Three Lightning Bolts and a Quiet Seven
After Șomartin — Exile in Sibiu
Prayers, Spirals, and the Soil That Keeps Calling Me Back
Seven o’clock now breathing through the dark.
Sibiu slow and quiet.
Only the faint glow of the laptop and the steady Swedish heart at forty-eight bpm.
In my youth the pain was hard and sharp.
Young Kevin, not knowing how to cope, stood in his room pointing at the wall, circling, pointing at the wall, round and round, pulling the hair out from the crown of his head — strands coming loose between fingers, sharp tug at the scalp, the faint metallic taste of blood when I bit my lip to stay quiet.
Some days the comfortable numb would overtake me.
I’d sit there as if looking through binoculars the wrong way — everything shrunk down, safe, distorted, far away, the room’s edges blurring soft, the air thick with dust motes floating slow in slanted afternoon light, the distant hum of traffic outside like a heartbeat muffled under blankets.
The protectors were there, always are, always will be
but the pain wasn’t over.
Growing up hurts all of us, most of us, every last one of us — the ache in the chest like wet rope tightening, the shallow breaths that never quite fill the lungs, the quiet dread that tastes like old pennies on the tongue.
But I had been caught in the funnel, spiraling down and around, aiming for some point out there in time and space I couldn’t even see or even begin to imagine.
Every night the prayers came like old friends:
Our Father…
Hail Mary…
Holy Spirit…
Those prayers were my meditation long before I ever knew the word — lips moving soft, the faint scent of candle wax lingering on my fingers, the wooden rosary beads cool and smooth rolling under thumb and forefinger.
Even after Bert, even after four years of Sundance, the prayers stayed.
They never left.
One night thunderstorms circling Vīnas — where the little cabin stood.
I had my small teepee over the fire, just a scrap of canvas to keep the flames dry — damp wool smell rising from the fabric, smoke curling sharp and sweet from wet pine.
Sat there while the sky split open.
Thunder rolling low, vibrating through the ground into my bones, lightning cracking white across the hills, ozone sharp in the nose, rain drumming hard on birch leaves, mud sucking at boot soles.
Floyd’s voice came back clear:
“You see the lightning cracking as if walking toward you.
One lightning bolt.
Two lightning bolts.
Three lightning bolts.
Will you get up and run?”
The Lakota asked these questions to see what you were made of.
When Floyd asked me, I didn’t run.
And on this day in the teepee, with thunder circling Vīnas, I didn’t run either.
I sat there praying for the lightning to find me, to take me, to carry me away from the spiral.
Now I’m what I used to think was an old old old man.
I look back and I see it all:
The spirals.
The sine wave.
The valleys that felt like failure but were only inverted peaks.
The tantric energy rising and falling like the living sweater itself — stitch by stitch, row by row, wool catching faint woodsmoke, fingers callused from stone and loom.
The pain sharpened me.
The numb protected me.
The prayers held me.
The lightning never struck.
The thunder kept rolling but never took me.
Left me here instead — breathing, writing, waiting for the next green shoot to break through mud.
Instead the soil kept regenerating.
And right now, in this quiet seven o’clock, so many souls are praying for release, for kindness, for goodness — for the hammer to drop forever, for the lake to give back what it took, for the children to laugh without shadows behind their eyes.
In the Red Book quiet I see them sometimes — the old people from the lake, standing again, whole, no hammer marks, laughing soft with the children who never had to run, their voices carrying faint over wet grass and birch bark.
Active imagination lets them walk forward into the firelight, hands open, no fear, no grief, only the rhythm of the sine wave carrying them home, the scent of pine smoke and rain-soaked earth rising around them.
That vision comes when the night is thinnest.
That is my prayer too.
With everything I do.
With every word I write.
With every row I knit.
Stitch by stitch the sweater grows arms long enough to hold all the broken ones.
Long enough to reach the ones still circling their own walls.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
We are all related.
Now our minds are one.