lion and the wolf
Updated: Jan 14
Written February 12, 2020
In 2012, in the middle of a cold, Berlin night, huddled in the corner of a single room of a shared apartment complex, a lonely twenty-two year old Arik scribbled the following words into his tattered travel pocket journal.
yesterday, the sky rearranged herself.
the moon wrestled the sun,
for position over the stars.
I write these words eight years later, in the year 2020, a thirty-year old version of twenty-two-year-old Arik. Eight laps around the sun come and gone. 2,920 wrestling matches between the sun and the moon. One great love, one greater heartbreak. One great depression, one beautiful rebirth. Enough life lived for a lifetime.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, I still carry these fifteen words around with me, words that fell out of me from who knows where, an accidental poem birthed in solitude, in the search for something real, for something true. Fifteen words about the sky, the moon, the sun and the stars. Words that gave me a story to believe in, a story that was my own.
For a long time, for most of the past eight years, in fact, I could see myself in both the moon and the sun, in the lion and the wolf. I liked to think that the lion was my body, the wolf my mind, both coming together to help me find my soul. To help me find my place among the stars. As a lost 22-year-old entering adulthood, I liked the story, and decided it would be mine.
But I see now that maybe I was missing the point this whole time. Maybe this story was never really about the lion and the wolf, but about the poem.
the moon wrestled the sun,
for position over the stars.
Perhaps the lion and the wolf are symbols, guides to remind me that the beauty of life is in the search, in the tug of war between dualities, in the contrast between darkness and light. Maybe the purpose of life is the journey itself, but in order to live a life well lived we must fully commit to our path. As long as we commit to the journey, as long as we keep asking the right questions, it doesn’t matter what answers we find, because we will be living. We will be touching the miracle of life. And what else is there?
Perhaps the lion and the wolf are guides on my journey towards truth, a journey that, like a circle, has no beginning or end.
