are you the white wolf?
previously unshared stories from the Other side of my Two Wolves cosmology (and; the cross-sections of brutality and softness)
in the book of legend, the white wolf is mentioned at the Start.
i am standing between them— The Two Wolves— one black, one white, on the great bridge spanning the worlds. the black wolf offers:
it is the nature of this life, child, he says, looking past me to the white wolf. you must spend your time walking with us both.
it is implicit that i have Been Walking with the white wolf up until then— at least that’s how i understood it at the time. that the white wolf was my ‘regular life,’ the topside world— and the black wolf was arriving to take me to the underworld, to the bottom half of the circle. to all those Other places everyone was telling me to stay out of, keep away from, in my crises, destructive patterns, depression/darkness, erratic thoughts. the places i was visiting, or rather, being pulled down and into, with increasing frequency.
i will see you again, the white wolf said from behind me. know that i will see you again. the you that is true beyond all this, beyond this story, beyond the light we throw, the shadow we cast, how high we climb, how deep we dig.
those were the white wolf’s last words to me before i chose to embark with the black wolf. i wrote these in november 2016— 8 years ago now. i read them like i read the rest of these stories— so familiar to me, and yet, always Marveling.
after a few journeys with the black wolf, i encounter the white wolf in this way, and that is really the last of them, in specificity, in the book of legend:
that night i dreamed of the white wolf, cloudy and hovering on a cliff-top. i called to him but he did not move. my mother was with him. my father, my siblings, my grandmother, and my child self.
i clung to the arms around me— some flesh and blood, some gnarled, some winged, some ghost. their arms, their fingers, their hands were all i could focus on.
with my eyes on the white wolf, i drowned.
this is The Thing about myth. even personal myth. when it pours out from Some Other Place— even you, the writer, don’t understand it. maybe, until later.
maybe not.
***
fast forward to end of 2019, early 2020. the black wolf has become my core guide, my healed and healing animus, my inner king.
the white wolf reemerges for the first time in a way that there is Dialogue with them. a sense of their Who-They-Are-ness. i had chosen to leave my relationship and the home i was trying to make with my partner right at the time the book of legend was going to be released (sept ‘19); i cancelled the book launch and the books didn’t even arrive on time. i was living in a temporary sublet, and was walking for the first time in the Edges-of-the-Edges of astoria neighborhood i was going to be moving into, getting a feel for this New/Next part of the journey..
everything had turned to mist—
the tops of the buildings now half reconstructed into the hazy dream that had settled lightly onto the landscape.
it wasn’t like the nothing. it wasn’t erasure. it was the kind of day that once would’ve made her feel listless and dreary. but there was a delicate sheen to the fog-- twinkling lightly with the magick of potentiality. it was not outright— not the kind you’d come storming in to claim or reclaim. it announced itself in a pure whisper of self-assuredness. nothing else was needed at this moment in time.
out of these generative mists the white wolf appeared. straight out of the clouds advancing on the path beside her— conjured by it but also creating it, in tandem.
she had always been comforted by its presence— but since her many journeys and adventures through fantastickal lands and bottomless underworlds, she felt subtly and then strongly that her perception of their dynamic had changed.
the funny thing is, she started— i thought i’d been walking with you already. i thought that's where this journey all started.
the white wolf nodded.
you have. and you were.
then softly smiled.
but not like this.
this was Post-book of legend. more of the Next stories— stories that i have gathered nowhere except in my mind and heart, myriad pages, typed phone notes squirreled away.
i’ve written constantly on instagram, and since this summer more expansively on substack— but This. this is my heart of hearts. has not felt like the time to put The Stories Themselves on the internet without a nest around them, without holding.
i can already feel how this path is different, i whispered, breathless— catching the ever beloved scent of hearthfires curling in the atmosphere.
i looked at him.
you want me to experience— to create for myself— something i’ve never let myself have.
something i’ve never let myself have.
i’m typing now, Beginning this— the morning of imbolc, st brigid’s day. for the first time i left a shawl/scarf, my one emblazoned with the blue-green-brown pair of wings, hanging out the window for her to Bless.
there is a crayon drawing that didn’t exist a day ago on my wall, with the white wolf and the child warrior and the saint of the sword and the whale carrying the little blue egg in a brown nest— walking towards a fire-topped verdant gate framed by trees and foliage, with the words: MAY YOU TRUST THE PATH THAT LEADS ONWARDS written in varying shades of green.
here is this being i Thought i understood. the counterbalance to the black wolf. to the underworld one. it was where i came from. it’s the topside world. it was life Before— ‘all of this wild shit’ started happening to me.
but/and i tell you— the perplexingness of how much i Didn’t know, Haven’t known, about them— first designated as him, now emergent as her— has continued to reveal itself. since that reemergence in january 2020, she’s been walking with me— and it was my intention in writing this to begin Tracing her path, and what she’s been trying to show me.
i see her there in the drawing, on her hind legs, totemic. golden crown hovering above her head, fire lit in her body-cavern, sky blue and sea green in her crayon-outlines.
are you the white wolf?
***
it’s now a few days later, february 4th. i wrote this entry on substack in between, about ‘a signpost reading: go no further.’ i wrote on instagram about this song and its lyrics: ‘do you think that spring is coming? i need some respite from the dark’ ..
i wrote:
as a self-proclaimed being of the Deep Deeps, and the Darkest Darks— letting the littlest bit of myself really Hear, and Feel, these words— feels heartbreaking. am i betraying the underworlds that raised me, that taught me So Much of what i Know— by recognizing, in that tiniest bit— that i am missing the topside world? that i am missing the Light..?
can it be, Really, that i am standing on the great bridge between worlds again, as i first did eight years ago— but This time, this time, i am saying farewell to the black wolf for now, to walk with the white wolf..? the thought seems unimaginable. so married am i to this story, to the darkness, to all it has Made me and Transformed inside of me.
i am remembering two things in tandem; how it felt in summer ‘22 to hear my friend jen retell a story (re)told by nana tomova about the white wolf— when she told of the little boy, point-blank asking his mother: are you the white wolf? i felt, unequivocally, that i was being Seen Into and Through. i am remembering in mid-january how it felt to Literally, Literally, find a 10 of swords tarot card lying in the street. it had a message for me Then— but i didn’t know it would Also be This.
the End of the Road. the Last Sword being driven in.
the signpost reading, Go No Further.
**
my conversations these days have been Gifting me. last night, with a beloved about familial trauma, enmeshment, narcissism. yesterday, with a continually-bonding fellow teller-friend about our fathers’ choices of life and death, their dual ‘mental illness’ diagnoses, their warriorship and brutality we are trying to Understand and Make Peace With and Disentangle From in our Own lives, as their children.
i returned this morning to writings from last year, last january. a Clear emergence of the white wolf, Again.
{i am realizing as i type this that She was also with me on the grief walks i was doing as part of the grief pilgrimage journey-process i was in for 6 weeks in april/may ‘22. funny how i literally feel i am tracking This Animal— her scent, her presence, her pawprints— through the landscape of my own life…}
this experience was not only written— it was Lived into. [more context in this instagram post, here.] it was given to me, Seen and Felt, in the ways that the book of legend stories were not only written, but/and Lived. it was harrowing; and i was genuinely Surprised that it was the white wolf there and not the black wolf, to meet me in this pushed-to-the-edges, brutal place.
in the spiral notebook salvaged from somewhere in my ex-fiancé’s apartment, i wrote ..
what is sung back onto the bones depends on what song is sung
the bones are possibility of starting again. pure.
from the base template
everything is my choice.
if i kill, i will need to keep killing.
if i harden, i will need to keep hardening.
suppleness flexibility softness.
to just hold the space for transformation without action. retaliation.
this is the halfway point.
*
the white wolf’s ability to just watch and witness.
The Utter Carnage.
to see me hurting myself. stabbing the snow and the earth. covered in blood. slamming myself into the tree until my shoulder broke. hearing the bone snap. stabbing him in the heart, going for the throat, asking— who’s going to stop me? her saying no one. and that’s exactly it.
becoming the deranged version of the black wolf, half-blind eye, fur patchy, in tatters. bleeding, foaming. coming at her.
do not think i am the savior. like i do not have a version of this myself. but one of us needs to keep the balance. […]
i saw her alternate self. all bones with terrifying bulging eyes, lidless, hanging in nothing. rusted blades and rail spikes jammed into open places, hinging. spikes raised on back where they shouldn’t be. i saw it behind her; is that the balance, at any moment it could overpower, get free? what was i going to do; kill her, too?
sitting there feeling and watching it. maybe i was more her than me, or both of us at once. marina [now mars, my SE practitioner/friend] told me my trauma pattern is speeding up, what if i slowed down?
my skin and fur bubbled up and over. melted off the bones. searing. she became la loba, so old and ancient and grizzled. who is sung back? that is the question.
i feel like i remember where this writing and visual was emergent from— recognizing that i was given— inherited— this heavy, bleeding armor of clacking blades, to wear. and i was trying to feel into the other edge— of lightness; the swan-feather cloak. my reaction:
i’m so angry at the swan-feather cloak. for being so pure. so soft. so unarmed.
how would i survive, at all?
how would they not hurt me?
i do feel, i do feel. if not Everything— but So Many Things— can be followed back, can be Traced.
a transformative mental health friend, sascha, writes:
‘the repeated traumas, the constant degradation, humiliation and violation that might pull someone lost into choosing to not only use violence as a tool for survival, but to identify with it’
‘one becomes both desensitized to cruelty by constant exposure to it, and after a certain point, be drawn to it as a way to access power’
‘it takes time, grounded courage, work, a constant presence and genuine understanding’
[…]
‘when you’re on the battlefield you can’t say STOP,’ i wrote last year.
because there is not sufficient safe space and time to hold the emotions, the armor comes up. the retaliation begins.
because the onslaught doesn’t stop, there is no recovery time.
it is almost an immediate knee-jerk reaction. defense mechanism.
The White Wolf Did Not Judge The Carnage.
just witnessed. did not try to fix or change it or tell me to stop. there was space in the forest. in the snow. in the remoteness.
it was a Massive Recognition, to come to the understanding: as i wrote— on one page in the spiral notebook, and then on the other:
ALL THIS TIME U’VE BEEN WAITING FOR SOME1 TO WITNESS YR CARNAGE + NOT RUN
THAT PERSON IS YOU
[…]
***
‘it is not a bad thing thing to protect yourself,’ i wrote to myself, on another one of those pages.
‘you would not still be alive if you hadn’t.
seriously + truly.’
i am reminded of the green knight’s words to gawain, knowing that he had offered his neck to the axe only whilst wearing the green sash that could protect his life.
i am Feeling Like That— in these journeys since the end of december, till now. as if walking half-stupefied out of a nightmare, or a dream.
yesterday, the Definitive message came— walking open-handed in the sunlight that hadn’t streamed in new york city for days and days. It Is Enough.
the white wolf Is here. to walk with you.
*
I Have, Fully, No Idea, What Comes Next, Friends.
*
in a box of papers and photos today i found this image of christ, despondent, in the Angel’s arms, the cover of the mass book from last year’s lent. i taped it to my wall, under this found quote about the labyrinth (the game version, of which, i finally put back into the box and back into the hallway, in its dismantled state).
STAND AT THE CROSSROADS AND LOOK; ASK FOR THE ANCIENT PATHS, ASK WHERE THE GOOD WAY IS AND WALK IN IT, AND YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.
‘a labyrinth is not a maze, as a maze has many paths and dead ends; in a labyrinth there is only one path’ …
this song gave me what i needed, yesterday morning, before that sunlit walk.
i leave it here, for me and for you.
<3
‘but you can choose how much of your life you live in that way. notice when it goes to extreme. how much light you let in.’
‘i am not a savior. i am a reflection of you in this moment.’
#followthewhitewolf
Thank you for all of this! Especially the beautiful image of the angel. Angels have been coming forward to me so much in these last few weeks. Blessings to you and the white wolf as you journey.