Constructing reality is hard work.  It takes decades to prune it into a shape we can understand.  We edit nature’s colors into a few categories, see what we know is there - the name instead of what is.  Refusing to see that air has substance, we focus past an array of orbs to see only walls and chairs and lamps.  We argue away the shapes at the corner of our eyes – the one that suggests a cougar slept by the bed, or a small brown man hangs out in the hallway.  It is so much effort to keep the world in place.

At the same time that we are making our world, the one we can be sure of, we try to reach beyond it to something that shatters what we create. When we persist maybe something penetrates.  A mythological figure moves inside the skin, a tentacle reaches around the doorway.  We see that the green of some plants is actually blue, so blue we wonder why we ever thought it was green.  Grey tree-trunks become pink and purple.  Am I the tree?  Or the water? 

We want this and yet it is frightening.  Usually, if you’ve been seeking you are presented with a choice.  Do you want the reality you had, or this one even though it refuses to be still? 

This is the time to choose companions carefully.  Those who want to define and categorize this new world may be comforting for a while, but definition is an old habit.  Don’t allow someone to colonize how spirit reveals itself to you just because it is different than what speaks to them. 

It is not that we shouldn’t have friends who know this territory, or that we shouldn’t read books, or go to workshops and schools, but experience trumps everything else.  I believe the early Christians believed this; some religions still do.

As I have stressed before, don’t speak too soon about what arrives.  Don’t tell everything.  Some of these helpers or entities are sensitive and very shy.  If you speak too much they might disappear, and it will break your heart to lose them.

Still, there is no need to be anxious and paranoid, just not naïve.  If you offend a spirit, make amends.  Life loves you.  No God I know casts you from the garden without a means of return.  

Dusk is the hour of the wolf.  This is the time between day and night when light is equidistant, as if without direct source; an in-between time, a boundary.  We can see easily enough to find our way, but animals, and other creatures, we don’t ordinarily encounter might suddenly be present. 

The wolf is known for her powerful family ties, loyalty over time, endurance.  In the family each has a role; work on which the others depend.  They call each other in need, responding from many miles away.  Just because she is delayed, don’t think that help won’t come. 

She watches the border; unencumbered is the only way to cross.  If you are a relative, she will sweep the path behind you, removing grief and rage, intended harm, so that between one step and the next, you know the way.  She has her own plant medicines, ones she will offer if she knows you well.

This is the only way into the wild place where her pups nurse; clean, that is.  She knows where you’ve been, the miles traveled, how well you loved.  Put your tears in the water, your anger in a buried stone.  Collect her plants, use them.  Go into the woods at dusk.  Thank her.  Keep her secrets.  Let yourself be a little crazy.  Expect to see colors you didn’t know existed, ones that have their own embedded meaning.  Know what you know. 

If wolf has come to help protect your family, spread over them the medicine of your love and loyalty, leave a little something to quench her hunger.  Do it at the full moon.  Or the new.