Our dinner guests yesterday were a typical Seattle-area couple: she ran a successful health care business, and he worked as a technology executive. The conversation was mundane, revolving around the merits of various movies we'd seen, before it veered towards our families and childhood experiences. Mary, it turned out, had grown up on a Native American reservation as a child, and had quite a story to share.
When Mary was about six years old, she would have to walk alone to school through a desolate landscape overgrown with bushes and scrub. It was a distance of a few hundred yards to the school and there was an aggressive pack of wild dogs in the area that she was terrified of. To avoid them, Mary would stick close to the brush. On one such day, her luck seemed to run out - she was cornered by two dogs in the bush. As the dogs advanced on her menacingly, the seemingly miraculous happened. A wolf appeared out of nowhere and attacked he dogs, chasing them away. The wolf then escorted Mary all the way to her school, stopping at the edge of the bush and keeping watch on her until she made it to the school building. At the end of the school day, it was there waiting to escort her all the way back home.
We thought this was remarkable enough, but Mary added "This was no one time occurrence - the wolf was my companion to and from school for the rest of the school year." I asked her if she had felt afraid of the wolf, to which she said "How could I be afraid of it, when it had saved me from those stray dogs?"
The Native Americans believe in power or spirit animals, which appear in visions during trance, often carrying a symbolic message relevant to your current situation in the real world. The spirit animal is ephemeral, and you have to draw inspiration and courage from it to solve for yourself the problem at hand. Mary isn't Native American and doesn't know if the wolf was her spirit animal; in her case, not only did the wolf appear in this reality, it stayed around for nearly a year to protect her through a difficult and vulnerable time.
The story has a sad ending. The reservation would periodically cull the population of wild dogs, and that summer, the wolf was among the casualties.
When Mary was about six years old, she would have to walk alone to school through a desolate landscape overgrown with bushes and scrub. It was a distance of a few hundred yards to the school and there was an aggressive pack of wild dogs in the area that she was terrified of. To avoid them, Mary would stick close to the brush. On one such day, her luck seemed to run out - she was cornered by two dogs in the bush. As the dogs advanced on her menacingly, the seemingly miraculous happened. A wolf appeared out of nowhere and attacked he dogs, chasing them away. The wolf then escorted Mary all the way to her school, stopping at the edge of the bush and keeping watch on her until she made it to the school building. At the end of the school day, it was there waiting to escort her all the way back home.
We thought this was remarkable enough, but Mary added "This was no one time occurrence - the wolf was my companion to and from school for the rest of the school year." I asked her if she had felt afraid of the wolf, to which she said "How could I be afraid of it, when it had saved me from those stray dogs?"
The Native Americans believe in power or spirit animals, which appear in visions during trance, often carrying a symbolic message relevant to your current situation in the real world. The spirit animal is ephemeral, and you have to draw inspiration and courage from it to solve for yourself the problem at hand. Mary isn't Native American and doesn't know if the wolf was her spirit animal; in her case, not only did the wolf appear in this reality, it stayed around for nearly a year to protect her through a difficult and vulnerable time.
The story has a sad ending. The reservation would periodically cull the population of wild dogs, and that summer, the wolf was among the casualties.
