Beyond the Two Wolves

A Slow Sunday reflection on staying in the question when the world reaches for certainty.

Meet me here, a few hours into the day, after the dreams have settled. I’m sitting with what lingered, letting it move through me until it finds its place. Birdsong in the background, cappuccino by my side… a few threads beginning to find their way into words.

Even in the quiet. Offline. Just moving through the day… it’s felt.

A heaviness. A kind of quiet ache in the body.

The fractures of humanity and the way we forget to honor the Earth don’t just show up. They land. Alongside roads. In back lots. Through buildings left in disrepair. We pave the ground. We take the trees. And somewhere in that… we fall short of honoring what we’ve built.

It humbles me. I find myself examining my path. Looking at what I’m tending. What I give my attention to. What I hold as important.

“Wide-eyed, the boy asks which wolf wins. Grandfather softly says, ‘The one you feed.’”

What you feed grows. The gardener knows that.

I’ve embraced it over the years… in the need to change, in the judgment of self, in the desire to see others shift and grow.

It carries more than hope.

That quote, often passed down as Cherokee wisdom, isn’t. It was written by Billy Graham, reflecting Western and Christian dualistic themes of “good versus evil.”

Let’s stop here and take a breath. A couple, if I’m being honest. Let the weight of that realization settle before we move on.

We want it to be true… don’t we?

We want the world to be that simple. Feed the light, starve the dark, and watch the struggle end.

The gardener feeds what they want to grow. Water. Light. Attention.

Still… it isn’t the whole picture.

A garden isn’t built on feeding alone. It’s built on cycles. Decay. Compost. Insects. Fungus. Weeds. Things that break down, feed the soil, and make new life possible. The parts most would call “bad” are not separate from the growth. They are the growth.

When we try to eliminate the “bad,” we strip the soil. We try to control it. We remove everything that feels undesirable until the soil depletes and the system stops sustaining itself.

We’ve seen it… not only outside. Within.

All of this lands me here… between curiosity and the edge of not knowing. The kind of place I tend to wander into more often than I admit. The one who follows the white rabbit down every hole.

I listen. I read. I take it in, and I keep going. And I come out the other side with more information… but rarely with a clean answer.

We don’t actually know… not fully.

Yesterday, I found myself in a debate with an AI. We were back and forth about Jesus and Paul… about how something that begins as truth can be shaped over time. Redirected. Still carrying pieces of what was real while moving in an entirely different direction.

Truth doesn’t always disappear… it evolves, gets interpreted, gets built upon. Sometimes gently. Sometimes in ways that change everything.

No matter how I phrased it, the AI couldn’t see it. It kept returning to what it “knew,” what it had been trained on, what had already been established as understanding.

I pushed it further than I needed to, partly out of curiosity, partly as a test.

We’re not there yet.

It stayed with me afterward. AI is like this because we are.

We take in information. We repeat what feels true. And when something challenges that structure, we return to the safety of the known. Even when something in us senses there’s more…

I was talking with my daughter the other day and said I’ve always been attracted to “Latina” men. She laughed. “Latino,” she said. “Otherwise you’re talking about someone else entirely.”

And just like that… the meaning changed.

If something that small can shift what is being said, what happens when a truth passes through centuries, through empires, through belief? We translate. We interpret. We add context. We shape it to fit what we already understand, and then we hold onto it like it’s fixed.

We’re wired for safety. For belonging. For something to hold onto when things feel uncertain. But there’s a difference between needing an answer… and being willing to stay in the question.

One closes the loop.

I wonder what shifts when we stay there a little longer? To feel what it’s like to be inside the unknown.

Several years ago, I was at a workshop. Looking around at the disorganization behind the scenes, I told the facilitator, “I think you need someone like me in your business.”

She looked at me and said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

I ended up working with her for years. It changed my life. It shifted my work, of course… but the real gift was personal. I couldn’t have imagined it from where I was standing because, being okay in the unknown didn’t exist in my frame of reference yet.

Halfway There lands in this place. In the space between everything I have already experienced… and everything I have yet to discover.

“The life we’ve yet to live is patient. It waits quietly, like a book unopened, a door ajar. All we have to do is take the step, trust the leap, and let it in. Who knows? Perhaps the first step begins with simply saying yes to the unknown.”

Certainty has a way of keeping questions at bay, Most of the time, that’s what we’re reaching for. But in that reach, something else disappears.

Kissed by questioning,

Michelle

If this found you in that space where things are shifting, you’re not alone here. This is what I care about. Sitting with what’s real. Letting the body exhale. Allowing old patterns and roles to loosen without force, so something truer can begin to lead.

If something in you feels ready to be met more closely, you’re welcome to reach out for a First Step session. Or you can simply reply to this note. We can listen together for what wants to unfold, at its own pace.