It was lightning, cracking and carving the grey sky, that illuminated what I had forgotten. Maybe the parched air and patronising winds of the past few months had leeched it from my memory. Maybe the sepia fields and cracked lips were a timely metaphor for the drought that had dried it up from my life. Regardless of how it was lost, I remembered it again when I watched electricity cut the clouds into fragments.

I remembered my wonder.

In my wonder I was transported to another moment. It was five months earlier and I was sitting in an aeroplane, propelling across an inky landscape, forehead and nose pressed against cool plexiglass. Captivated.

A starry sky was the canvas for a series of lightning storms – nature merely trying to balance two electrically charged fields – but I saw more than that.

I saw a pure sky of stars dripping into a billowing horizon of white giants. The more I watched the more I imagined. I imagined stories for the scene. One, of the stars falling into clouds and blazing briefly before extinguishing. Another, the stars an audience in a night blue stadium watching fellow light dance on a cumulus stage. Yet for all my imagining there still didn’t seem to be enough stories or phrases to capture the brilliance of what I saw.

I won’t soon forget the pure headiness of that flight, the rush of wonder as I wiped away the clouds of my breath that formed on the glass, desperately trying to will the moment into indestructible memory.

It was an awe that travelled with me for many days. I could feel the spark of it in my chest when I told of the moment. The power of it reminded me of the beauty in the broken and the love of the One who designed such magnificence.

Of course, ‘many days’ is only finite and the awe faded. The spark flickered into the dark and the power lost its potency. And I forgot my wonder.

They say that you don’t realise what you had until it’s gone. I think that’s true. But I think it’s equally true that you don’t know what you had until it returns.

The lightning reminded me that I had been living for five months without wonder, and I immediately felt the absence of it throughout those months with that single spray of energy across an overcast sky.

It reminded me that I don’t want to live that long again without it. So my fingers came to the keyboard, to write this note-to-self:

Remember your wonder.

Remember it the mundane, or in the small.

In the way tastebuds hold on to the flavour of the hot chips you last ate in an airport cafe.
Or in the friendly, altruistic smile of a child who ran to give you your pen lid that dropped to the ground unnoticed.

Remember it in the extraordinary.

In wind whipping up white caps on an endless ocean.
In lines and shapes, the geometry of the earth revealed by thousands of feet of elevation.

Search for it. Don’t wait for it to return with thunder and rain.

Remember your wonder.