We Are Broken
I just returned from a visit to South Dakota.
A colleague and I spent a beautiful weekend at the Crazy Horse Memorial.
If you have not seen this giant sculpture in progress on sacred Lakota ground, you must go.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is the largest mountain carving in progress in the world. When it is finished, it will be 641 feet long and 563 feet high, dwarfing nearby Mount Rushmore.
Stand there on Mother Earth and take in the Black Hills—and what it once was. As you follow Crazy Horse’s intense gaze toward the lands where his people are buried, it may just change you forever.
Chief Henry Standing Bear and other Native chiefs charged sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to begin carving this memorial 75 years ago. His profile is now etched in a granite mountain, honoring the Lakota leader of the Ogala band that fought against white settlers to protect their land and way of life.
Chief Henry Standing Bear said then about this effort that We want you to know that we have our heroes too.
I was at Crazy Horse to facilitate a board retreat and to participate in their 75th anniversary celebration. The program featured Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota track and field athlete who won a gold medal back in 1964 in the Tokyo Olympics.
No other person from the Americas has won the 10,000-meter race since.
We watched a short video of Mills’ winning moment that showed him coming from behind to earn his gold. It is considered one of the greatest upsets of all time because Mills was relatively unknown. He had been orphaned when he was 12 years old, and never even owned his own pair of shoes until Tokyo.
But what struck me about Mills’s comments was what helped him to win that race. He said that as he was running the final stretch, he saw one of the nearby runners sported a jersey with an eagle on it. And that eagle made him think of Crazy Horse. And of his Lakota heritage. It made him think of his father.
It made him think of flying.
Mills’s father had said to him, “You have broken wings. It takes a dream to heal broken wings.”
That quote ripped through me. I know so many two-leggeds who are walking the world with broken wings right now.
Some believe they were given faulty wings from the start. Others think that someone in their life broke their wings. Still others think that that their wings are now irreparable.
But what if all we need to heal those wings is a simple dream?
A powerful dream that can move you forward?
It’s worth checking out the condition of your own wings. How ragged are they? How deep are the slots? How much are yours dragging? What air do you allow between bristly yet powerful feathers?
It may be time to preen your wings a bit. To care for them. To revitalize them.
Are your wings prepared to take on the stress of flight in this world right now?
According to Billy Mills’s father, all we really need to heal broken wings is a powerful dream. A dream like Billy’s. A dream to run like the wind, to soar like an eagle.
What dream might heal your brokenness, so you might lift higher or glide longer?