PACIFIC WILD

Kids, here is some incredible footage to bring your heart pure joy, this blustery gray November morning, with the first chill of snow off the mountains in the air. Some young folks at PacificWild.org set up cameras near Bella Bella, in the Great Bear Rainforest, and captured  wonderful glimpses of wolves at work and play. This last wilderness area is at risk, not just from extensive logging, already decimating the ancient forest, but from the proposed oil pipeline. These wolves may be enjoying the last months of such free and joyous living, before Mankind moves in, as he does so destructively everywhere he goes.

The camera is down now, but you can visit their site and click on the links, to investigate further. I certainly will be. I saw them on the news last night, on CBC. It was the first I heard of them. I only wish I had been following along the entire time. Maybe next spring! Below, there is a short clip of the wolves fishing. 

Of course, I see my wolf-Pup in there - he was of the forest clan, and lived off the sea as a wee pup before he came to me. He always loved the water, and wild salmon was, hands down, his favorite food. The last meal of his life was salmon, for which I was grateful, after.



I see Pup's body language in these young pups, the hunched back and the loping. Such beautiful intelligent creatures.

A Howl for Sister Wolf

They come with loud voices into the wild,
setting their snares:
Game Slayer Coon Cuffs, $29.99,
Rubber Jaw Coil Spring Leg Trap,
a bargain at $13.99.

Into the mud,
or under green boughs,
they spring them open,
then retreat.

As their voices fade away,
the creatures come back
to reclaim their habitat.

Sister Wolf streaks across the clearing,
head high, yipping,
joyously running,
her freedom felt in her very cells,
blood pumping,
alive, alive, alive --
until the sudden snap,
piercing unbearable pain,
and she is held fast to the earth.

She bites at it, pulls away,
realizes it cannot be escaped.
Growls, snarls, whimpers,
and then one mournful howl.
She sinks to earth.
Pain, thirst, hunger, fear.....
and then she hears them,
coming back,
voices loud, triumphant, laughing.

Dear God, help me not to hate 
the ones who set the traps,
for I do,
and it disturbs my soul.

* images from howlingforjustice.com

Wolves, a Woman and the Wild

Hi kids, I have just finished reading a wonderful, if heart-rending, book: Shadow Mountain : a Memoir of Wolves, a Woman and the Wild. It is written by Renee Askins, a woman who, for her love of wolves, especially a baby wolf named Natasha, devoted fifteen years of her life to helping to successfully reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Here are a couple of excerpts of what she has to say about connection with the wild:

"Experiencing the wild does not require conquest or challenge. Pitting one's wits against mountain, river or creature is an approach that can separate rather than integrate. I believe experiencing the wild is a process of allowing our senses to infiltrate, not overwhelm, the self. Our sense of self does not disappear for we, too, are of the wild; it is simply intermingled with a sensibility that is larger than we are, creating a vivid alertness and attentiveness. I think of it as being breathed by the world. Certainly, recognizing the wild involves a certain relinquishing of control, which is why so many believe we must renounce the symbols of control to experience it. I believe it is not so much the leaving as the letting go. We can experience wildness as truly through being vividly conscious during... a symphony as we can be venturing to the most remote regions of the planet. Wildness resides in us, around us, and between us.

"We haven't killed the wild but we have, over time, successfully repressed our consciousness of how important it is to us, buried it like a distant but seminal childhood experience. Its presence still expresses itself in every element of our being, however - our longings,  rages,  melancholies, pathologies and especially our dreams. Its repression only strengthens its power to haunt us......

"We still hunger for the wild as we do for our fleeting childhoods.......we are reaching for something representative of  the wild that we fear is slipping away, and we think if we mount it or wear it or own it we will embody it.  Because we intuitively know, as Gary Snyder wrote, 'A world without wildness is a world beyond its capacity to heal.'.........

"The reciprocity between wild nature and the wild in ourselves....still exists but lies dormant. It is this wild that Natasha revealed to me, a wild she both possessed and reflected.....

"For centuries, our search for wholeness has led us back to the animals, to our origins, to history. Something mysterious happens when we look into the eyes of an animal, whether it be a panther or a poodle - we see something familiar looking back....We see something that is within us and yet without us, something we recognize and yet is unfamiliar, something we fear but for which we long. We see the wild....At a time when our relationship to land and soil and place has been diminished, we still turn to our animals, domestic and wild, as a conduit to healing.And through our animals - those of our childhood, those in ouir homes, and those in the wild - we can begin to find our way back to being whole.......

"I began to realize that what Natasha really taught me was not what we had done to wolves or animals in general, but what we had done to ourselves. The conditions of her existence - trapped, diminished, disconnected and separated - were metaphors for mankind's existence. That we could sentence this creature, one of millions consigned to such a fate, to a life of concrete and cages, separated from her pack and natural habitat, was merely an expression of our own alienation. If our treatment of creatures like Natasha, domestic or wild, was as wounding to us as it was to her, then so might the gesture of inviting animals back into our lives, honoring their wildness and wild nature, their autonomy and distinctiveness, be a part of the journey towards reconnection and healing. The seed that John Weaver planted in his visit to Wolf Park, the idea of giving wolves back to Yellowstone and the wild back to wilderness, could represent one step on that journey toward restoration of our relationship with the natural world......

[Renee recounts the death of her beloved dog, Bristol, years later. Bristol was dying of a cancerous tumor, and suffering badly at the end.]

"I admit with some shame I did not have the courage to let her go. It was an act that was incomprehensible, as merited or right as it might have seemed....I was crazed with her pain and her struggle. Finally, at 2 a.m., I did what I had only done on a very few occasions, and only for the sake of my work. I called on.....the spiritual realm of wolves. Where the wild edge of our ancestor and animal guardians reside, where our spirituality wanders, and prayer travels, I invoked the memory of Natasha. I appealed to my sense of the beyond, to my trust in a meaning-filled universe where our actions and dreams matter. "For eleven years, I have worked on your behalf, Natasha, and for the wild rights  of your kind. I ask only this - that you take Bristol now. She is of your nature, take her now and stop her suffering, because I cannot. " In less than two minutes, Bristol died. Tom held her as she collapsed. I remember most the peace that replaced her anguished gasps for breath and the quiet offering of silence that held our relieved sobs. The wild's mercy......

[They wanted to return her body to the wild, so they carried her to a nearby rise, and covered it with flowers.]

"I felt strongly that Bristol did not belong under the earth. She was a free-flying spirit; no rocks or mud should cover her lightness. There the coyotes would consume her and through them she would still roam in both worlds, ours and theirs......

"As we rose to leave, I howled. Just once. A howl that screamed the agony of letting her go. Seconds later, it was as if the earth came alive. Coyote howls surrounded us like a sonata breaking from the sage and buttes and islands of trees. Howls from every direction, rising up and filling the dawn as it spread to light the peaks and ridges of Shadow Mountain."

(which just about did me in!)

Women Who Run With the Wolves

[image from whitewolfphotos.blogspot.com]

I am reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes these days, in response to the stirrings and mutterings of my inner wolf woman, who had been sleeping for a time, and who seems to have awakened. Here is a stirring quote from Clarissa, whose life has been a study of the wildish nature of women:

"Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth and health; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work and play are re-established; they are no longer marks for the predations of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive. Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mindset, job or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away and they know how to stay.

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and natural watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventer, and a listener, who guide, suggest and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds. When women are with the Wild Woman, the fact of that relationship glows through them. This wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports their inner and outer lives, no matter what......

Wild Woman is the health of all women.....She is what she is, and she is whole....If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free.....no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds back up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman. Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings, which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape."

Sounds good to me, kids!

Wolf Song

[Wolves of Yellowstone image from experienceactivetravel.com]

Wolf Song

'cross the frozen

midnight fields

wakes the sleeping

Wild Woman.