Wolfish

One of the books I’m currently reading is Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

The following excerpt is one that speaks deeply to me. Perhaps it will speak similarly to you.

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In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things – love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while. Everyday life is so often isolated, dreary, and lonely. A little craving is understandable. A little craving might actually be the rallying cry of survival.

In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez examines the mystery of why wolves seem to kill more than they can eat. “Wolves do not get hungry in the way we normally understand hunger,” he says. “Their feeding habits and digestive systems are adapted to a feast-or-famine existence, and to procuring and processing massive amounts of food in a relatively short time. They are more or less always hungry.” Not knowing when they will find their next meal, they must ensure that their cubs and dependents have all they need. Failure to do this could mean starvation at an unspecified future point.

Perhaps the wolf is such an enduring motif of hunger because we see in them a reflection of our own selves in lean times. In winter, those hungers become especially fierce. [Yet] we can learn to respect our wolves. Despite centuries of human effort, they endure.

– Katherine May
Excerpted from Wintering: The Power
of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Riverhead Books
pp. 158-159

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Michael Greyeyes on Temperance as a Philosophy for Surviving
• Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”
• Meeting Truth
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2019)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2017)
• Intimate Soliloquies
• Shards of Summer
• The Empty Beach

Image: Photographer unknown.