dogs and wolves

I am walking in Tuscany and every now and again a dog catches my scent and starts to bark. Dogs are perhaps a strange choice for this series, dawn chorus, which is inspired by nature. For dogs, more than any other domesticated species, have been changed so much by man. Our vanity has changed a wolf into a poodle. All dogs have been bred from wolves and when I look at a dog I often feel sad, for so much has been lost by that selective breeding.

I once came face to face with a wolf. It wasn’t wild but still, it was an amazing encounter. I was in the Alps, I had been climbing in the high mountains, and descending through the pine forest, I suddenly had that feeling of being watched. I looked up and there, three or four metres away, was a wolf looking straight at me. It took another second or two for me to see the human standing behind it, tethered to the wolf by a thick rope, attached to a harness on the wolf and also a waist harness on the man. The wolf stood utterly still and I had a strange feeling – this was many years ago – a strange feeling that the wolf was more noble than me, more serene, more centred, less neurotic.

A wolf is indeed a majestic creature and, like all wild animals, it is living its buddha nature, its natural being. Only human beings have strayed from the enlightened state. Our minds, churning away ceaselessly, create so much trouble, and take our awareness away from what is. I say only humans have strayed, but when I look at dogs, I see that we have inflicted something of the same tragedy upon them. Compared to the majesty of a wolf, any dog is rather sad, and dogs take on the neurosis of their owners. If the owner is unsettled, nervous, then the dog becomes the same. If the owner is hyperactive then so is the dog. If the owner is always anxious then so is the dog.

So for me, dogs and their natural counterpart, the wolves, remind me of the fall of man: this great disaster which has struck us, losing our grace, losing touch with who we really are, and becoming neurotic. For all humans are neurotic until they rediscover their natural state. The beauty is that we can rediscover our nature, our true nature. We can turn from a dog back into a wolf, the wolf that we really are – utterly imperturbable, serene, with a poise, a stillness, and a penetrating gaze. Let us return to that nobility, let us once more live as a wolf does, with our head held high, without anxiety, at home in the world, at home in our true self.