The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.