FIRST PEOPLE: Wolves

If you come from truth you do not broadcast or boast your medicine. It watches you intently one's medicine. Medicine, and the attributes of one's power, the spirits that walk with you and the family you come from leave the choice to brag or serve upon you. My intimacy with the wolf comes indirectly from their cousins: wild dogs. I spent years studying them as I tracked and stalked them through the forests they hunted or raided neighborhood trash bins. I was alone, bare of foot, with or without a blade, in a pair of jeans and within my medicine dream.


Online is a safe place to study wolves, traditional medicine, and stories but it lacks the dare. There is no breath, no danger, or challenge to all the senses. The vulnerability of stalking solitude deep in dark forests is missing from online discussions, or study around the deeper things of living and existing between worlds. The presence of invisible beings just outside the peripheral of vision breathes its dust into and through the scalp, it whispers, and its silent nudges on your shoulder in the dark marks the ceremonial hunter. Medicine is earned. It belongs to you. It stalks you as you live. Watching the whole of your life is the work of medicine before it introduces itself to your life.

Think of this relationship as you look at this link about wolves. - Gregory E. Woods, Heart Song Stone Man