A Lone Wolf Stood Still on the Road to Provo Peak

It was dark, a cool spring night, and I was driving with my windows down to the foothills below Provo Peak to pick up my daughter and her friend. They had been out on the trail hiking in the dark for a few hours, and I could hear the relief in their voices as they climbed into the car, happy for a ride home.

I was asking them questions about their hike when we turned the corner, and there it was. About thirty feet ahead of us, standing dead still on the dirt, a creature.

My first thought was coyote. Then I thought, a big neighborhood dog that escaped its yard but something in me knew better. You could feel the wildness coming off it, right through the windshield.

Then my daughter’s friend said it quietly. It’s a wolf. I know it is. I have been hiking out here for the past few weeks and I have watched it move through the backcountry.

A wolf. Here, in Utah, thirty feet from my car.

The very first thing I felt, before the fear, before the awe, was a question that came from somewhere deep. Where is its pack?

Where is its pack

Her friend believed this one was alone. A lone male, he thought, maybe making his way north toward the Wyoming border, looking for a pack he could belong to. The three of us sat there in the car and stared, caught in his moment for minutes, none of us moving.

We felt two things at the very same time. Sorrow that this magnificent creature was alone, and pure wonder at its power, so much bigger than any coyote, so wild that the moment the headlights touched it, it froze. This lone wolf had traveled a little too close down to the base of the foothill neighborhood, and then it slipped back into the dark.

We drove home quiet, all of us thinking about that wolf. Would it make it all the way to Wyoming? Would it find a pack it could belong with? Weeks later we read a news article, someone else had seen it too, this same lone male wolf, traveling by itself through the mountains.

I could not stop thinking about it because I knew that feeling in my body. When we travel without our pack, without our family, without our close people, we walk into cold and uncomfortable places alone. I had been that wolf once.

The wolf-woman they told me I could not be

I was nineteen years old, sitting in a creative writing class, when we were assigned to read “Women Who Run With the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. That book was one of the most influential I have ever read.

I read for the first time about raw, intimate, and sensual writings of women and their relationship with the earth, with their own bodies, and with each other. Women who let their hair run wild as they bathed in the river. Women who found their people, their tribe, the ones who wanted the same aliveness and connectivity to the earth. The deepest part of me rose up off the page and said, that is mine. I want that. I want to belong to that.

In that very same breath and hope, something in me sank because I was inside a high-control, demanding religion that told me I must wear special garments at all times, never revealing my skin. I could not come alive with my own intuitive wildness. I read those words like a wounded animal, stuck in the cage, not allowed to come out. The other women and girls in that class did not feel the same way I did. I heard it in their essays and their poetry. They were not in the same cage I was. Instead, they were free.

“This wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

I didn’t realize how my freedoms were taken from me until I devoured every page of this book as the creature in the cage longing to be a wolf-woman. I wasn’t allowed to be angry, to speak my mind or even wear the type of clothes I wanted to. Even the swimsuit I was allowed to wear was a modest one piece, sewn into my psyche since I was a girl. I have written about that ache before, the pink sparkly two piece I longed for and was not allowed, and how deep purity culture reaches into the body.

Leaving a high-control religion can feel like being driven out of the only pack you have ever known. For a while you become the lone wolf on the road, frozen in the headlights, traveling by yourself through the dark, aching for a belonging you were built for, one you know exists and cannot yet find.

The night I howled at the moon on Green River

It was only a year or two after I left the church that I found my pack.

I was on the soft sand under a full moon at Green River, still recovering from a lifetime of that modest one piece, still carrying the rule of it in my body. I had never once skinny dipped as a grown woman. In the moonlight I peeled off my clothes, and my women friends peeled off theirs, and we jumped into the river together.

We howled up at the moon. We splashed and we laughed at the sheer freedom of it, our bodies in the cold water, the Milky Way spilled out over us like a blanket. I felt a freedom I had never known in my life. Freedom from the garments. Freedom from the cage I had first felt at nineteen, back when I could only read about moments like this happening to other women.

And now here I was. Not reading it. Living it. Creating a whole new story under the stars, in my own skin, with my own pack.

That is what the wolf will not tell you from the road, the lone wolf is not the end of the story. It is the middle, the transition.

Finding the pack in the heart of high-control country

When we saw that wolf near Provo Peak, the reason it touched me so deeply is that I wanted it to feel what I have finally been given, a pack who I felt safe with. The joy that comes when we gather and circle and share a meal together.

I have been held by my pack every time I have had a baby, there has been a community of women around me, present and attentive and strong. I am surrounded by doulas and midwives and birth workers, women who know how to show up for a body in its most tender hour.

Here is the irony, I live inside. The church and its teachings are strongest right here, in the forty five minute radius where I make my home. Yet, many of us received that same indoctrination, we carry that same caged longing for freedom. When the door finally opens, and we are playful enough to run into the river together, it heals a wound we have all carried for far too long.

That is what ceremony is. A pack gathered on purpose. It is the whole heart of the ceremonies I hold now, the circle, the fire, the belonging. The thing that lone wolf was walking in the dark for miles and miles to find.

The cage ends with me

My daughter was in the car beside me that night, watching the same wolf through the same windshield. In that moment I was only wondering about him, where his pack was. But she is the reason I fought so hard, years ago, to get free.

I get to be the wolf-woman now, and because I do, my daughters and other girls in my life will never have to learn the shape of those bars from the inside.

There was a night at Deer Creek Reservoir when the full moon was shining bright, when I took all of my girls down to the water. My own daughters, Sevanah and Brin, and Liv and Marley, two more I got to be a second mother to. They loved each other like sisters, and I got to be the mama to them all.

They peeled off their clothes and slipped into the reservoir, laughing, totally wild and free, doing at their age what I could not do until I was a grown woman finally out of the cage.

I did not get in with them. I stood on the shore and kept watch. I held the edges of the dark so they could be wild inside it. The wolf-woman does not only run with her pack. She stands guard at the treeline so the daughters can delight in their own freedom.

Liv is not with us anymore. I have written about losing her. I carry that night at the reservoir with me still, the sound of her laughing in the black water, wild and free and entirely herself. I got to guard that. I got to give her that.

The cage ends with me. These girls will not inherit it. They get to be wild, and I get to be the guardian of that wildness, with my whole body.

If you are the lone wolf in the cage

Maybe you are reading this from inside the cage right now. Still wearing the garments. Still serving in so many church callings. Still feeling unsupported in a patriarchal world that was not built for your wildness.

Here is what I want to hand you. Begin to see what is possible while you are still in the cage.

When the sun rises tomorrow, can you let it land on your skin and actually feel the warmth of it? Can you drop into your senses, into your body, even for one brief moment, even with everything still exactly as it is? When you allow yourself to delight in your own senses, even for a breath, that is your power. No one forced that moment on you. You invited it. You reached through the bars and took it, and it was yours.

That is how the wolf-woman begins to wake, long before the cage door ever opens.

You were never meant to travel alone

The wildness in you was never lost. It only went quiet, curled up small in the cage, waiting. And every time you delight in your own senses, even for a breath, it lifts its head and remembers your name.

Questions people ask

What does the wolf symbolize as an animal ally? Wolf carries the medicine of instinct and belonging. She is the part of you that remembers you were never meant to travel alone, that trusts its own wild knowing, and that longs for a true pack, people you can belong to without abandoning yourself.

What does it mean when a wolf crosses your path? In many traditions it is a sign of instinct and belonging, a reminder to trust your own wild knowing and to find your true people. For me, a lone wolf appeared on the road to Provo Peak, as I reflected that I finally found my true wolf pack after leaving religion. The wolf is never truly a loner. She is a pack animal between packs, and yours is out there.

A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This work walks alongside healing and growth. It is not a replacement for therapy or medical care, and many of the people I sit with do both. That is a good and beautiful thing.

If something in you howled quietly as you read this, there are two soft places to begin. You can gather with us in the Rewilding Hearts community, a circle of people who are finding their pack again, one full moon at a time. Or we can begin together, just the two of us, with a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell, only space to be heard.

You were never meant to travel the whole way alone. When you find your pack, you will know. You will hear yourself howl, and you will hear a howl come back.