We consider wolves as a spiritual keystone species. We have considered the horse as a spiritual keystone species, and we can learn a lot from both Wolf and Horse as archetypal currents in the soul. Wolf is part of the mandala of the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum. In light of recent events in Wyoming and more broadly, this contemplation on the spirit of Wolf seems important and overdue. Includes reflections on the books, The Philosopher and the Wolf (by Mark Rowlands), Beyond Words (by Carl Safnia), and the books on the Yellowstone wolves by Rick McIntyre, which start with The Rise of Wolf 8.

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The Way of the Wolf - Wolf as Spiritual Keystone Species, Teacher, and Friend

Part 5 of an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

This is a big contemplation—the Way of the Wolf. We’re going to go deep, so stick with it. The terrain could get rocky.

Last time we reflected a little further into ecological thinking, and tried to better understand something that might at first seem merely poetic: Thinking like a mountain.

That has to have a big meaning for us. This kind of thinking can bring medicine to the world. And I come to you today in the shadow of all the wounds of the world, including the wars in Europe and the Middle East, the terrible crises on the African continent, and the continuing ecological crises that go altogether with the humanitarian crises.

For all the intense emotions that these terrible things can evoke in us, I know that some of us also feel an additional emotional charge in relation to our non-human kin. In particular, it has been pretty challenging to hear about what happened in Wyoming with a young wolf.

In this contemplation, we will return to a famous passage from Aldo Leopold that invites us to see wolves differently. We considered it before, but now we will consider it with a beginner’s mind, and put it in a different context to give it a fresh meaning. That context includes our last contemplation, so let’s refresh our memory about it.

We considered the idea that we need a better sense of the meaning of thinking. We don’t know how to think well. If we did, we’d have peace, and we’d have clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and plenty of food for everyone. We wouldn’t be in the midst of a self-created extinction event, and we wouldn’t see so much inequality and injustice.

What’s our problem? Gregory Bateson put it plainly when he said our problem is that human beings don’t know how to think in the way Nature works.

How can we arrive at more vitalizing ways of thinking? How can we learn to think the way Nature works? Put another way: How can we think more creatively and more in accord with wisdom, love, and beauty?

We noted that Bateson gives us a hardnosed scientific argument that indicates mountains think, and that we might somehow need to learn to think more like mountains.

We associated that kind of thinking with wildness itself. Bad thinking amounts to domesticated thinking. We need to go further into all of this, but we can at least say better thinking doesn’t require us to live naked in the woods. However, it does require more contact with Nature beyond the built environment than most of us get. And it requires us to learn how to think from the wild beings who made us what we are.

It’s very much like what the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said. He said that Indigenous peoples don’t revere animals because they are good to eat. No. They revere them because they are good to THINK. We need to learn how to think Wolf, just as we need to learn how to think Horse. Just like we can follow the Way of the Horse, we can follow the Way of the Wolf in order to begin to think the way Nature works.

In the book, The Philosopher and the Wolf, the philosopher Mark Rowlands writes about his profound relationship with a wolf who came to live with him as a puppy. We’ll get to the puppy in a moment. First let’s start with what Rowlands does in this book, which is a wonderful work of philosophy, which I recommend wholeheartedly. I don’t recommend too many books written by living philosophers, but this one is worth reading.

Let’s start with a slightly longer passage. I’ll let you know when we get to the end:

“If I wanted a one-sentence definition of human beings, this would do: humans are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves. Humans are credulous animals.

“In these dark times, it does not need emphasizing that the stories we tell about ourselves can be the biggest source of division between one human and another. From credulity, there is often but a short step to hostility. However, I am concerned with the stories we tell to distinguish ourselves not from each other but from other animals: the stories we tell about what makes us human. Each story has what we might call a dark side; it casts a shadow. That shadow is to be found behind what the story says; here you will find what the story shows. And this is likely to be dark in at least two ways. First of all, what the story shows is often a deeply unflattering, even disturbing, facet of human nature. Second, what the story shows is often difficult to see. The two senses are not unconnected. We humans have a pronounced facility for passing over the aspects of ourselves we find distasteful. And this extends to the stories we tell to explain ourselves to ourselves.

“The wolf is, of course, the traditional, if unfairly selected, representative of the dark side of humanity. This is in many ways ironic – not least etymologically. The Greek word for wolf is lukos, which is so close to the word for light, leukos, that the two were often associated. It may be that this association was simply the result of mistakes in translation, or it may be that there was a deeper etymological connection between the two words. But for whatever reason Apollo was regarded as both the god of the sun and the god of wolves. And in this book it is the connection between the wolf and the light that is important. Think of the wolf as the clearing in the forest. In the bowels of the forest, it may be too dark to see the trees. The clearing is the place that allows what was hidden to be uncovered. The wolf, I shall try to show, is the clearing in the human soul. The wolf uncovers what is hidden in the stories we tell about ourselves – what those stories show but do not say.

“We stand in the shadow of the wolf. Something can cast a shadow in two ways: by occluding light or by being the source of light that other things occlude. We talk of the shadows cast by a man and those cast by a fire. By the shadow of the wolf, I mean not the shadow cast by the wolf itself, but the shadows we cast from the light of the wolf. And staring back at us from these shadows is precisely what we don’t want to know about ourselves.”

This is all very powerful stuff. The book examines a lot of wonderful philosophical ideas about the nature of human beings and the nature of the world we live in. Wolves are a spiritual keystone species, and it behooves us to cultivate reverence for them. Much of what we considered in the episode called Horse Magic, Horse Medicine, Horse Mystery applies to wolves. A spiritual keystone species can shine a lot of light into our shadows, and help us to evolve.

Rowlands named the wolf that came to live with him Brenin, and here’s what he wrote about their relationship:

“It is the concept of guardianship rather than ownership that seems to provide the most plausible way of understanding the primary relationship between people – at least decent people – and their companion animals. But, with Brenin, this doesn’t quite seem to fit either. This is what distinguished him – decisively – from any dog I have ever known. It was only at some times, and in some circumstances, that Brenin was my younger brother. At other times, and in other circumstances, he was my older brother: a brother that I admired and wanted,

above all, to emulate. As we shall see, this was no easy task, and I never achieved more than a fraction of it. But it was the attempt, and the resulting struggle, that forged me. The person I became, I am utterly convinced, is better than the one I would otherwise have been. And nothing more can be asked of an older brother.”

As far as what Rowlands says in this passage, I think many of us have had the sense that our dogs can make us better people, but I have to agree with Rowlands that domestication has affected most of our dogs in many of the same ways it has affected us and most horses—though many horses, even domesticated ones, seem to have a closer connection to wildness than most humans.

We can learn something from our wild kin that we can’t necessarily learn so well from our domesticated kin. In some sense, our wild kin made us what we are, and we have simply forgotten all about their influence. That includes horses, when most horses were wild, and it includes wolves.

To appreciate the brilliance of wild thinking, let’s consider the example of the most famous wolf of our era, Wolf 21 of Yellowstone Park, here on Turtle Island.

Rick McIntyre spent more hours outside watching wolves than any other human being I know of. He chronicles the reintroduction of the wolves in 4 marvelous books. Read them, and you’ll thank me. They will take you on an adventure into the wild.

The first book is called, The Rise of Wolf 8. At the beginning of the book, McIntyre writes, “This book will tell the story of two wolves: the greatest wolf who ever lived and the one that was greater than him.”

You will come to feel this is true.

He also writes, “THE STORY TOLD in this book is an epic one, filled with heroes and heroines who struggle to survive and defend their families. A story that includes all the elements of a great tale: warfare, betrayal, murder, bravery, compassion, empathy, loyalty—and an unexpected hero. It is a story that deserves to be told by a literary genius such as Shakespeare, Homer, or Dickens. None of those writers was available.”

But Rick does a great job. The books are easy to read and will get you hooked.

The greatest wolf who ever lived was Wolf 8. Of course, there are many great wolves. Wolf 8 will win your heart though, for his spirit, and for the incredible courage, dignity, and kindness he taught his adopted son, Wolf 21, who became an even greater wolf.

Wolf 21 was a superhero. He never lost a fight, even though he once got jumped by 6 other wolves. He also never killed any of his opponents. Instead, once he had clearly triumphed, he let them go.

He was not an alpha male as we habitually think of that term. Rather, he exuded the dignity, courage, and kindness his adoptive father taught him. This allowed him to think clearly, and to focus cultivating peace and well-being in his pack, without aggression. He maintained peace rather than provoking violence.

Only because of his fine character did his lineage survive. If he had killed all his rivals, he would not have become an ancestor wolf, and his family line would have died out. Because of his kindness and clear thinking, his lineage survived.

However, he once faced a terrible situation. He had to leave the pack he grew up with so he could lead his own pack. That’s part of the epic you definitely want to hear. It involves a beautiful love story between Wolf 21 and the love of his life, Wolf 42.

But, when he first took leadership of the pack, the alpha female was another wolf, Wolf 40. She embodied the negative idea of an alpha personality: She was aggressive, reactive, violent, competitive. She was a bit of a psychopath.

Wolf 21 put up with her because male wolves have to honor their female companions. Still, his heart belonged to Wolf 42.

One fateful day, Wolf 8 found himself in Wolf 21’s territory. He had a job to do: Protect his family. And he threw himself into that job every day, even though, at this point, two of his canine teeth had gone missing, and one had gotten broken. He couldn’t possibly take down Wolf 21 even with a full set of teeth, let alone with only one functioning canine.

Rick watched as the confrontation began to unfold. He felt a sense of wonder at the courage Wolf 8 showed.

And he knew what it meant. Wolf 21 had to protect his family too. Wolf 8 had wandered into his territory, and he had already lost several pups. He had only two living pups, and he had to protect them.

As a skilled fighter, Wolf 21 would single out the leader of the opposing pack and take him down. Given his character, he would let his opponent live.

But, Wolf 40 was running hard behind him. Her hyper-aggressive personality would lead her to attack Wolf 8 while 21 had him pinned. Wolf 8 would die.

As the wolves got closer and closer, McIntyre tensed up. This was it. 21 would have to kill his adoptive father. There was no other choice.

And then Wolf 21 did something incredibly creative and wild: He ran right path Wolf 8 without even touching him, let alone attacking him.

This was impossible. It was like magic.

All the wolves with 21 ran with him, straight through the opposing pack. Everything became disorganized and confused. It was as if no one really knew what happened or what they were supposed to do.

After several minutes, Wolf 8’s pack gathered together and started to jump on each other with excitement.

21 ran to his pups, and led them away. No one got hurt.

You can understand why people cried when Wolf 21 finally died. They genuinely admired him. Just reading about him gave me so much admiration. The life of that wolf, and the love story between Wolf 21 and Wolf 42 will stay with me for as long as I live. If I end up with dementia some day, in the sea of confusion that dementia may bring, I bet the story of Wolf 21 will appear like a floating timber that will buoy me up for moments of clarity and joy.

Wolf 21 embodied exceptionally skillful thinking, and incredible dignity and courage.

Wolves in general have the capacity to do this. That’s why the philosopher Mark Rowlands felt so much admiration for the wolf he lived with, the wolf who felt like an older brother.

From a species perspective, wolves are our elders. That might be why humans deeply under the sway of domestication can show such incredible ignorance in relation to wolves.

I say this with a heavy heart. In the midst of all the problems in our world, in the midst of all the gratuitous violence and suffering, some human beings try to make themselves feel better about themselves by killing and tormenting wolves, coyotes, and other sentient beings.

Humans can utterly refuse to see the dignity of other sentient beings. In human conflicts, we find a terrible effort to dehumanize the supposed enemy. But this reveals yet another layer of ignorance. If one group of humans tries to dehumanize another, it means they have already accepted the yoke of domestication, and they have already asserted human privilege to feel better about themselves.

We have cut ourselves off from what we are. Anytime we do that, we seek a common enemy to bolster a sense of connection and superiority.

The level of confusion here boggles the mind. I don’t want to have to talk about what humans are doing right now to dehumanize each other, and I don’t want to have to talk about what one human being recently did to a wolf, because he transgressed against his own dignity the process, just as we transgress against our own dignity anytime we fail to acknowledge sentience and sacredness.

It’s not easy to acknowledge sentience and sacredness. It brings a great responsibility to us, and sometimes it brings fear and trembling.

When some people see a mustang or a wolf, they can’t get in touch with the natural sense of awe, reverence, and inspiration that belong to all of us, and that means they can’t learn, and can’t transcend their own limitations. The wolf or the mustang cannot function as an invitation and a guide into the great mystery.

Instead, driven by ignorance, fear, grasping, aversion, and self-doubt, many human beings resort to domination and aggression, especially in relation to the wild. They then take up an attitude of exploitation toward the world, in order to fill a hole they can never fill. They try to feed their hunger by eating shadows.

And we keep that going by telling ourselves reassuring stories. In the episode on the “Myth of Freedom and the Way of Mountain Thinking,” we considered how stories keep our insanity going, and how a proper mythology might help us uncage ourselves. The same thing goes on in human wars and in the relationship between humans and wolves, humans and coyotes, humans and countless other beings.

Remember what Rowlands wrote. He wrote, “I am concerned with the stories we tell to distinguish ourselves not from each other but from other animals: the stories we tell about what makes us human.”

We have ourselves locked in unskillful stories about what we are, what others are, what the world is, what the whole Cosmos is. It keeps us stuck in gratuitous suffering, and it keeps us at war with ourselves, with each other, and with Nature and all our kin.

We don’t have to live like this. The wild ones still call to us. We can still find joy, wonder, inspiration, and genuine magic in the world. The world still proclaims the sacred teachings of all our wisdom traditions. We just have to listen, to the wolves, to the mustangs, to the mountains, rivers, forests, and oceans.

We need to focus on the beauty, the joy, the creativity, and wisdom we find directly in the wild, and in the community of life. We also need to look at the hard things. If we look only at the positive things, we will lose touch with compassion. But it takes an active practice of compassion to be able to look at our own ignorance, and the terrible consequences of human ignorance we find in this world.

Ignorance is our only enemy. The humans who torture and kill wolves are not our enemy. The humans who torture and kill other humans are not our enemy. Only ignorance is our enemy.

If I were to call the man in Wyoming who tortured and killed a female yearling wolf “a monster,” I would presence the same basic energy that he did when he tortured and killed a female yearling wolf. The same holds for the ways both sides of a human conflict attempt to dehumanize one another, and justify killing each other’s children.

We now see an armed conflict in the Middle East that has resulted in the deaths of thousands and thousands of children. It’s unconscionable, but we still have to see things clearly, and not allow anyone to distract us from the fundamental point, including seeing how human conflict goes together with human-centrism, and how our great sin of cutting ourselves off from the wildness and sacredness of life has driven us to degrade our world and create more suffering and the potential for ever greater conflicts. We suffer from a lack of spiritual and ecological thinking in total nonduality.

Accepting all of this, accepting that ignorance is our only enemy, and looking clearly into the suffering in ourselves and our world—that requires a big practice. We have episodes on compassion training, and you can find free resources for compassion training on the Dangerous Wisdom website, on the resources page.

Keep in mind that compassion offers us a clear path to authentic fierceness. Compassion can be fierce. The difference between fierce compassion and human aggression in part has to do with our human agendas. A wolf like Wolf 21, defending his pups—he isn’t angry. He’s fierce. He does nothing more than he needs to do, and he doesn’t kill the aggressors.

There, too, in the capacity to presence fierceness without reactivity and aggression, the wolf can serve as a teacher.

We turn to someone as a teacher in part out of sincere reverence and admiration. The philosopher Mark Rowlands wrote about this reverence and admiration:

“On our runs together, I realized something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, unquestionably, demonstrably, irredeemably and categorically superior to me. This was a watershed moment in my life. I’m a confident guy. If people don’t think of me as arrogant – perhaps they do – that’s only because I’m good at hiding it. I can’t ever remember feeling this way in the presence of a human being. That’s not me at all. But now I realized that I wanted to be less like me and more like Brenin.”

He describes this as deeply aesthetic. Brenin had many virtues, but Rowlands noticed the incredible grace in Brenin’s manner of moving in the world, his whole way of using himself. This description is a little longer, so I’ll let you know when we get to the end of it. He writes,

“When we were running, Brenin would glide across the ground with an elegance and economy of movement . . . when Brenin trotted, his shoulders and back remained flat and level. From a distance it looked as if he was floating an inch or two above the ground . . . I can still see it: the ghostly wolf in the early-morning Alabama mist, gliding effortlessly over the ground, silent, fluid and serene.”

“The contrast with the noisy, puffing and leaden-footed thudding of the ape that ran beside him could not have been more pronounced or depressing. I wanted to be able to lope. I wanted to glide across the ground as if I was floating an inch or two above it. But no matter how good at running I became – and I became very good – this was always going to escape me. Aristotle once distinguished the souls of plants from those of animals. Plants, he claimed, have merely a nutritive soul – a soul whose function is to take in, process and excrete food. But the souls of animals, Aristotle called locomotive souls. It is no accident, I think, that he characterized the souls of animals in terms of movement. Contrary to what I was told as a student, I don’t think Aristotle simply meant that animals move around whereas plants do not. He was not, in general, a fan of platitudes. Rather, I think, if you want to understand the soul of the wolf – the essence of the wolf, what the wolf is all about – then you should look at the way the wolf moves. And the crabbed and graceless bustling of the ape, I came to realize with sadness and regret, is an expression of the crabbed and graceless soul that lies beneath.”

Okay, that’s the passage. Rowlands calls all of this “[an] unfortunate case of species-envy.” I think he’s right. Human beings can suffer from species envy.

And it’s not just the aesthetics. It’s the courage, the strength, and the sheer wildness. Wolves presence wildness, and that doesn’t mean they presence chaos or incoherence. It means they presence a clarity, lucidity, intimacy, and holistic knowing that most humans have gotten totally cut off from. They remind us of a dignity that belongs to us, but which we have forsaken, and they remind us of something indigenous to our own souls which we have covered over almost completely.

And so they frighten us. They frighten us as a presence of the sacred. As we have said, the sacred is that which evokes fear and trembling in an untrained heart. The howl of a wolf, let alone the sight of one, can evoke that sense of the sacred that infuses the whole Cosmos.

We could let that sacredness teach us. As a spiritual keystone species of special quality, the wolf appears in the mandala of the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum. All of the people who learn the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum learn that mandala, and thus they enter into the lessons the wolf can teach.

If we could put those lessons in a short phrase, it has to do with joyful perseverance and an incredible trust in self and world, an unshakeable confidence and an attitude that every situation is workable. When human beings say words like those, they usually amount to mere platitudes. But wolves embody it, and they teach us about real possibilities.

We recently had Carl Safina on the podcast, and I recommend that dialogue. In his book, Beyond Words, Safina writes about the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, in Wyoming:

During the reintroduction operations, researchers worried that the wild-caught Canadian wolves might try dashing straight home to Canada. So for several weeks they kept them in large “acclimation pens.” Most of them accepted this arrangement. But three defiant wolves never tolerated confinement. One jumped high enough to latch onto an overhanging section of ten-foot-high fence, then actually managed to curl his body around the overhanging mesh and escape. And then he dug back in from the outside—releasing his comrades. The three defiant wolves’ relentless chewing on the chain-link fence caused extreme damage to their canine teeth, basically wearing them flat.

[Doug Smith, Yellowstone’s lead wolf research, said to Safina,] “I thought, ‘Wow, these guys are kind of doomed.’” “But after release, you could not tell there was anything at all wrong. I thought, ‘How in the world is this wolf without canines killing elk?’” Wolf jaws exert twelve

hundred pounds per square inch, twice that of a German shepherd. “That’s crushing power.”

Four or five times, Doug Smith has caught a wolf to replace a collar and discovered that the animal had a healed-up broken leg. “Since I put their first collar on, I’d been tracking them the whole time; there was never an indication that, meanwhile, they’d broken a leg!” Once Smith was in a helicopter over a running pack. “They were doing the porpoising thing in deep snow. I darted the one at the back to put a collar on. When we reached it on the ground, I was

shocked to see that it had only three legs. From the air I couldn’t see anything wrong with how that wolf was running.” In that same group with the three-legged wolf, another wolf got a broken shoulder in late winter, probably from a kick by an elk or bison. “She was ten years old”—exceptional longevity for a free-living wolf—“and she lasted all the next spring and summer. I think the others were helping her.” In autumn, she faded out.

“When you examine their bones, you see that these guys have a very rough life and they’re incredibly tough.” Smith once spotted an alpha female whose leg was dangling; she was attentively watching her pack hunt. Instead of hiding and nursing her break, “she was right there, alert to what was going on.” She healed and survived.

“No,” declares Doug [Smith]. “Wolves never feel sorry for themselves. It’s never ‘Poor me.’ They’re always ‘Forward!’ Their question is always: ‘[What’s] next?’”

That’s the passage, and that’s what I love about wolves: They receive every moment of life as Sophia’s most devoted practitioners. They have a joyful perseverance, they never give up, and they approach every situation as workable. That’s the attitude of a real Buddha, a real Bodhisattva, saint, sage, or priestess.

The mention of the teeth might remind you of Wolf 8. But here’s the thing about Wolf 8: he had bigger problems than just missing canines. Rick McIntyre writes about looking at Wolf 8’s skull after he died:

“[Not only were three canines broken, but] several other teeth were missing or broken. [And] there were a lot of abscesses, meaning infections, in his jaws. [Carnivore ecologist] Jim [Halfpenny] said that there would have been a bad smell from those areas. 8 would have learned how to detect the scent of sickness and infection in prey animals and would know that he was now giving off that scent himself. Jim loaned me two photos of 8’s skull, and I saw that his jawbones were honeycombed with gaping holes from those infections. The front of his lower jaw looked more like a sponge than bone. The pain he must have endured from those abscesses would be unimaginable.”

That’s what McIntyre found out. And it means Wolf 8 went all out, even though he knew he smelled like a weakened animal, and even though biting on anything would have been painful. He never stopped to pity himself. That’s a sacred attitude, and a sacred embodiment.

The sacredness of the wolf goes together with the life of the mountain. The life of the mountain is their life—from the hot summers to winters at 40 below zero. The humans watching the wolves would have layers of high-tech fabrics on, and still find themselves shivering, while the wolves faced each moment with clarity.

As we noted, once our expansiveness gets broad and deep enough, we arrive not only at clarity but also real fearlessness, because we verify that have nothing to fear. We truly, truly have nothing to fear. The wolf touches that fearlessness more than most humans, and so most humans feel fear at the sight of a wolf.

Let’s think about that cage and those wolves for a moment. Many of us sense that we live in a cage, that the dominant culture functions in many ways like a cage. And many of us are too worried about our teeth to do much about it. We live in the Matrix. That movie grabs hold of us because of how it resonates.

Recently I heard the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton talking about our situation right now. He said, “The drug companies were paying off politicians to turn the other way when their constituents were dying in droves. There’s a sense in which the working class as a whole has become a flock of sheep to be sheered by corporate America.”

[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B0L83XhIr-I]

That’s a Nobel Prize-winning economist. But it’s not really shocking. And it has always been true in societies structured by conquest consciousness.

We considered some of this in various other episodes, like the episode called, The Magnificent Swindle,” or the episodes on “The Dangerous Wisdom of Adam Smith” and “The Dangerous Ignorance of Adam Smith,” and also the episode called “The Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burn Out, and Loneliness.” That’s a mouthful. But the secret is out in the open if we have the courage to look.

And we can cut through all this nonsense and break free from our cages—if we let the dignity and fierceness of the wolf inspire us.

Think about the image Deaton gives us: We’re a flock of sheep. It’s actually worse than that—or we can say, it’s not so nice as just getting sheered. We’re getting eaten alive.

So, will we be sheep—or will we become wolves? I love sheep. But I’d rather be a wolf.

Like a lot of other people, I worry about my teeth sometimes. That’s perfectly natural. But if we’re a bunch of sheep, or if we’re in a cage we’re not getting out of unless we’re willing to at least risk our teeth, we have some deep thinking to do—about what we truly are, and what we will let ourselves become.

We haven’t finished contemplating the Way of the Wolf, but it’s a good time for a break. If you have questions send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.