The Wolf
“The world must be romanticised. In this way its original meaning can be rediscovered.” — Novalis
During an intense meditation retreat some months ago, a large grey wolf appeared at my side. He has not left since.
The large grey wolf moves beside me without haste, his massive head raised alertly, nose lifted into the wind. We take back streets to avoid the pedestrian zone, which is overrun at Saturday lunchtime. At a red light we wait while city traffic rushes past. I rest my hand on the wolf’s back and feel his bony shoulder beneath the shaggy coat.
He spent the first night in Leipzig at the foot of my wide bed. We have more space here than on the narrow mattress at the retreat house.
The wolf takes the move to Leipzig with equanimity — I notice no change in his behaviour. He is not the only wild creature in the neighbourhood, after all: falling asleep last night, we heard the piercing cries of grey herons fishing by lamplight in the canals. Early this morning, just after sunrise, the hoarse barking of foxes was drowned out by the raucous cawing of the enormous crow flocks that roost in the nearby zoo. Raccoons rummage through the bins; wild boar plough up the park. The wild lives among us. It does not occur to my wolf that he might be out of place here.
In the afternoon, as I type at my laptop in a café, he sleeps under the table. None of the other guests suspect that a large wolf is in their midst. Even my enchanted flatmates know nothing of their new lodger. And yet he is more present than many of those around me. He radiates immense energy. I keep trying to “see” where he draws it from.
The retreats continue to work in me — above all the last one. Last night I heard in my sleep, as if from a great distance, the dull beat of drums, the ringing of bells, again and again overridden by the shrill blare of bone trumpets. Everything around me was black; I seemed to be wandering once more through the caves of my interior, the wolf as always protectively at my side. But suddenly he was larger than me. As I wondered at this, I noticed I was no longer moving on two legs but on four white paws. My perception had shifted too: I seemed to smell, hear and feel more than I could see, and the darkness around me posed no obstacle to my orientation. With some effort I managed to shift my perspective — from dream-subject to observer. I saw from outside: the wolf padding through a dark cave, and beside him a grey-white husky with my blue eyes. In the dream, I had become a dog.
As we walk home through the Clara-Park in the diffuse light of dusk, I muse on the dream and watch the wolf trotting a few steps ahead of me, nose to the verge.
Suddenly I am overcome again by the vague sense of being able to perceive a boundary along which he moves. He seems to represent something like an interface. It is as though two energetic fields are meeting. He moves through my reality — and belongs to it. At the same time, the steady stream of energy that sustains him seems to draw from a source beyond my universe. As though something on the other side of that boundary flows alongside me in a constant, even current, its enormous energy perpetually condensing to my right. An energetic densification, whose intense waves of movement conjure within me the imagined image of a long-limbed, gaunt, shaggy wolf.
“Stop speculating,” I remind myself. “Don’t make a story of it.”
I am simply glad he is here. Whatever the reason.
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