~ I love this comic and quote, another classic by Zen Pencils.
‘Which wolf am I feeding?’
The question naturally arrives. The above quote necessarily spirals one into considerations of inner shadow-wolves devouring all of the scraps of every meal we’ve ever consumed. Meals of a spiritual kind. Every decision we make is feeding one. Or the other.
Faith vs. ego. The wolfen yin and yang are having it out over our soul then? Can we make an honest appraisal of which is winning? What are the stakes within this conflict? I’m pretty sure the stakes are high. {Steaks?}
How much joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, etc. can anyone one say they have in their life? We’re human beings after all. How much of all that are we even allowed to have at any one time? Everyone starts in the dark. And the furious, reckless, pathological chase for the light may bury us further into the darkness yet. Everything is borne out of chaos, and our progressions are built within the love in other people, the light within knowledge, the empathy bearing out of honest communication, with ourselves and others.
But these lights seem to me to be easily snuffed. They burn out fast. We experience a moment of peace, a moment of joy, a moment of serenity, a moment of hope … {a moment of love?} And then our station returns to the chaos of inadequacy and disappointment and departure and general flux. Our baseline state of soul is to be upset at the problems of our purview. We move constantly toward their solutions. But for every solution that we can painstakingly formulate, ten more problems pop up to shadow our steps. The cycle begins anew. New meat & new vegetables to dole out in the backyard of our souls.
So, which one are we feeding? How can we know? From my inner evaluation, my courses are always thrown into the recesses of the shadowy, chaotic maw, into the pathology of whatever it is that my ego happens to want at the present moment. If my faith wants to be fed, it has to fight for every last bite. ‘Serenity’ is no easy prize, joy and love not so simply gathered up without some form of mortal combat.
But why shouldn’t this be the case? Good must be fought for. And while I contend with the ego necessarily being ‘evil’, it is certainly a worthy opponent to the internal stability and the outward happiness we feel we are striving for {even as it tells us we are not deserving of it anything more than it}.
The answer coming out of all this is, of course, that we are feeding both wolves constantly. There is no absolute to anyone’s menu. Their diets are absolutely full of the myriad strange and wondrous things we do and say and engage with every moment {even as we fail to realize more than half these meals}. And every day and night, one goes a bit hungrier than the other. Neither will ever starve to death {until both do}. Both wolves will continue baying and fighting within us because that is what it means to be a human. That’s what they are born to do. The only ones harboring lonesome light-wolves within are the angels. And I may posit that no such beings {fictional or otherwise} house the shadow-wolf as a solo agent within. There being the truth that every demon is a fallen angel, I can see no such pure ego out there for us to fear and entertain as an absolute evil to turn away from.
There is no absolute source from this laundry list of “good” and “evil” attributes to originate us. Our decisions, our actions and inactions, our thoughts, feelings and lives are all products of the fight. I believe we may achieve serenity only beyond this life, in the moment at the very end perhaps, in whichever form this may come, and if it comes. {Gotta have faith, eh?}
The simple truth is that we need both wolves. While in this life, we have only the middle grey of experientia to deal in, all of it a scramble spawning out of the pit where our two wargs wage their war.
~ We need faith to hone us against the adversity we consistently find around us, and to soothe us away from destroying ourselves in our vices and our pathologies.
~ We need the ego to enrage us against injustice and to impassion us to make changes and differences within us and in the world around us.
We have to have faith that things will get better // We have to have ego to galvanize us into working to create that reality.
~
And by the way ~ it is spoken of in prophecy, alongside the light-wolf and dark-wolf, Hati and Sköll, of a third wolf named Fenrisúlfr fated to arise within us all. At the end of our days, when Sköll finally catches and devours the sun and Hati does the same with the moon and all the stars cease their shining, our inner earth will shatter and shake, mountains will come crashing down, enabling Fenrisúlfr ~ apocalypse-wolf ~ to break free of those pesky chains trapping him within our hearts, signaling the beginning of our personal Ragnarök!
I look to the day. And so should you! 😉
