The World Is Still Within Our Care

What one rescued owl reveals about humanity’s tenderness, our shared responsibility, and the possibility of tomorrow.

Every day, the people around me remind me how grateful I am for this life. They bring their smiles, their kindness, their love, and occasionally a tantrum that suggests the management of this household will be receiving a strongly worded complaint. I get to learn with these people, grow with them, live alongside them, and become someone I could never have become on my own. They are my people, and even on the difficult days, I know how fortunate I am to belong to them.

Loving them makes the future feel terribly personal. I want my babies to have a world they can grow into, somewhere they can discover who they are and find people who will care about what they become. I want there to be forests for them to walk through, neighbors they can turn to, and enough kindness left in the world that needing help doesn’t have to mean being alone.

Last night, I was making potato soup when Ezra came up behind me and startled me while I was stirring. I pushed the wooden spoon forward, and some of the boiling-hot soup splashed onto my hand. Ezra, meanwhile, was holding onto my leg, having arrived with the entirely reasonable expectation that his mother would remain available for baby purposes during dinner preparation.

He didn’t get any soup on him, thankfully. But I couldn’t immediately fling it off my hand without risking getting it on him, and I couldn’t quite escape to the sink while he was attached to my leg. So I waited until he was clear. I ended up with a nasty burn from a meal whose primary ambition had been to become dinner.

The circumstances were ridiculous, and the burn hurts, but what stays with me is how completely his safety occupied my mind. He was little, he was close, and I needed the danger to stop before it reached him. He had no idea any of this was happening. He was simply holding onto someone he trusted.

I think about how much of childhood rests on that trust, how many times someone protects us before we are old enough to understand what needed protecting. My babies are growing toward a future they can’t yet examine or choose, and I want us to be people they can trust with it. I want the care we bring to our kitchens to travel with us into our communities, into the voting booth, and into the decisions that shape lives far beyond our own.

Some days, I struggle to imagine what that future will look like. Then someone reminds me that there are still people willing to help make it possible. This week, I found some of them standing beside a barbed-wire fence.

Good News Network shared a story about Sharon and Scott Jacobs, who were driving near Spearfish, South Dakota, when Scott spotted a bird caught in a fence. He thought it might already be dead, but Sharon asked him to back up. When she approached, a great horned owl looked back at her.

She spoke gently to it while they worked out how to help. Another driver, Brandon, stopped. He had gloves and wire cutters. The landowner’s daughter called her father, who gave permission to cut the fence, and together they began freeing the bird. Once one foot was loose, the owl placed its other foot on Scott’s gloved hand.

Brandon gave them his sweatshirt to cover it. Scott gathered it against his body, and the rescue continued through a veterinarian who removed the embedded wire and the Black Hills Raptor Center, which took over its care. The center was cautiously hopeful it would heal enough to return to the wild.

I keep coming back to that foot resting on the glove. I don’t know what the owl understood. I wouldn’t pretend to know whether it recognized help, or simply found somewhere to put a foot that had been caught. But I think about the difference between a moment when every movement might hurt and a moment when there is somewhere else to rest your weight. Another living thing is holding you, and for a little while, you don’t have to do all the work of surviving by yourself.

These people had left home with their own plans. Somewhere along the road, those plans made room for a life that needed them, and people who hadn’t set out together found themselves working toward the same precious outcome. I think there is an enormous amount of hope standing at that fence.

We hear so much about what people are capable of doing to one another that it can become difficult to remember what we are capable of doing for one another. Cruelty reaches us every morning, carrying fresh evidence. After a while, tenderness can begin to feel like something we’re remembering from a world that no longer exists, and we wonder whether believing in people is simply another way to get hurt.

Then someone notices a bird beside a road and asks to go back. Another person pulls over, brings what he has, and stays. A small gathering becomes a rescue because each person makes the next person’s effort possible. The one who notices needs the one with the tools. The people with the tools need someone who can tend the wounds. Nobody has everything, but together they have enough to give this creature a chance.

That’s the part of humanity I want us to remember. We are still capable of being interrupted by another life. We can still care enough to let someone else’s need change what we do next. And when I look at our country, when I look at the world my children are growing into, I think we are being asked to do exactly that.

There is so much worth loving here, and so much in need of help. People are trying to build lives while carrying burdens they can barely manage. Communities are struggling to hold themselves together. The natural world that makes every one of our lives possible needs room to recover from the damage we do.

It can be overwhelming to see all of it at once. We can stand beside something wounded and feel that we’ve arrived too late, or brought too little, or have no idea where to begin. But at that fence, help began with going back to look.

I want us to look closely enough at the world to remember that it is still alive, still full of people and places whose futures can change because of what we choose to do. There are children learning to read, people falling in love, seeds taking root, and neighbors making room for someone who needs them. There is an extraordinary amount of life here, reaching toward tomorrow. Our care can help it get there.

The world needs us the way that owl needed the people who stopped: to notice its suffering, bring our different abilities together, and stay through the work of making things better.

We don’t know whether the rescuers agreed about politics or much of anything else. We know that whatever differences existed between them left enough room for care. They found something worth helping, and that gave them a reason to work together.

Surely we can recognize something worth helping in one another. Surely the future of our children, the safety of our neighbors, and the living earth beneath our feet can give us reasons to gather our efforts and put them to use.

As citizens of this country, we have responsibilities that reach far beyond our own homes. People elsewhere in the world can’t cast our ballots or choose our leaders, even when their lives are touched by the choices we make. Our children can’t vote for the future they will have to live in. The forests, rivers, and creatures we share this earth with will never be able to ask for protection in a language Congress is required to hear. We have to remember them when we decide what matters.

I want us to elect leaders who can recognize the worth of a life without needing something from it, who understand that power gives them more people to care for and a greater responsibility to care well. I want the rest of the world to have reason to hope when it looks toward us, because we have noticed what needs help and are willing to use the power we have.

And we each have something to bring. Someone understands the policy, someone can explain it, someone helps a neighbor register, and someone provides a ride. Someone keeps showing up when another person needs to rest. We can make our contributions part of something larger, until another person’s future has possibilities it didn’t have before.

This is why the owl gives me hope for humanity. There were people available to be moved by its suffering, and their tenderness survived the inconvenience of doing something about it. We know that capacity is still here. We have somewhere to begin.

I think about my babies, and how much of loving them is wanting to place a future within their reach. I want them to have years I will never see, friendships I can’t arrange for them, and joys I don’t yet know how to imagine. I want them to grow beyond the life I can give them at home and find a world where other people will care that they’re here. Every time someone chooses to help, that world becomes a little more possible.

I hope the owl heals. I hope there comes a night when it can lift from a branch and disappear among its familiar trees, carrying a future the people who helped it may never get to witness. Somewhere in those unseen days will be the difference they made by stopping.

And somewhere in the years ahead of my children, there will be people whose care has made a difference for them, too. Some will be strangers to me. Some are here, reading this. We may never know how far the life we protect today will travel, or whose happiness will become possible because we gave what we could.

I am grateful to be becoming something with you. I am grateful that my babies are growing up in a world where people still stop beside a fence and find a way to help.

When I feel afraid for their future, I will try to remember that gloved hand. There are still people willing to hold some of the weight, and I can be one of them.

If this piece brought a little hope into your week, please restack or share it. Someone you know may need a reminder that there are still people willing to stop and care.

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Your kindness helps us keep making this little life together, growing things, raising our babies, and finding hopeful stories to bring back to you. We’re grateful to have you along.