Lambs and Wolves

I wanted to write again finally. When I tried to choose a topic, this kept resurfacing in different forms: the trick of being a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

Before I go any further let me offer my definitions. I refer to wolves as the perfect aggressive hunters who prey upon peaceful honest creatures I refer to as lambs. I often portray the former but feel the exhaustion of hunting company. I am a seeker not a hunter and in that difference there is no collateral to be made by my moves.

School is the perfect natural landscape in which to find these two at play. In school we begin to practice life skills and slowly become classified at some end of that spectrum. Divine or beautiful human intervention can provide an escape from this power dynamic; nevertheless it will always exist outside your doors.

Lambs and wolves both have their positive and negative characteristics. Neither the better nor the worse, creatures just marked significantly different by their charms.

I am a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

We can talk upbringing, or move to the present. Though now is what I care most about. I spent much of my life adorned in furs to repel attack; my family provided me with the chance to play the game of life at my own will. A gift I will never know how to return. Naturally I am a curious and silly lamb.

But I’ve been taught

When to blink and how to walk

If I need to attain certain things,

Written in ink by the way I talk

You see, wolves only understand (or appreciate) wolf speech and wolf movement as worthy of their aggressively claimed possessions. You have to be in the club to be in the club. Funny, how that is.

Once I graduated from university and got my wolf paper I lived like a free-range lamb for a few years…I reckon I’ve earned at least the independent adult title of that. I refrain from the use of the word ‘sheep’ for its loaded connotation as mindless followers. The lambs I speak of are not mindless nor followers, just nonaggressive thinkers and doers. So I ask my readers to deny that ingrained association for the remainder of my writing. Or maybe there is some creature in between lambs and wolves. Yes, that’s it. How could I simplify the world into only two. Pardon me; I must have learned that in school.

Now in a world of brilliant humanimals, which would I be?

This can of worms is too grandiose to choose from. I’ll stick with a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

Today I have returned to school to become a teacher and the game is still the same. I feel the pressure to perform to certain standards of ‘proper teacher behavior’. And as frustrating as the surveillance of it may be, I understand the need to weed out the bad ones. These will be the people who will teach your kids how to be. People like me, maybe. I feel the constant need to be ready for the offensive. The ‘perfect killers’ watch for weakness and in such a bleak job market the survival of the fittest determines the race. Even as the romanticism of the calling is daily sabotaged by self-motivated hunters, I still want to be a teacher.

Not because I am perfect, and not because I know everything. But because I know I am not perfect and because I know I don’t know everything. But most importantly, because I care.

I care about the ones who never put up their hand, the ones who don’t come to class, the ones who cheat, and the ones we label ‘At Risk.’ I have walked amongst those kids. It was in being part of the malicious circle of competitive animals where I found myself truly at risk. At risk of living a meaningless life. What’s the point of taking up space if you do no good for anyone else?

As a teacher you swear your loyalties to your kids and not to yourself. This is the first profession where if wolves wish to roam, they must at the very least wear sheep’s clothing. And a beautiful side effect to daily adornment; it begins to seep into your veins and the ego should humble down.

This is the part where I admit I was never just a lamb. And that as I mindfully write I just now discovered after seven hundred and forty three words, that we are all constantly moving along the wide spectrum of these polar opposites. We are both lamb and wolf all of the time but closer to one much of the time.

Damn it, I just lost myself.

Let me recover my own and your thoughts with this. There is such a thing as selfish lambs and wolves with heart. Power is what separates them, power in the most ancient sense, the kind that means you die and you live. That could be a literal statement for some and a metaphor for many. I have felt the pang of the metaphor and I do not like it. That is the seed of this writing’s discontent.

So I will continue to go forth in the land of hunters and gatherers as one who can be both things. If you know me you know I am untraditional, which seems to ruffle some feathers as I enter a profession marked by tradition. This sets the wolves on my scent. Luckily I have their clothes, and I wear them well. Some parts have worn into me beneath my skin and that’s ok. I need to survive. We can’t stay lamb forever. What a beautiful world if we could…