Dana Stroschein

I recently attended an Ojibwe jiisakaan or shake tent ceremony. There are parts of ceremony that are not mine to share, so I won’t. But I can share something I found myself thinking about afterward.
A question had been asked about someone close to me who was struggling with darker feelings toward other people: malice, vindictiveness, and even the uncomfortable admission that sometimes it felt good to see another person hurt.
The conversation that followed was about something we don’t always like to acknowledge. People have dark parts and light parts. Good parts and bad parts. And whether we like them or not, they are all there.
It immediately made me think about the story of the two wolves.
Most of us have heard some version of it. Inside each person are two wolves. One represents anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, and cruelty. The other represents compassion, kindness, love, generosity, and peace. They fight. And when someone asks which wolf wins, the familiar answer is, “The one you feed.”
I have always liked that story. But lately I’ve been wondering about the wolf we don’t feed. Because it doesn’t disappear. What happens when we pretend it isn’t there? What happens when we refuse to look at it because acknowledging anger, jealousy, revenge, selfishness, or cruelty makes us uncomfortable? What happens when we become so invested in believing we are good people that we stop examining the parts of ourselves that aren’t particularly good at all?
Maybe an unfed wolf doesn’t simply vanish into the woods. Maybe it just gets hungrier. A “bad” hungry wolf walking off into the dark places in the forest. The image in my mind is chilling. 
That thought followed me to another place, Grand Portage. My daughter and I were there for a powwow over the summer and while we were there, I had the opportunity to visit the Spirit Tree. I hadn’t been there for many years, and I was beyond excited. The Spirit Tree— sometimes referred to as the Witch Tree— is a little cedar tree that has stood growing out of a rock formation for centuries, bent by wind, battered by storms, frozen by northern winters, and exposed to everything Lake Superior can throw at her.
And still, she stands.
Cedar, or “giizhik” (pronounced gee-shik) is one of the four sacred medicines and spoken of as a grandmother tree, and this particular tree feels like one. She has watched generations come and go. She has received prayers and offerings. She has stood through long nights, brutal winters, violent storms, and stretches of darkness that must have seemed endless.
That darkness has marked her. You can see it in the way she has weathered, in the places where she has been tattered by wind, in the shape she has been forced to take. Darkness has withered parts of her. It may have even taken from her. But it has also strengthened what remained.
Her roots have had to hold tighter. Her wood has had to become tougher. She has learned, over and over again, how to endure what comes in the night.
There is something deeply spiritual in that.
We often talk about darkness as though it is only something to escape. But Grandmother Cedar seems to know otherwise. Darkness can change us. It can, and probably will, scar us. It leaves us looking nothing like we once did. But it can also deepen us. Strengthen us. Teach us where our roots are. She is not unscathed by what she has weathered. She carries it in her body. The body carries the score isn’t just about people, hey?
There’s a place along the walk toward the Spirit Tree where the forest changes. It becomes darker. The canopy thickens. The sunlight doesn’t reach the ground in quite the same way. The bright, open feeling of the woods gives way to shadow. It is also where you are asked to remain silent for the remainder of the walk. And this darkness is far from frightening, it feels sacred. 
There are places in the forest where darkness feels completely natural. It belongs there. Of course, humans have spent decades teaching one another to be scared of dark places: dark woods, dark rooms, the middle of the night, things we cannot see and things we cannot understand, things that at first look dangerous or even evil. 
And maybe that is part of why we have such difficulty with the darker places inside ourselves. We want to turn on a light. We want to get rid of them. We want to call ourselves kind and loving and healed and enlightened and leave the rest of who we are somewhere out behind us on the trail.
But the woods doesn’t do that. The forest makes room for darkness. Some forms of life even depend upon it.  Lush, soft green ferns and mosses thrive beneath dense canopies where very little sunlight reaches the ground. Mushrooms of all shapes, sizes and colors emerge from damp, dirty, shadowed places and quietly break down what has died, returning food to the earth so something else can grow.
Owls begin hunting when much of the rest of the forest becomes quiet. Bats take to the sky. Moths replace butterflies. Creatures we rarely see during daylight begin moving through a completely different world that has existed beside ours all along.
The dark forest isn’t scary. It may look that way, but it is alive, it is working and it has purpose. Just like the dark parts of us. There are things happening there that simply cannot happen in full sunlight. Our darker emotions aren’t always something to destroy.
That doesn’t mean we hand them the steering wheel. It doesn’t mean cruelty is acceptable because cruelty is human. It doesn’t mean anger gives us permission to harm people. It doesn’t mean vindictiveness becomes wisdom simply because we acknowledge it exists. There is a difference between understanding a part of ourselves and obeying it. 
Why am I angry? Why did that person’s pain make some part of me feel satisfied? Why do I want revenge? Why am I jealous? What part of me feels threatened? What hurt is underneath this? What am I protecting?
Those are uncomfortable questions. But uncomfortable things grow in the woods all the time.
Some seeds need fire before they can open. Fungi grow from decay. New trees take root in fallen ones. Life does not seem nearly as concerned with dividing everything into good and bad as humans are. The forest simply uses what is there.
Maybe there is wisdom in that.
I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand the different parts of myself. The compassionate ones are easy to claim. The parts that want to help people, protect people, love people, and make things better fit nicely into the story most of us want to tell about who we are.
The other parts aren’t quite as comfortable. The angry part. The jealous part. The selfish part. The part capable of saying something specifically because I know it will hurt. The part that sometimes briefly, wants someone who hurt me to hurt, too. I’d like to pretend those parts don’t belong to me. But they do. And perhaps becoming whole has less to do with eliminating them than learning how to walk with them without becoming lost.
We are so quick to associate darkness with what is frightening, hidden or wrong. But a womb is dark. The earth where a seed begins is dark. The place beneath the forest floor where roots reach outward is dark.
And sometimes the places where we are remade are dark, too. Maybe we have misunderstood darkness because we have confused it with evil. They are not the same thing.
Darkness can hide things, for sure. But darkness can also protect them. It can give them time. It can make us quiet enough to listen. It can return us to ourselves. Maybe the darker places inside us ask for that same kind of attention. The willingness to sit quietly enough to understand what is moving around inside us when the lights are off. Maybe being a good human being isn’t about having no darkness in us. Maybe it is about knowing our own darkness well enough that it doesn’t have to sneak up on us.
Knowing when anger is becoming cruelty. Knowing when hurt is becoming revenge. Knowing when “righteousness” is really just another name for wanting someone else to suffer. Knowing the difference between a wounded part of ourselves asking to be heard and a wounded part demanding to be obeyed. There is responsibility in that.
The woods are never ashamed or apologetic of its shadows. It doesn’t apologize when evening comes. We don’t call the owl bad because it hunts at night or the mushroom ugly because it grows from decay. The forest holds all of it: the fallen tree and the new sapling, the predator and the prey, the bright clearing and the places where sunlight barely reaches the ground.
The forest has never been only sunshine and wildflowers. It has always had shadows. It has always had decay. It has always had creatures moving quietly through the night and roots reaching through places no light will ever touch. It sees violence, predator vs. prey. 
And still, it grows. Still, it heals. Still, it creates. Still, somewhere beneath the leaves and fallen branches, something is always beginning. And none of those things are ashamed of where they began. So perhaps we shouldn’t be either. 
The woods know that darkness is not always something to escape. It is, perhaps, an opportunity to slow down, a place where we are asked to listen. Sometimes it is where we remember. Sometimes it is where we are changed. And maybe that hungry wolf from the beginning of this story does not need to be chased deeper into the forest or be “pretended away”. Maybe we need to know where it is. Maybe we need to listen for it moving through the shadows, and try to understand what makes it hungry and remember that acknowledging its existence does not mean allowing it to lead us. Both wolves live within the same woods. Perhaps the wisdom may be in knowing them both well enough to choose which one we follow home. And sometimes, just like in the woods, deep beneath everything we can see, under the dirt and decay, new growth begins.