The Wolf Came Back

Wake-up feel: 6.

Awake at 03:54. Not for any reason the morning gave me. The thoughts were already running when I surfaced, and they ran the way water runs downhill — toward the low ground, the dark side of things, what's wrong in what I love. I tried to change the channel. The channel does not change because you ask it to.

Five nights now on the ground. A tent, a thin floor, the earth under that.

In the night it rained. The drops came down on the tent roof and I lay there and they rocked me — not to sleep, I was past sleep, but into something steadier. A sound that asks nothing. By morning the rain had washed the air. The landscape stood out there clean and quiet and balanced, every edge of it settled.

The air was clean. The thoughts were not.

There is an old story about two wolves. A man carries both. One is generous and one is not, and they fight, and the one that wins is the one he feeds. I have always told it to myself as a question about feeding. This morning the question was smaller and harder. Not which one I feed. Which one I was listening to, at 03:54, in the dark, with the rain coming down.

I am sleeping on ground I know.

Years ago — 2019, if I have it right — wolves came across this land and killed two of my sheep. Real wolves. Real teeth. They took what they took and went back into the country they came from.

Now I lie on that same ground in a tent, and a wolf comes again in the night. Not across the field this time. Closer than that.

The same earth holds both. It does not seem to mind which wolf is which.

Flower day until eleven, then Leaf. The Moon goes into Scorpio at eleven — water. Tomorrow the full moon, the second this month.

The moon keeps a calendar, and I follow it. There is another calendar that says how far along I should be by now — what should be finished, what should already have begun. I am not following that one. The ground does not hurry because a date has passed; it moves when the conditions are met. What I am in is not finished. So I stay in it.

I boiled water on the little stove and made tea. Did the exercises. Packed the dirty clothes, because there is no infrastructure here to wash them — a simple tub, water and a clothes line to dry would suffice — and carried them with me to the city. The café in the station, the one I have used these past days, opens later on a Saturday. Another, beside the city hall in Frankfurt (Oder), opens early. Coffee. A plug in the wall. A place for the early birds.

The people who lived in this valley before us called the place Miłoraz — the beloved place. It was Slavic ground then, and to them the wolf was not two things. It was Veles's animal: the lord of the soil and of the dead, the keeper of what is buried. The wolf crossed between the living and the gone. They feared it and they honoured it — the same animal, both.

One wolf. Not two. And it had come back.

Day 65 — Phase 9 — Hearing — Pericardium — Amethyst — Psalm 46 + Gospel of John
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
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