BROTHER WOLF: A story from Nature

The huge, shaggy wolf waited alone for the first light of dawn. The sky covered the mountain peaks in a vast darkness, but the wolf could smell the Sun rising towards the day.

In the valley below, fireflies ceased their nocturnal blinking, winking out one by one. A lone eagle rode the breeze, gliding in spirals down the slopes. The old wolf sniffed the air and licked his lips. The breeze promised clear skies.

The wolf settled slowly onto his belly and lowered his head onto his paws. He dreamed of hunting like a shadow, chasing lovers from midnight trysts, frightening children on forest paths. He could dream, but his body ached and his eyes no longer saw the stars at night or the mice scurrying in the grass. Even the 

moon did not stir him as it once had.

The wolf growled, a low rumble in his belly. The wind brought warning of the pious monk who walked the mountain trails to speak with the animals. Small and fine-boned, the monk came where he was not wanted, venturing further than others dared.

“Brother Wolf,” called the monk. "Hear me, Brother. The people accuse you and curse you. But I come to make peace between you and the people. You no longer need to terrorise the children. No more do you need to steal the cows and goats.”

The wolf could have told the monk that his desire to evoke terror was all but gone, but the holy man barely paused for breath. 

“The women will cook you a pot of oatmeal every morning. The children will gather eggs for your evening meal. The dogs will stop chasing you, and the men will stop shooting at you. Consider this well, Brother.”    

The wolf howled, a sound that had once paralysed goats and sent children scurrying home to their mothers.

The monk knelt on the mountain path to pray, his tonsured head glowing in the sunlight.

The wolf turned away. 

  

The monk finished his prayers and walked back down the trail.

  

The wolf followed, padding softly in the man’s footsteps. Halfway down, he settled  behind a large boulder. Butterflies flitted around his head, tickling his ears, and birds told stories from the treetops. The wolf dozed,  dreams moving through his body in remembered leaps and bounds.

The sun settled into the west, and the monk returned, singing as he walked. "Brother Sun, Sister Moon . . ."

Brother this! Sister that! Didn’t the little man have a family of his own? Quiet as a shadow, the wolf stepped into the  monk’s path. The singing stopped. 

“Brother Wolf! Just the one I was coming to see,” said the monk, smiling benevolently.

The wolf curled his lip.

"I have come to make you an offer,” said the monk.

“I know. Oatmeal, eggs, and no shooting.”

“All things considered, a generous offer,” said the monk.

The wolf sighed deeply. “Tell me more of the people who make these promises. Do they watch in awe as Sun rises each day? Do they hear the stories riding on Wind? Do they drink deeply of Water sprung from Earth that is our Mother?”

“Come, Brother, the townsfolk are waiting for you,” said the monk, looking away.

The wolf moved closer. “You call me Brother, yet you do not meet my eyes. Do these people of yours no longer look to Sun and Wind, no longer call Earth their Mother?”

“It is a time of change,” said the monk.

“Do you not sing of the lilies of the field?” asked the wolf. “Have the people not heard your songs?”

The monk shuffled his bare feet. “I sing of the lilies, but not all understand my words.”

The wolf sighed again. “I am tired. I will come down with you. Perhaps they will tell the story of the monk and the wolf when we are both gone.”

“Perhaps they will,” said the monk.

 They walked slowly down the mountain together, the huge, old wolf and the diminutive monk.

At the last bend in the trail, the wolf stopped. The hair along his neck rose in warning, and he braced to run.

But it was too late, and he was too slow.

The men of the town cast a net woven by the women with hatred in their hearts. They pulled the wolf, struggling and biting, into the town square. The children threw stones, and the young men stabbed with sharp sticks. Finally they hauled him, net and all, onto a pyre. Battered and broken, he lifted his shaggy head to look at the monk.

“Why?” he asked. “Brother.”

“Because a beast is always a beast,” said the monk. “And beasts cannot know Spirit.”  He threw a burning brand onto the pyre.

The wolf closed his wise, yellow eyes and howled.

The mournful cry echoed through the forest and across the mountains. The sound lingered at the edge of memory, haunting the dreams of the townsfolk, stalking the cobblestone lanes and mighty cathedrals of faraway cities. It resounded for seven generations, stirring nightmares.

Some say it lingers still in the mountain passes, riding the wind, entering the dreams of men who no longer watch in awe as the sun rises, disturbing the sleep of women who no longer listen for the stories in the air, stealing the innocence of children who no longer drink deeply of the water that springs from the earth. It resonates like a warning from the places where wolves no longer wait for the dawn.

Have you heard it?

THE ORIGINAL DREAM OF THE EARTH

"What became of the people of Earth?” the traveller asked the storyteller. 

“What happened to them?”

“Ah,” the storyteller sighed. “They lost their stories, so they died."

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We are alive in interesting times.

That aphorism has been attributed to an ancient Chinese curse.[i] Apparently there never was such a curse; the exotic story of its origins is a myth.[ii] The world abounds with myths, stories told personally and collectively to explain human experience.

Stories link us to our past and to our future. It is through story that human beings weave the threads of experience into a tapestry of meaning. Stories come in many forms. Fiction is a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact. A legend or fable is a story about mythical or supernatural beings or events. An allegory or parable is a short, moral story. Myth -- a traditional story often accepted as history -- serves to explain the world view of a people.

What, then, is the story we know as history? Clearly, it is something that belongs to the past. Is it an adventure story, a mystery, or a romance? Is it legend or myth? And how does it affect us in the twenty-first Century?

As an Australian child born in the fifties, I knew of at least one institutional home for Aboriginal children. If I thought of it at all, it was with a fizzy benevolence that the children were being provided for. It never occurred to me -- or the adults in my life -- to wonder why the children might need a home. Where were their parents?

I now know that their parents were powerless to prevent the children being stolen from their families to be raised in institutions. I call that story a tragedy. What of other stories from our past?

While it may be possible to collect the facts of an event from our own lifetime -- although, even that can be uncertain -- it is almost impossible to be sure of the stories that have come down to us through millennia. Our current consensus reality is in part determined by stories that began thousands of years ago, their origins long forgotten.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the conservation and environment debate. In the last fifty years there has been a gradual recognition of the serious environmental issues threatening human survival, yet there is still widespread ignorance of the underlying attitudes to Nature that contribute to the problem. In the modern world, Nature is regarded as separate from human beings rather than as the matrix of which we are a part.

Anthropological studies have suggested that the identification of women with nature and males with culture is both ancient and widespread. This cultural pattern itself expresses a monopolozing of the definition of culture by males. The very word 'nature' in this formula is part of the problem, because it defines nature as a reality below and separated from 'man', rather than one nexus in which humanity itself is inseparably embedded. It is, in fact, human beings who cannot live apart from the rest of nat ure as our life-sustaining context, while the community of plants and animal both can and, for billions of years, did exist without humans. The concept of humans outside of nature is a cultural reversal of natural reality. How did this reversal take place in our cultural consciousness? Rosemary Radford Ruether [iii]

Over the next weeks, I will be posting stories I have written about our relationship with Nature.If you have stories to share, please post a comment with a link to your stories or poems or musings . . .

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[i] http://www.noblenet.org/reference/inter.htm  In a speech in Cape Town, South Africa, on June 7, 1966, Robert F. Kennedy said, "There is a Chinese curse which says, "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times..." Journalists picked up the phrase and it has become a commonplace. It might be related to the Chinese proverb, "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period."

[ii] http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=33750

[iii] http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/openeye/sp000943.txt

Rosemary Radford Ruether is a writer and active campaigner for women's spirituality. She authored the first ecofeminist book, New Woman/ New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation in 1975. Her most recent book is Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. (Send stamped S.A.E. if you would like notes and excised mid-section.) The Women's Environmental Network runs a number of green campaigns and also organises occasional talks by prominent ecofeminists: WEN, Aberdeen Studios, 22 Highbury Grove, London, N5 2EA (Tel. 071 354 8823).