My Whole Existence Is Flawed, You Get Me Closer To God

image: "0026" by solitarium

Part 1. Part 2. I am running out of songs that have the word "animal" in the title. So! In conclusion...

Whenever I hear stories about wolves, or see the Big Bad Wolf in the picture books, I imagine a black German Shepherd. Or an Alaskan Husky. You know, pets-- and ones that can accept members of their packs and even alphas that are so obviously outside their species. I don't disbelieve that in the history of the Western world or Europe that has had wilderness and nature based faiths, that wolves haven't earned a reputation among people... but I figured that I would have to be almost attacked by one to really get out of the mindset that a lone wolf is just a very fuzzy stray dog that's usually a real threat only to prey that is smaller than they are.

The wolf in my dream, the night of October 29 2012, appeared to assert a wolfishness that got me out of that mindset (although I was smaller than it was, slightly, that didn't strike me as much as what I sensed inside it.) Maybe, with the Game of Thrones marathon and my brushing up on Norse mythology, Vánagandr, Hati Hróðvitnisson and Sköll... some Platonic understanding of wolfishness was beginning to seep through?

I dreamed that I saw it attack people. I'd wished harm like that, but not really-- it was almost as a joke, it was something I couldn't make happen or (so I thought) even imagine. It would be abstract suffering expressed in a cartoonishly elaborate concrete way. Witnessing a wolf attack, in this dream, was a horribly ugly death. I saw the teeth bared, saw the rending of flesh, spurting blood, spilling organs... I saw people I disliked fight for survival against something built to kill, and, even though I couldn't look away-- even precisely because I couldn't look away and I had to see everything, every wound inflicted upon a body that must have hurt so bloody deeply and so much-- I felt an aversion to that situation.

So, that was horrifying enough. Then the wolf ate the meat bits. And I interpret that as a life lesson, actually, in forgiveness-- on the level of psychological dream symbolism and catharsis. I didn't want the wolf to eat the people it had torn apart, because then they would become a part of me and I disliked them. That was when I really felt that my self-triggering my own anger was the worse alternative to forgiving and forgetting them.

This dream appeared to be more psyche-ic than psychic. The grapevine says they've been having the time of their lives without me, as I have had without them except for this one oddly sympathetic nightmare about them being ripped to pieces by a dire wolf (in the way of dreams, sometimes, it was a pack of dire wolves.)

But I remember the connection I felt to to the wolf. When I tried to get a sense of the wolf's nature, I was surprised to sense a scythe-like aspect to it. This was a killer. It wasn't complicated by joy at bloodshed, or knowing what it has to do to survive, or the fear that one might not survive if one does not resort to this, or knowing its place in the ecosystem and the circle-of-life-King-Mufasa-lecture or anything. There was something pure in it that shall end you, period, full stop. I remember that scythe-like ferocity quite clearly. And I remember feeling the connection to me, even though I can't reason it out right now.