After The Lightning
The desert, the dishes and the slow work of spiritual formation.
I have spent too much of my life chasing peak moments. The dramatic win. The big breakthrough. I have been drawn to the electricity of the lightning-bolt moment—that feeling that I cracked the code and finally arrived.
This peak-seeking behavior has shown up in countless areas of my life. The spiritual landscape is just one of many. I wanted the moment of Satori in Buddhist terms. The epiphany in the Christian tradition. The burning bush. The psychedelic transformation — the overwhelming oneness that dissolves the boundaries of self and merges us into something vast and luminous.
At least this is what I wanted in my twenties when I found my spiritual path.
In This Is It, Alan Watts describes the countless ways spiritual seekers have tried to give voice to that ineffable moment of wonder — ego dissolving, cosmic consciousness flooding in, the sense that there is no “me” separate from the universe. Those moments can be awe-inspiring. They can shift your perception permanently. They can even rearrange the architecture of your life.
But they are not where the work happens.
The work happens afterward.
Back in 1995, I spent a month at Plum Village in the south of France studying with Thich Nhat Hanh and his community when I had decided I wanted to retreat and become a monk. What I found most transformational wasn’t some epic, mystical insight. It was simple daily rhythm. Monks and nuns cooking meals, washing dishes, gardening, driving into town for groceries. There was an extraordinary ordinariness to it all.
There is absolutely nothing cosmic about mindful gardening.
And yet, if you are fully present, there is everything cosmic about mindful gardening.
In Buddhism, the word samadhi points to that unified state of presence — where subject and object soften, where the boundary between me, the moment, and the rest of the world dissolves. It is a relief to experience. A deep ease in the body. A quiet dropping of the endless striving and surviving of the self — the bills, jury duty, traffic, the cat box, illness.
But here’s the truth: it is nearly impossible to stay there. That’s one of the reasons basic tasks of daily life are used for monks and nuns to practice. Can you stay present when you’re doing the dishes? Give it a shot. It’s harder than you think.
We get glimpses. And then life pulls us back.
We are held to this earth by gravity every second of every day, and we rarely notice it. But there is another force that feels just as constant — the force of distraction and mental disruption. In Buddhist language, it is personified as Mara — the energy that pulls you off your path and out of your presence. The whisper that says, “Check your phone. Hurry up. Worry more. Control this. Fix that.”
That energy hijacks consciousness daily.
At this stage of my life, in my mid-fifties, I feel more than ever the relentless pull of that force. Life drags us from equanimity over and over again. Work. Responsibilities. Health scares. Loss. Uncertainty. The narrowing of circles. The stripping away of what cannot stay.
And in seasons like this one, when illness reshapes the calendar and the circle narrows without asking permission, the temptation is to wait for lightning. For something. For a sign that everything will resolve cleanly. But what has carried me hasn’t been spectacle. It has been simple, daily practice.
For a second week in a row, I found reassurance in a Lenten sermon with the family outing to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. The essence: there is the lightning of revelation, but afterward, there is the slow deepening of relationship — with Christ, with Buddha, God, with whatever name you give to the divine presence that humbles you and holds you.
The sermon contained one clear message: faith is not measured by the intensity of your epiphany. It is measured by the continuity of your practice. As Jack Kornfield wrote, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”
After the desert revelation, the walk home. After the cosmic Dead Show, the traffic jam leaving the Coliseum. When life strips away what cannot stay, you discover what is immovable.
And what is immovable is rarely dramatic.
It is the vow.
It is your devotion.
It is the quiet decision to show up again tomorrow and tend to what life tasks you with.
The lightning moments may awaken us. But the slow, hard seasons form us.
Hard seasons don’t usually produce spectacle. They produce suffering that shapes the practice that forms the bedrock. They narrow the field of noise and leave you standing on something dense and solid. Not ecstatic. Not euphoric. Just grounded.
And here is the grace in all of it:
We strike out.
We lose focus.
We fall asleep at the wheel of our own awareness.
Over and over.
But we get a do-over every day.
Every morning is another chance to sit. To breathe. To recenter. To remember the interdependent nature of life. To step back into the ordinary holiness of washing the dishes with attention; to return to love when ego tightens its grip.
The illusion of the self is powerful. We live inside it most of the time. But the practice — the daily, weekly, monthly return—slowly erodes the illusion through repetition. What we do every day forms the substance of who we become.
When life feels like it is throwing everything it can at me, returning to meditation has been a lifeline. Every morning I sit in my prescribed seat, staring at the wall, practicing awareness and remembering. Some days I feel like I am back in kindergarten. The mind can be so chaotic in the quiet. I watch the bullet train of thoughts racing through consciousness as I try to stay present and breathe.
Humans. My Lord. We are a beautiful mess — bombing and building, attacking and loving, defending and forgiving — all at once.
Cosmic consciousness is magical. But ordinary mind, trained in presence, is where depth is formed. In silence. In the daily patience of facing everything that wants to break the spell.
If I can train my body in the gym, I can train my mind on the cushion.
After all this time — all the wins and all the losses, all the ecstasy and all the suffering — some days it feels like I am just getting started.
And in some way, every day, I am.
Monday Meditation:
Notice where you are waiting for lightning. Notice where slow formation is already at work. What remains if you stop chasing intensity? What in your life feels immovable — steady, grounded, quietly present?
Breathe.
Then wash the dishes.