
We are like someone in a very dark night
over whom lightning flashes
again and again.
Maimonides
The truth is that things are often dark because they’re deep, not because they’re forbidding. The purpose of spiritual lightning is to illuminate the deep. The Soul’s journey is to bring the totality of life and the depth of life together. This is the work of consciousness : to go from being blind to being sighted, to illuminate the dark, and to bring the totality of life and depth of life together, again and again, as long as we breathe.
We can understand the flash of lightening as the transforming instance of great love, or great suffering that breaks our trance of isolation, that jars us with wonder or pain into feeling our connection with everything. We’re illuminated when we least expect by great beauty or truth.
Mark Nepo