Dance of Two Wolves
Another older piece of mine written in March 2019, one year before the pandemic and 6–7 months before I met my future partner at an event in Santa Ana, California. I wrote this allegorical prose around my feelings of what relationship can feel like. It’s like a wild dance that has fluctuating movements and nuances we face with each change that happens within the sacred circle of two beings’ dances.
A pair of wolves dance together in the snow drifts, raising flurries of pearlescent dust — a cloud shrouding their intimacy in a mysterious veil. They play with a fiery fervor, nipping each others’ tails and growling with sensual delight. We can’t see clearly in the blurred movement of this tribal dance. We simply feel the guttural soul of who we are and hear the howls echo in the fortresses of our cosmic heart. It’s a wild, pleasurable, delicious sensation when we first meet alone on that empty plane. There’s just us.
Relationships of every kind begin in this anticipatory stage. Then, in time, they falter and flutter — the snow dust of our milk and honey imaginations settle into stillness. You see the other. As the final note drifts gently away with the wind, the alpha and omega see the reality of what it means to partner in the wilderness of our world and with each other. It’s here we are beckoned to act with wisdom as the challenging stage of relationship opens its chapter.
According to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “If lovers insist on a life of forced gaiety, perpetual pleasuramas, and other forms of deadening intensity, if they insist on sexual Donner und Blitz thunder and lightning all the time, or a torrent of the delectable and no strife at all, there goes the Life/Death/Life nature right over the cliff, drowned in the sea again.
Refusing to allow all the cycles of life and death in the love relationship causes the Skeleton Woman nature to be ripped from her psychic lodgings and drowned. Then the love relationship takes on a strained ‘…let us never be sad, let us always have fun’ face to be maintained at all costs. The soul of the relationship sinks out of sight, set to drift under the water, senseless and useless.”
We are bound to face the so-called strife and fluttering deaths within all of our relationships as we proceed to deepen our intimacy with others. We will move from one stage to the next stage and flow back into a stage of new life, a new chapter, should we have the intelligence and awareness to move through the discomfort of those changes, challenges, and deaths. It is no question, that no matter whom we come into contact with over a period of time we will inevitably be confronted with our own shadows and inner realities, experiences, nuances, judgments and emotions. When we experience this discomfort in the form of relating to another human being we can find ourselves blaming or projecting our experience of reality onto the other person as though they are the cause of this heist of off-kilter feelings we’re burning to brush off and feel good again. They’re the dust bunnies under the bed we’ve ached to ignore for ages and, now, in the alchemical container of our relationships we find ourselves called to face them within ourselves through the catalyst of another human being.
Mature love and relating whispers to us to see and hold space for each. When we can cease to run and sit in total discomfort and slowly, gently look up to meet the eyes of the other we’re ripped open. The skeletons are out of the closet. And when we’re met by our partner with such love, silent listening and containment for the space both of you share…you’ve passed through a death in your relationship. You’ve passed a door and it will be a new life for you both — together.
When the snow fell still and I saw you clearly,
I sat down slowly.
I could hear your heartbeat
as it echoed off of mine.
Your grey fur rustled in
the winter wind.
And your gold eyes shown
with light that danced
alongside the shadows
of your soul.
That’s when I knew
I loved you.
