nature

What I Learned from Being Kissed by a Wolf

There is a wolf rescue in Westcliffe, Colorado– way back along several dirt roads and a few foothills. This rescue has one objective– if it’s good for the wolves, they do it. It’s been running since the year I was born, 1986, and the founders are calm, generous spirits who you can sense possess the half wild that humans dream of when they are kids– the in tune nature we possess before formal clothing and social expectations wield their way over the freedom of bare feet and sun on our skin.

We’d played a show for a group of 90 or so in town the night before, a favorite on the folk circuit. So much so, that our fellow folky friends reminded us over lunch on our way down– “Don’t forget to see the wolves.” This was our third time to Westcliffe, and both times before we’d forgotten to see the wolves. We are always in a hurry, and are working on that habitual flaw. So we called our host Bob as we drove down to the show, as a reminder to ourselves and a commitment to upkeep, and told him, “We have to see the wolves.” He obliged.

We took a quick morning run with our very tame dog, stopping at a local coffeeshop where the barista was chatty and asked us what our day would bring. “The wolves,” we said.

“Are you going to let them lick your teeth?” he asked.

Without hesitation, I said “Yes. It’s all I can hope for.”

And it was.

When You Go To Meet the Wolves, there is no guarantee they will greet you. They are wild, or at least half wild, and it is in fact very weird for them to want to approach. But if you are a very careful and a very lucky human, it can happen. And when it does, you must:

  1. Walk in with your shoulders back, looking around. Women are typically better at this, as they have been conditioned to be multi-taskers, watching cubs & prey & predators at once, chronically aware of danger and potential danger. Men, on the other hand, have a tendency to stay narrowly focused, hunched, and singularly minded. This inability to be open does not warrant the respect of a wolf, and just as the man ignores his wider surroundings, so he will be ignored by the wolf as neither threat nor peer.

    When I enter a room now, I will keep my shoulders back and my senses awake. My presence may feel threatening to some, but to those that matter, I will appear as an ally.
  2. After entering the den, look for your spot to sit, and sit down like a Queen to her Throne. Face up, shoulders back, alert.

    I would add to this, deep breaths. I am in more danger by believing I don’t belong somewhere than to believe that I do.
  3. When the wolf approaches and makes eye contact, look back. This is contrary to what we have been taught of wild animals, and contrary to what we have come to believe about people who are different than us. Anyone who cannot hold eye contact with a wolf is neither friendly to their approach, nor worthy of their time. For people, the same.
  4. Do not be on your technology. Hunching over and staring at a phone creates a hunched back, a downward gaze, and is not the behavior of a guest. It is the behavior of a mountain lion. It is the behavior of a predator.

    The wolves do not care that you have a social media post you have to check in on, or that flights to Edinburgh have just gone down $53, or even about your Merlin app that helps you connect with nature. They care that you are present, and not there to attack them. And even if they know that you are not a mountain lion, it has not yet been resolved as to whether or not the device in our hands isn’t the predator to us. When you are with the wolf, be with the wolf. Though this advice might be important in anyone’s home. What are you doing here if not to be here?

    5. Remain calm. The wolves can sense your fear. They can also sense if you are too eager. Neither is worth their welcome. Come back when you can be a guest that is respectful, and not radiating an energy that will disrupt their intentional ecosystem.

    You are a guest here in this den. You are a guest here in this country. You are a guest here on this earth. We are only caretakers, immigrants, passers through. And we are only given the time we are given. Don’t be afraid. Don’t rush out ahead of yourself. You’re here. Be here.

When Kissed by a Wolf:

  1. Do not draw back. Remain as steady as you can. She will come to you fast, and you have been taught to be afraid. But from the moment you walked into her den, you have been training to be open and ready for her approach. It only takes minutes to untrain a lifetime.
  2. Grab behind her head and pull her in. Do not push her away. You’ve been fooled your entire life to believe that you don’t deserve this gift, the gift of close contact, the gift of a wild face upon your own face. But to push her away now would be to do to her what you have always done with everyone else, and the result is the same– she will think she is not wanted. She will be rejected. She will go away. And for all of your life you have never been so lucky as you are right now, this glorious fur and direct eye contact in your tame-for-too-long face– so for the love of all things sky and moon above, grab behind her head and draw her in. Drink the connection of stone to grass to wolf to woman and let her know that you are not only here and in control, but she is in good hands. Hands firmly here.
  3. She will want to lick your teeth. You are welcome to keep your mouth closed, but you’ve come this far, and even as you purse your lips, she will fleabite your lips until they open and then she will lick your teeth anyway. So it is better to have it. Let it be the full dental exam you haven’t had yet this year as you worry about your healthcare getting taken away– but wait, don’t worry about that right now. Because you are being kissed by a wolf in her own home and you have nothing in your head but this strange tongue in your mouth and the joy of being chosen. From here, she may let you pet her. She may arch her back and let you pal around and play and scritch those hard to reach places and circle you again and you will allow it because for the first time in your life, you are ready and truly open.

But Remember This:

Once a wolf has greeted you in this way, it is the equivalent to shaking hands in someone’s home. If you try again, it will seem strange to her. If you try a third time, she may be put off. Ten times in a row and you are a crazy wolf who needs to leave the den. Do not keep trying to shake hands with your host.

You simply have to accept that you are now accepted. This is the hardest lesson we may have to learn as people.

But sometimes, if you’re really really lucky like me, she might come back again. And again. And again. And you might be greeted like a long lost friend who has been reunited after years of being apart and no matter how many times we have kissed, it seems too good to be true and you will be kissed again. And in the acceptance and repetitive welcome of a wolf named Eden in Westcliffe, Colorado, you will come to accept a part of yourself you couldn’t before.

It will be an almost full moon that night. You will feel compelled to step out and see it, even though you are bone tired and feel less like you belong in the outer world of tall buildings and highways. And you will put your shoulders back and your chin up. Although it is a farce that wolves howl only at full moons, the truth is much better. That wolves howl at half full moons and no moons at all, too. They howl after feeding day, and when a change in the wind comes. They howl and howl and howl to mark the changes in the world and the changes in their lives and the cacophony would be maddening… if you weren’t now part wolf, howling back– open, open, open.

Mission: Wolf is located outside of Westcliffe, CO and currently houses 15 wolf dogs. Their ethos is simple– if it’s good for the wolf, they do it. If it’s not, they don’t. We owe them a great debt for the visit we had there, and the experience they offer all visitors and community members to bridge the gap in our brains between humans and nature through education, interaction, volunteerism, and space. If you would like to donate, visit, or learn more please head to https://missionwolf.org/

All photos by the staff at Mission: Wolf

One Tree Less

We lost a lot of trees while we were gone. Not small ones. The storms that blew through New England while we were down south, soaking up the sun on tour, wrecked our yard. We were fortunate– they didn’t land on the house, the shed, my studio. But it was no small destruction. A huge one went down, taking a few smaller ones with it. The trees that remain around the fallen are still bent at an angle from which I’m not sure they’ll ever recover.

I have not yet spent enough time in my home or on this land to be able to distinguish if they were at all useful or important to our two-and-a-quarter acre ecosystem. I couldn’t even tell you their specific classification. Mostly, we lost pines. We’ve been told that’s common here– pines don’t have tap roots. They’re real pushovers. Oaks, I am told, maples– the big deciduous types not only have a taproot, but are a flat replica of themselves below ground. They spread wide like the base of a wineglass, their roots luxurious in space, deepening further with their extended tap root finger marking their spot. Which is why they are more likely to survive the heavy winds of a New England storm.

The big tree that fell was this kind. A maple.

It created a small mountain of limb and trunk and branch, at which we numbly stared from our bedroom window. The immensity of this aftermath was trumped only by the loss of our lone and favorite Blue Spruce that went down next to the driveway– a household favorite– ball and all headlong upon our entry.

Trees have always been an obvious metaphor for me. As a kid, my parents called me a Treehugger, a gentle nag at my penchant for spending long mornings and afternoons in the woods around our cabin, coming back with a list of animals I’d seen, plants I’d identified, and rocks I thought pretty enough to bring home so that they lined the windowsills. I was the one who stayed indoors during deer season, gluing together pompoms and pipe cleaners and smearing them with paint rather than smearing my hands with the blood of the deer the rest of the family hunted– the deer that would feed us the rest of the winter. The venison I had no stomach for as I got closer to adulthood, as grateful as I was to their sacrifice.

“Our little Treehugger,” my dad would say as he came back in for lunch to find me melting wax onto a finished art project. It didn’t bother me, as I knew I didn’t actually hug trees… very often. It was a shorthand for some sort of understanding about who I am. A way of distinguishing some core belief I contained that was apparent to everyone, that didn’t seem to conflict with what I believed about myself enough to protest. And from there, I grew into a folk singer– treehugger adjacent, if not synonymous. In a sorting and forgiving of my childhood story’s hurt, I now have a maple tree– the maple from the backyard of my childhood home– tattooed up my arm and on to my right shoulder blade coming just short of my spine. A tree, at last, to hug me back.

And then I have my Circle of Trees.

Annie reentered my life in 2020, after a long hiatus of growing apart and moving on. We did long distance yoga and book club and grew to touch base almost every day. A happenstance of the pandemic, and of lowering our defenses. We had a third, too, but she fell away like a pine. Annie and I persisted, and came across a book that would help define us– The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s a book of faith, and a book of losing faith, and a book that took two women who invited a third– not long after a fourth– and grounded us firmly in each other’s path. The passage that has become our own shorthand is that of the Circle of Trees, wherein Kidd describes her women folk as a circle in the forest, in which each of them are a tree. They are rooted in each other’s soil, growing separately but sharing sun and shade and nutrients– sharing the earth beneath them as a way of communicating and connecting. It’s a metaphor that makes these hapless sensitive spirits feel stronger, less alone, and shielded from even the strongest New England storm.

The pine who blew down, she eventually grew back. Tentatively at first, then extraordinarily fast. For a minute, I mistook her for a maple. An oak. An ash or a birch or even a cottonwood. But a pine, however beloved, is still a pine. And at the end of last year, a wind took her out again from our circle. Not even a strong one. Just a low breeze on an ordinary day. And like that, she was laid out, rocks falling from the ball of her roots, though still casting those rocks in our direction.

“We are one tree less,” Annie has been saying since. The ache of it radiates from the truth, and I have still not fully healed from the loss. It is one thing to have a tree blown away. It is another for her to pick up her roots and leave. The unnaturalness of this departure crowds out my acceptance.

So when we came home last week to find our trees down, I was submissive to the metaphor again. I strained my eyes against the barrenness of the large tree’s absence, and covered my head with my blanket at 7:20 in the morning, when the sun peers in through a window that this tree used to block from glaring directly on my head. I begrudge her more. And then, I decided she was not a pine at all, not helpless and unsure and unable to resist. She really was a maple. Only a hardwood could do this much damage– and take so many down with her– when she uprooted and decided to fall. This was not the result of a light wind, but an accumulation of storms over time. One tree less, maybe, but a Circle of Trees affected. She’d been releasing her roots before someone else ever came to push her out.

There is a myth about hardwoods, that their root system below is actually a mirror image of themselves– that they go as deep as they do tall, each branch above replicated by one below. This is not true. In fact, it is near impossible for a tree to do so, to dig so deep, and still receive the nutrients it needs to survive. It must grow outward at the base. We are never exactly who we are above as we are deep within, no matter how hard we try. Always, we must spread our roots out toward others to steady ourselves. I am no exception. I can only hope my taproot is not formed of anger, but of something more sustainable. I can only hope I keep reaching out.

I have been finding small miracles beneath the wreckage. We have made friends with our neighbor, now– a handyman we were certain hated us, but turned out only not to know us at all. He came with machinery to clear out the large slabs that would’ve taken us a couple weeks to clear ourselves– slabs he’ll mill and use for his own work. He left us neat piles about the property– fodder for a bonfire we intend to invite our friends to this month before we leave again for our next tour. And also this: in late fall, we planted a northern tart cherry tree. It sits in the back yard, and was fully forgotten in the felled tree derelict. My Someone came in after the first assessment, looking hopeful.

“Everything is okay?” I asked.

“Well, no– we still lost a lot of trees, but guess what?” he paused for an answer, and on receiving none, continued, “I lifted up some of the limbs and found our cherry tree.”

I sagged, feeling myself drowned beneath a heap of limbs.

“No,” he said, reading me, “it’s okay! I think it’s going to be just fine! I straightened it up, and it looks to be in good shape.”

What luck. What damn dumb luck. Of all the pines, the big maple, the creature casualties– the littlest, not yet one year with us, held on for hopes of spring.

Sometimes the trees that have grown so big and strong around us, while destructive in their exit, aren’t as meaningful as the ones we are planting right now, the ones we are tending to. These little ones that may even one day bear fruit. Literal fruit. Sometimes, when those big maples fall, you’ll still notice the big gap like a toothy leer, but then you’ll suddenly remember what’s important, and with a quick assessment, can save what’s beneath it. And the sturdiness of a cherry tree in its first winter will shock you back into doing the good work of putting your hands to the soil– continuing to reach out. Of unexpected new neighbors. Of the reassurance of old friends.

Sometimes one less tree means a little more light for the rest of it. Some of it blinding in the morning, willing you to get up and see how it also shines directly down on a winter day to a strapping young cherry tree, waiting to be born.