The Lightning Rock

Every morning when I get up and make myself a cup of coffee, I find myself staring face to face with a large molten-looking rock.  It's a fulgurite; a rock that was struck by lightning, found in a patch of desert and passed along to me by a paleontologist.   It had been superheated, melted and fused by the hammer of the heavens, and when most people see it they think it's ugly because it's chaotic in appearance.  There are air pockets and molten rivers and glassy patches where there used to be sand. It is large and heavy, a small boulder in a sunny patch on my windowsill where most others might have put a potted plant blooming with small pink flowers.

The rock and I have an uneasy relationship.  My superstitious very Italian mother hates it. She says fulgurites are cursed and bring ill luck to the home.  But I am not superstitious.  The rock and I stare at each other every morning because we share a history.  We've both been struck by lightning.   Sometimes I lean forward after pouring myself a cup of coffee and tap the mug to the rock and say, "cheers."  

I was nine years old and coming home from school.  There was a storm of the mediocre muggy summer afternoon sort and the sky was an angry puffy blue, like a face with a black eye. I'd seen storms like these almost every day of every summer of my life up to that point. I knew how they worked, what they smelled like, how they moved, and I knew from the way the sky seemed to take a deep breath and roll over that it was about to downpour, so I started jogging to get home. Somewhere in the last hundred or so yards to my driveway, I realized the hair on my arms was standing straight up. I remember thinking, "That's weird."  

I'd like to think that being struck by lightning is about as close as a human being can get to something like the event horizon of a blackhole.  There's something about that moment when my hair stood up that I cannot erase from my memory...like realizing you are being stretched into something you cannot escape, a thousandth of a second of a wordless profundity.  Maybe at some point there was something like a gravitational singularity, where time stood still and that maybe at that point I saw into my past and into my future.  A moment of infinity.

Well, either way it fried some things.

When I first picked up that fulgurite, I can't explain it, but it was if the stone and I had an understanding.   Even on a molecular level.  Two magnets, drawn to each other and repelled by each other.   While I tend to have an Adam-complex and I go around naming every single thing in my domain, the rock is simply the rock.  The one significant object that shares my space but remains without a name, without a label, without a denomination to me. It is...in a sense...symbolic of everything I cannot predict or control.  And every morning I get up, I look at it, and it reminds me that change is always prickling underneath my toes, or tickling the top of my head.