THE WOLF

Some places and times in our lives sear pain and experience deeper than others. Taos, New Mexico was one of them for me.

I experienced everything there. Every category of abuse the textbooks have a name for, and probably a few they don't. My father, a man being crushed under the weight of a conviction for a crime he didn't commit, finally hit his breaking point and unloaded a shotgun into the walls of that sun-baked New Mexico adobe. My mother threw me and my siblings into a car and drove us to a friend's house where we waited, not knowing if the next phone call would tell us our father was dead by his own hand. He wasn't. He was broken, railroaded by a system that had already decided his guilt, but he was alive.

The police came eventually and took him away to minimum security. Then one day he just walked off, because that's the kind of man my father was, and suddenly we were fugitives. Three years on a sailboat, moving like smoke, the whole family reduced to a crew on the run from something we didn't fully understand.

It's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot.

But here's the thing that keeps surfacing when I push through the wreckage.

The wolf.

I was playing outside one afternoon, just a kid, the dirt and the high desert light doing what they do, when something made me look toward the fence line at the edge of our property. Standing there, still as stone, was a big black wolf. Not running. Not growling. Just watching me, with the kind of patience that has no interest in your schedule.

Fear hit me like electricity. I ran for the door as fast as my legs had ever carried anything.

For years after that I dreamed about that moment. The wolf. The fence. The sprint. And in every single dream, when I got to the door, it was locked.

I've been sitting with that locked door for a long time.

But something is shifting now. I'm starting to understand what I couldn't as a boy frozen in terror at the threshold. That wolf wasn't waiting at the fence to take something from me. He was reflecting something back. Something that had always lived on my side of the fence.

I am the protector of the pack. I am the thing that stands at the perimeter so others don't have to. Sweet and ferocious in the same breath, not in spite of each other but because of each other. Cunning enough to have survived everything that house tried to do to me.

And I am finally, truly, beginning to understand.

Nothing out there can hurt me. Nothing out there can scare me.

The door was never locked to keep me out. I just wasn't ready to open it yet.

The inner work matters. It is unglamorous and it is brutal and most people will do almost anything to avoid it. Because those memories don't just live in the past, they reach forward through time and lock us into earlier versions of ourselves, boys and girls frozen at the moment of impact, still running, still waiting by the phone, still standing at a locked door. Arrested development isn't a concept, it's a cage.

I am only now beginning to recognize the man I am. But I couldn't find him without first going back for the boy. That frightened kid standing in the high desert dirt, staring at something wild and powerful at the fence line, not yet knowing it was his own reflection.

Go back for the boy. He's been waiting.