Wolf and Farm Dog

This is an old, old story. A starving wolf wanders the high mountains in winter. He can’t remember his last meal. He shivers in his sleep, and the ground is hard. One day he roams down into a valley and sees sheep grazing lush grass. His belly aches and saliva drips from his tongue. He approaches the pasture, head down, intent. Puzzled by a rustling in the grass nearby, he turns to see a farm dog trotting toward him and saying, “Good day wolf.” “Good day farm dog”, wolf replies. After some casual conversation farm dog says, “Wolf, how lean you are. I can see your ribs. You must get hungry and cold sleeping in those mountains.” “As a matter of fact I do”, admits wolf.

“Ah, that’s too bad. You know, I eat every day. I guard the sheep, as my master bids me to, and at night I get fresh organ meat from the sheep he kills. It’s a simple life of comfort and predictability. It’s too bad your drifting life style leaves you with so many unmet needs.” Wolf, with hunger crying from his belly, says, “Well, you make it sound like such a good life. I would consider living that way if I knew of a farm where I might work.” At that, farm dog wags his tail and says, “Oh, just come with me. My master will likely train you if I bring you home. Then you could be a working farm dog too, and enjoy the routines of a domestic life. I bet your ribs would hide under a healthy layer of fat in no time!” Hardly believing his luck, wolf trots behind farm dog toward the farm house beyond the pasture. He imagines falling asleep with a full stomach, dreaming satisfied dreams. As the farm house grows larger and more detailed ahead, he notices that farm dog’s neck reveals raw pink skin, and there’s some bright red blood dripping into the fur.

“Hey...farm dog, you have a wound on your neck.”

“Oh, this?” Farm dog glances over his shoulder. “It’s nothing. It’s just where the chain my master loops around my neck at night rubs the fur off. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”

Wolf stops and watches farm dog trot toward the warm looking house. “Good day farm dog”, he says, and turns toward the darkening mountains to vanish once again into the wild.

Since I first encountered this ancient fable it’s spoken to me on multiple levels, touching layer upon layer of how I make sense of the world and my place in it. We’re left with a sense that neither wolf nor farm dog has it all. Both lives leave them hungry in different ways. The tension among these needs is the story of civilization and the farming that led us there. Somewhere in the uncounted moons of hunting and gathering, someone saved a seed and coerced the soil to bear a plant specifically useful to humans. Someone tamed some herd animals enough to keep them around, relieving the hunter of the endless hunt. Someone lured a queen bee into a basket and her hive followed her. Instead of finding food in the wild, meeting it on its own terms, people figured out how to hijack the destinies of wild things and bind them to the destiny of people. We essentially learned to colonize other beings, getting them to work for us. Surplus food required armies to defend it. Excessive labor needs for cultivating land and managing herds encouraged coercing animals and people to do the work for free. And in those stories are the stories of the building of social order, laws and institutions, complex craftwork and engineering, cultural taboos and socially condoned behaviors codified in religions (religio- to bind). Empires colonized entire cultures, living off their efforts and resources- narcissism on the scale of nations. But a price was paid, and continues to be. We domesticated ourselves when we domesticated life. We take the chain, but the wild in us rises up every so often in history...the revolts, riots, countercultural movements, secret societies, the beheaded kings, the collapses of civilizations. The Saturnalia festivals that turned all the rules that kept society orderly upside down for a few days (these survive as Mardi Gras). Our story is the tension between the lawless wild in us all and the yearning for stability and order.

You might remember the story of your own taming, when you proverbially left the wild mountains. I remember hearing as a five year old that I needed to start using the toilet inside, like grown people do, instead of the yard, like our family dog did. The concession was necessary for me to make if people were going to be able to avoid stepping in my manure, but it was a moment I saw the wild wolf of me from the doorway of the farm house, and became self-conscious. I also remember the reluctant conversation I had with each of my daughters that they had to start wearing a shirt now, or they were going to attract unwanted trouble from the authorities (and perhaps from the repressed wild within men). We are born wild, without definitions, without right or wrong, without concepts. We are domesticated from our first breaths. We accept it quickly, swallow the cultural definitions surrounding us, as we rely on belonging for our survival. “Open wide, here comes Original Sin”, sings Regina Spektor. And the rules absorb into the fabric of who we are. We become mostly governable because we self-enforce, forming within us what theatre activist Augusto Boal called “Cops in the head.” The more of us there are, the more rules are made, and the more compromises we make to the total freedom of expression we were born with. Without the order, we might live in intolerable chaos and terror of each other. But, our bellies full under our roofs, our days mapped out on calendars, our clocks telling us when we will do what, our work days stretching before us, we catch ourselves stealing glances at the darkening mountains, hungry for something we don’t know quite how to name.

If we zoom in from the level of civilizations to what plays out in the average living room every night, we get to one of the more intriguing levels this fable speaks to. The animals within us tend to form pair bonds. Our learned cultural framework often calls them marriages. They are supposed to be the foundations of stability, the refuge of the farm house, and for some lucky couples they are. But the irony is they are often founded on the anarchy of the wild mountains. We “fall in love”, a most delicious, transformative, but ever-shifting fleeting experience. Love is wild. It does what it wants. It slips any chain at will, but will also willingly slip a chain over its neck. “Falling in love” feels like seeing the wolf in someone, the one who dwells in the mountains. We witness the un-self-conscious bare truth of someone who is here as plainly and miraculously as any tree, mountain or river. With a little magic it may be a moment when another looks into us and sees the wolf in us as well. And ultimately when we look into our beloved’s eye we see a pupil, in the most ancient latin root of the word, meaning “little doll.” The word references the tiny reflection of your own face you see in the dark pool of another’s pupil. In the language of metaphor we look into another and what we find in that dark wilderness is ourselves. This two-way recognition fills a true hunger in us. We can feel like children together with our beloved, because in a way we are children, seeing in each other the undomesticated primal wildness, the inborn essence. Newly in love, you find “yourself” saying and doing things “you” never do. You feel fearless, terrified, full and hungry, deeply at peace and shaken apart. Push, pull, wolf, farm dog, wild, tamed. Nothing makes sense and everything finally makes sense.

The funny thing is, from here, from the place of pure fire between two people that burns away our tired identities and sets us free together, what do we do? We stack stones to build a farm house on. We domesticate each other. We feel vulnerable in our state of freedom together. We carry our lover’s breakable heart around with us, and we watch them walk off with our own breakable heart casually tucked in their pocket. We get scared and want to fuse with the other, the ultimate dream of security. If they are so like us they are almost us, then maybe they won’t do anything unpredictable that could hurt us. So we quiet the noisy parts of ourselves, declutter our messiness, shave our corners away until we think we can fit the borders of our beloved completely. Or we try to influence our beloved to suit us more, to blend more with who we take ourselves to be. It starts innocently enough with comments like, “is that what you’re going to wear?” Our attempts to colonize each other come from a yearning to feel safe. We open our vaults and let this person into our private selves. They could do anything with that, including hurt us in ways we can’t see coming. So we make a knowable concept out of the unknowable wilderness of another person so we can sleep easy next to this wild being whose thoughts and actions we can’t control. We trim ourselves and our partners to fit in the same way we trimmed ourselves as children to fit our tribe, believing what they believed, not saying or doing what they don’t say or do. We can go on for years like this in our relationships. To stave off the cold we stack the logs so that the fire is never hungry, until the logs are too many, and the fire suffocates. Eventually one or both partners snap. There is crisis, a revolution, an overthrow. Someone falls in love with someone else. Someone takes off without explanation. Someone says and does what the construct of the relationship has tabooed. Like wolf noticing the blood on farm dog’s neck, someone finds out that security isn’t worth the price of freedom.

So what can we do in committed partnerships when all of our carefully stacked logs either suffocate or burn the farm house down? Is it over, or can it be redefined? Is there a way to walk the edges of domesticating each other and celebrating the wildness of each other? What if among the ruins we are still the people we thought each other were, the ones we originally recognized, but we no longer fit our edges the same way? Can tame and wild renegotiate? Sometimes it appears to be over, but I think love, nodding to thermodynamics, isn’t created or destroyed. It just is. What we do with it in 3D life is another thing altogether. Some grow together here, some apart. Push, pull, wolf, farm dog.

Maybe you’re asking yourself, as I have, who you are in your relationships. “Am I the wolf? Am I the farm dog?” But we’re all both, wandering our wildernesses as the chains rub our necks. Sometimes, in the fold of a valley, these parts of us can meet in peace. “Good day farm dog.” “Good day wolf.” The lamps are lit in the farmhouse. The darkening mountains abide.