The tale of two wolves

I heard this story once about how there are two wolves inside each person. One dark, one light and every day you decide which one wins and comes to the surface. I feel like I am in that place right now. Two sides of me inside wrestling for a place at the head. One says, go wild, be free. Leave don’t look back. Just go and don’t stop. Write and make art. Travel the world. Fall in love again and again. Get your heart broken and mend it again. Share stories, plant trees. Wrestle with your demons till they succumb. Find something new, go somewhere new. Try this new thing.

Then comes the other voice. The one that says, Stay. Be pragmatic. Be a realist. You crave stability. You want security. So find what gives you that. Settle down. Find the peace in a 9-5. Make art on the weekends. Call Home every week. See the steady boundaries of your life and yield.

And every day they fight to the death. Clawing at each other, they leave a bloody mess in my soul. They leave wounds in their wake that I need to tend to and nurture. Find soothing balms to remind myself it’s okay when you want stability and that there is no shame in wanting a wild life. Neither wins some days and I lay defeated between the two corpses of my wolves. The two halves of my heart. Some days they don’t even fight at all. They just sit on opposite ends and wait for me to take a step. And whoever I step towards comes alive with purpose and ideas and the other just lays down to sleep. Waiting for tomorrow.

Maybe one day, one will win over the other. Maybe one day one will step forward and take the reins for a few years before handing it off to the other. Maybe there is a third wolf I don’t know about, a hybrid combination of the two that stands majestic in its understanding that we are made up of parts that fit together to form the whole. And that this fight, this wrestle is because we haven’t found the edges that fit together just yet.

So there is tension and clawing and gnashing of teeth until you fit their jagged edges together and they settle down into peace.