A Meeting of Souls

Two wolves met in a forest clearing. It was a winter just like any other, completely un-extraordinary. The Arctic was a cold and desolate place. Life there was a struggle, but that didn’t mean that there hadn’t been good times. But both wolves had known no other life. They knew only of their time, what they had done and where they had been. A wolf has no regrets, because it does not know that any thing could be different.1

They met at the end. No, not of the world, but of time, at least as they saw it. Time had never existed for them up until this point; not until they knew it was coming to an end. Neither had ever been concerned with time or space, and so they had lived, not realizing that the other existed until the moment they saw each other. How simple life would be if we only worried about what we knew, and what we knew was so much less. But then, ignorance is not bliss and no one can live a life like that of a wolf.2

They should have been enemies. But the time for enemies had long since passed. There was a time when they would have fought, would have tried to dominate the other, prove themselves in the eyes of their pack. But each pack had left them, as they had left others before them and would leave others after them. It was nothing new or strange and neither animal knew to feel any hurt or anger. Emotions are different for wolves of course. They don’t feel embarrassment, don’t know how to. Hurt is simply something physical for them, never emotional, because they don’t know that what they felt when their mate died could be called hurt. Enemies are different too. Enemies are not hated, but merely not to be trusted and a source of competition. Such are the ways of the wolf. But neither of the two realized that. How could they?3

And so they met, in a snowy field, each living their last days in solitude. The days had passed, but they knew them not to be days, just as the passage of time was so different to them. For how could they understand when they had no way to identify what they knew? 4

Two wolves met that day, and two wolves parted that day. Each left the other alone, for although they did not know it, each respected the other. They could relate to each other and felt no challenge in the other’s presence. 5

And so they passed, just as time had, silently and without fanfare. They passed into nothingness, to be forgotten in the vast entity that is space. No one grieved for them, no one wept for them. But in the grass that grew, when the short spring finally emerged, there was the essence of two warriors. Two warriors that had fought against time, and like all others before them, lost.