The Language of Wolves
Wolves are powerful creatures of healing, familial lessons, and a wisdom we can access if we choose to open our hearts and connect with the essence of what they represent. The wolf spoke to me for the first time when I read Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in 2016 while living in California. As I turned the pages and absorbed the stories, one stood out to me — the tale of an old woman who gathered the bones of wolves and sang them back to life in the desert. At that time in my life, I too was gathering the bones to sing myself back into the wholeness — the wildness — of who I am and what I represent in the world. Like the wolves and their return to various regions of the United States wilderness, such as Yellowstone and the Colorado Rockies, I too was rewilding myself into the world. This laid the context for the lesson between myself, the wolf, and what their language taught me.
Historically, wolves have been misunderstood through myth and social bias as being vicious hunters of livestock and unintelligent animals with purely predatory instincts. These biases, according to science, are false claims. What wolves possess are qualities of intuition, compassion, and strong familial bonds that lie at the core of their instincts. Within the pack this social creature forms bonds with their pack mates, an alpha male and female act as a mother and father, and the entire family plays a role in raising pups regardless of their genetic relationship. My first visit to a wolf sanctuary in Lucerne Valley in 2018 became the keystone of what launched my inherent passion and irrevocable love for wolves. It was the first time I was kissed by a wolf — a white female wolf-dog mix named Shanta. When I looked into her eyes, I saw not only the wild in her but also an intelligence that went beyond words. Her kiss moved me to make it my ongoing goal to be in service to wolf and wolf-dog sanctuaries.
Beginning in 2018, I chose to raise and donate money and time to the conservation and ecological education about wolves by getting involved with sanctuaries in California, Colorado and Texas. There were key features and core philosophies that permeated the mission of these places: education, conservation, protection, and using the presence and interaction between humans and wolves or wolf-dogs as a healing experience. People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) such as veterans and children from abusive families would be educated on how to interact and approach a wolf. These people would enter into a supervised interaction with the wolf or wolf-dog and experience a breakthrough involving mutual healing between themselves and the wolf. It was a healing that spoke silently from the eyes of both beings. Many of the wolves I’ve met were rescues from owners who believed they could own a wild or partially wild animal or were from fur farms. When these wolves arrived at the sanctuary they underwent a process of integration, healing, and rehabilitation at the sanctuaries. Slowly, they built their trust and relationship to the human stewards that cared for them. When trauma is shared, the human and the wolf could see something in each other and be there for one another in their healing journeys.
The sanctuaries I became involved with not only illustrated the healing relationship between man and wolf but they also made ambassadorship a core element to their organizations. Ambassador wolves served as representatives to teach the truth to those who were ignorant to the truth. One man I met, a former hunter from the mid-west, told me his story and his journey that led him to stop hunting and the inevitable crumbling of his biases about wolves. He shared that it was when he met an ambassador wolf and saw the soul in the eyes of a wolf that he realized it was more than just an animal. He quickly developed a connection to wolves and through the inspiration to learn more from that experience, he retired from hunting and made his mission to help others understand the importance of wolves to the ecology of the land.
Wolves will and can change you, especially when you get close to them and lock eyes with one. There have been times where I’ve paused on the still land where these sanctuaries reside, buffered by the mountains or rolling hills, and listened to the chorus of howls across the enclosures. It takes you back to a simplicity that is wild and essential — a language older than our modernized world. This language, to me, is reminiscent of the earth itself and a melody that connects us back to the earth. A wolf’s howl is a thread that ties us to our wild roots and it taught me that re-wilding myself was about living authentically and true to my nature as well as adapting and building stronger bonds with those I love.
Even if we don’t speak the same language as wolves or any other wild creature, we can still learn each other’s languages to bridge the gap between misunderstanding and understanding. We can learn from nature and all her creatures, and particularly the wolf, how to co-exist and creative a vital, thriving and interdependent world where we don’t have to destroy one-another. Humanity and the wild ones all belong — we are a singular pack that each plays its role in the circle of existence. Each of us can help the other. A howl can bring us back to our wild selves and a song accompanied by a guitar can help sing the bones of nature back to life.
When we surrender to the presence of the natural world, our earth and her creatures, we can become one with it and hear the lessons, hear the wisdom and receive the medicine she has to offer.
