Let It Crack My Heart Wide

Let my knees bleed

Through the misty rain, I looked up to see a dark blur whoosh through the air and land, somehow, at the tip of the giant spruce tree. A great horned owl. He shook the rain from his feathers, tucked his wings, and peered through the dusky clouds, alert for field mice racing through the wet grassy tunnels in the pale autumn pasture below.

I wanted him to stay. To hoot hoot from the tip of that tree. To spin his head all the way around this way, then all the way around that way. To shake out his feathery coat and tuck back in. I wanted to steal away to his world. But he was there for only an instant. In a great leap, he thrust himself into the drawing night and disappeared, his silent wings beating.

This moment came like grace, a breath, right in the middle of heaviest words and heartache and life that’s battering, by incessant waves colliding, fragmenting, breaking. When the night is in pieces and sleep isn’t found and you lie on lumpy pillows, staring into the blackest blur. When day is hard and the next even harder and you drive out a lonely dirt road and stare at the mountains and ask why. Why?

When you sit alone at the edge of a lost pasture and scrape leaden words hard into paper, just to get them out. When you tear those words into tiny, tiny pieces, and scatter them to the wind-swept prairie, hurl them to somewhere else. When you stand on a life-drained hill, with your man by your side, and you crumple under the heaviness, bury your face, and sob.

Life is hard. It’s hard here, and it’s hard there, and around the globe, it’s unimaginable. My heavy and heartbreaking, so privileged alongside mutilating and horrific. Humanity staggers under compound sorrow. There is no filter there.

So let the suffering road I’ve walked, if even a privileged little, crack my heart wide for those who are suffering, too. Let me weep because they do. Let me wrap my arms around them, and my prayers around the clock. Let my knees bleed. Let me wobble to my feet, then, and stagger with them. And let us glance up, together, just in time to catch a breath of grace in the beating of wings.

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