Something Has to Break

I’ve always loved the idea of living in a cabin in the woods. Me and the birds. The breeze. The place that understood me.

I eventually ended up living in a camper for a time, tucked into the trees on some church land of my aunt’s. I looked out the window and imagined my dreams had been realized. Ironic, since I was recently divorced, drinking my nights away, and… searching. Searching the branches outside the small camper windows for purpose. For vision. For… anything.

The birds came anyway.

Native to the Ozarks, they didn’t ask if I was worthy company or what I had done to land in this vulnerable situation. They just sang to me. Graced my window with their presence. Bobbing on the thin branches that scraped against the camper’s edge.

Soon after I moved in, a cute little gray bird started slamming himself into the glass. Over and over. Not graceful like the others. Definitely caught my attention. I looked him up and found he was a tufted titmouse. I giggled at the name, transforming for a moment back into the kid who built forts in the Eastern Oklahoma woods.

He kept showing up. Loud. Determined. I started to wonder. My very spiritually enlightened aunt whose land I was living on inspired me to look into it.

Turns out the titmouse has a lot of spiritual significance.

Quiet confidence. Inner courage. Curiosity. Resilience. Joy in simplicity. Transformation.

That last one hit me hardest: transformation.

Because that’s what was happening. Everything in my life had cracked open. I didn’t feel strong. I didn’t feel brave. But I was paying attention. And something in me was beginning to shift.

Now five years later I have found a tool in which to connect my story to yours.

I painted “Breakthrough,” as a memory, a moment, a sign, that when we are in those vulnerable fragile times we are on the verge of something. The glass might just be about to shatter. We are transforming in the ugly sacred process of our brokenness. 

Now, when I see a tufted titmouse outside the tall windows of the real-life cabin my husband built for me on that same land, I watch the little gray bird simply play and enjoy the day. And I’m reminded that the transformation I went through was necessary to make space for a life more beautiful than the one that little girl building forts in Oklahoma could have ever imagined.