The Wolf You Feed

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 2 minutes, or less.

A SHORT STORY

There’s a famous parable I have been returning to often over the past few weeks.

In the parable, there’s a grandparent talking with their grandchild. They say that, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear.

The grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and say, “Well, which one wins?”

And the grandparent says, “The one you feed.”

I don’t know why I keep returning to that story. Maybe because I find I need to work harder to feed the good wolf.

Maybe because you and I are both trying to live more from the heart.

That is why I value the two minutes we spend together every week.

A small place where we can uplift each other amidst the chaos of the world.

A POEM

“What to Remember When Waking” by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

Grateful,

Michael