that this too was part of the lesson.

Magick changes with geography because we change with geography.

The Magick of Where We Actually Live

The natural world does not present the same symbols everywhere.

Someone living near an ocean may develop a relationship with tides, salt, storms, fog, shorelines, and marine life. Someone living on the plains may develop another relationship with wind, horizon, grassland, seasonal extremes, and an enormous open sky.

A person living in the mountains may understand stone, elevation, weather, isolation, and direction differently from someone living in a forest.

Our surroundings become part of our magical language whether we consciously choose them or not.

The same is true of culture, profession, memory, and experience.

My relationship with electricity is not abstract. Electricity has followed me through several stages of my life. It began as childhood mystery. It became a trade. It became technical knowledge. It became danger. It became survival.

Now it has also become metaphor and correspondence.

That history is part of my magick.

Someone else may build their symbolic world around entirely different experiences, and that is exactly as it should be.

The most meaningful magical practice is often not the one we borrow perfectly from someone else, but the one that grows naturally from the life we have actually lived.

Tradition can give us language, structure, ritual, and symbolism. Those things have value. But our personal experience gives those systems life.

Magick becomes meaningful when it intersects with where we are, what we know, and what we have lived through.

The Magick of the Child Does Not Disappear

That is why I believe magick should evolve with us.

We are not meant to remain spiritually or symbolically frozen at the age when we first encountered wonder.

The child's understanding can grow into something more mature without being treated as foolish or disposable.

I no longer believe there are literal cracks in the sky revealing another universe to me when lightning flashes.

I do not need that belief in order to honor the child who once saw them.

What matters is that the child was paying attention.

He looked upward and saw possibility.

That same quality of attention can survive even when the explanation changes.

Today, when I watch lightning, I see the science, the danger, the memory, the profession, the survival, and the symbolism together.

Each stage of my life has added another layer to the experience.

None of those layers has completely erased the ones that came before it.

Perhaps that is what I mean when I say the magick of the child does not disappear.

It matures.

What once existed as imagination becomes reflection. What once existed as mystery becomes correspondence. The original emotion does not necessarily vanish just because the explanation changes.

Sometimes it becomes deeper because we now understand what we are actually looking at.

Knowledge Can Give Wonder Better Roots

The sense of mystery may no longer come from not knowing how something works. Instead, it can come from understanding how remarkable the process really is.

The imagination that once created another universe behind the clouds can become the imagination that recognizes correspondence between the natural world and our internal lives.

The emotion survives because wonder is not dependent on ignorance.

Sometimes knowledge gives wonder better roots.

This is something we can carry into many parts of our lives. When something that once seemed mysterious becomes explained, we do not have to mourn the loss of enchantment.

We can take what we have learned and allow it to deepen the experience.

Instead of saying, “Now I know what it is, so the mystery is gone,” we can ask, “Now that I know what it is, what else can it show me?”

That question keeps the relationship alive.

Knowledge does not need to become the enemy of imagination.

It can become its foundation.

The more accurately we understand the world, the more carefully we can choose the meanings we draw from it.

The Many Lives of Lightning

For me, lightning continues to speak about potential, movement, connection, release, danger, transformation, and illumination.

Those meanings are richer now because I understand more than I did as a child, not because I understand less.

The boy looking toward the Gulf Coast sky saw a crack leading into another universe.

The electrician learned how electrical systems behave.

The technician learned about communication and connection.

The survivor learned what it meant for electrical energy to become frighteningly immediate.

The person I am today carries all of them.

None of those identities stands alone. They overlap. They speak to one another. The child gave me wonder. The tradesman gave me knowledge. The technician gave me a deeper understanding of systems and connection. The lightning strike gave me an experience that no classroom could have provided.

Magick allowed me to bring those things together.

Not by pretending they were the same, but by recognizing that they all belonged to the same life.

I Still Look for the Growing Clouds

When I look toward the sky now, I understand what I am seeing, but I also remember what it once felt like not to understand.

I still search for those growing clouds.

I still notice the atmosphere changing.

I still watch for light moving inside the darkness.

The difference is that I no longer need to recover childhood exactly as it was.

I can allow the experience to belong to who I am now.

The Gulf Coast clouds of my childhood may never appear over Saskatchewan in exactly the same way. The geography is different. The atmospheric conditions are different. The landscape is different.

And I am different.

That does not make the magick less real to me.

It means the magick has changed.

I no longer need the world to reproduce a childhood experience perfectly in order to feel wonder again. I can recognize that what I am searching for is not simply a particular kind of cloud.

I am searching for a particular quality of attention.

I am looking for the moment when I become aware that the world is larger, stranger, and more dynamic than my ordinary routines sometimes allow me to notice.

Magick Evolves Because We Do

That, to me, is one of the most enduring qualities of magick. It does not have to remain fixed in one belief, one place, or one period of life.

It changes as we gain knowledge and as our circumstances change. It travels with us from one geography to another. It absorbs our professions, our memories, our hardships, our discoveries, and our changing understanding of the world.

We evolve, and our magick evolves with us.

There is no reason that explanation should crush wonder. There is no reason that science should make the world emotionally smaller.

If anything, learning how complicated and dynamic the natural world really is gives us more to contemplate.

The mystery does not always disappear.

Sometimes it simply changes its language.

For me, the crack in the sky eventually became electrical discharge, and electrical discharge eventually became correspondence. What began as imagination became knowledge, and knowledge eventually found its way back into wonder.

Looking Up Again

So I still look.

I look at storms differently now, but I still look.

I pay attention to the clouds, the energy in the atmosphere, the changing horizon, and that remarkable moment when darkness suddenly becomes illuminated.

I know what lightning is.

I also know what it has meant to me.

Those two understandings are allowed to exist together.

That is something I wish more people understood about magick.

We do not have to protect mystery by refusing knowledge.

We do not have to remain ignorant in order to remain enchanted.

We do not have to discard science in order to find symbolism.

We can understand something accurately and still allow it to move us.

In fact, sometimes understanding allows us to appreciate it more completely.

Magick can exist in the relationship between what we know and what we feel, between explanation and experience, between the observable world and the meanings we create through our interaction with it.

That relationship is not static.

It changes throughout a lifetime.

The child sees one thing. The adult sees another. The professional sees another still. The survivor sees something different again.

And perhaps wisdom comes from realizing that we do not have to throw any of those perspectives away.

The Cracks Are Still There

Sometimes I think back to that child watching lightning split the Gulf Coast sky and imagining another universe shining through.

I know now that there was no literal opening.

I know the sky had not cracked.

I know the flash was part of a physical process that can be studied, measured, observed, and explained.

But I also know that the child saw something important.

He saw that the world could suddenly become unfamiliar.

He saw that darkness could become illuminated without warning.

He saw that immense forces existed beyond what he could immediately understand.

He saw that ordinary reality could, for a moment, feel extraordinary.

Those lessons survived the explanation.

They survived education.

They survived geography.

They survived the electrical trade.

They even survived lightning itself.

Perhaps the cracks in the sky were never really about another universe.

Perhaps they were always about learning how to look at this one.

That understanding means more to me now than the childhood belief ever could.

Magick is always evolving because we are always evolving. It remains present in the world around us, but recognizing it often depends on whether we are still willing to notice.

The child may have grown older and learned how the sky works, but the capacity for wonder does not have to disappear with him.

The magick of childhood does not need to be preserved exactly as it was. It can mature with us. It can absorb knowledge, experience, hardship, science, geography, and time without losing the emotional core that first drew us toward mystery.

Just because something has been explained does not mean that the feeling behind it must be explained away.

Take the knowledge.

Let it deepen the experience.

Allow what you know today to create new ways of seeing what once fascinated you.

Magick is not diminished because you understand more.

Sometimes understanding is precisely what allows the magick to return.

It may no longer look exactly as it did when you were a child.

Neither do you.

But it is still there.

And sometimes all we have to do is look up.