We create wolves.
Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men
At first this sounds obviously wrong. Wolves existed long before us. We did not evolve them, nor call them into being. They hunted across continents before the first human story was told. So how can Barry Lopez claim that we create wolves? Let’s begin with a wolf. Not the wolf of fairy tales, documentaries or conservation campaigns. A real wolf.
Standing on a ridge in the pale light of morning, it knows nothing of Little Red Riding Hood, wilderness tourism, ecological policy or of the fears, hopes or longings we attach to it. It is simply a wolf.
Everything else arrives with us. No two people meet the same wolf.
A shepherd standing beside a flock sees one animal.
A wildlife biologist sees another.
A child reading fairy tales encounters yet another.
A conservationist.
A hunter.
A poet.
A tourist catching a glimpse from a passing bus in the Alaskan hills.
A visitor watching a wolf pace the edge of its enclosure in a zoo.
Each meets a different wolf. Not because the animal changes, but because every encounter is already woven into the world by memory, language, fear, affection, belief and expectation. The wolf that appears is never only the creature standing on the ridge. It is also the wolf carried within the person who is looking.
For centuries much of Europe imagined wolves as embodiments of evil. They became the companions of witches, devourers of children and creatures of darkness waiting beyond the edge of civilisation. Long after wolves had disappeared from many landscapes, they continued to flourish in stories. Elsewhere they appeared quite differently. Many Indigenous people understood wolves as teachers, kin and fellow hunters. They were beings to relate to rather than dominate or persecute. They were admired for their endurance, intelligence and ability to survive where humans struggled for life. They were dangerous, yes, but danger is not the same as wickedness. Fire is dangerous. The sea is dangerous. Mountains are dangerous, but none of these is evil.
The animal remains itself, but our wolves change.
Lopez is not interested in proving one culture correct and another mistaken. Instead, he invites us to notice that whenever we speak about wolves we are also speaking about ourselves. The wolf becomes a mirror.
—
Once seen, it is difficult to stop seeing. Consider a river.
To an engineer it may be a source of power.
To an angler, a living habitat.
To a child, a place of adventure.
To an insurance company, a flood risk.
To a painter, changing light.
To a thirsty deer, simply water.
Which is the real river?
Or a robin. Most people think they “see” a robin.
But:
A child sees a bird and perhaps Christmas.
A gardener sees a companion.
A blackbird sees a rival.
A cat sees prey.
A poet sees winter.
An ornithologist sees Erithacus rubecula.
The robin hasn’t changed. But our robin has. Which is the real robin? The question cannot be answered, because the river and the robin exceeds every description we give it. Every description reveals something true. Not only about the river or the robin, but about the relationship between them and the one who is looking. The engineer’s river is not false, nor is the angler’s, or the child’s. Each notices something and each overlooks something, and what we overlook may reveal as much about us as what we notice. The river remains greater than every account of it. It keeps flowing beyond our descriptions. The same is true of a forest, a hospital, a city, a stranger. Even ourselves.
Perhaps, then, Lopez is pointing towards something much larger than wolves. Not that we invent the world, but that the world we encounter is always shaped by the meeting between ourselves and what is before us.
The wolf is real and our wolf is real too.
—
Modern culture often treats perception like photography. The world is assumed to stand complete and independent before us while our minds simply record what is there, and better cameras will produce better pictures. Better theories produce more accurate representations. Eventually, we hope, we will arrive at reality exactly as it is. There is something deeply appealing about this picture. There is also something cold about it, for it imagines the world as fundamentally silent, and meaning as generated inside human minds and projected outwards onto an otherwise indifferent universe.
But our experience doesn’t feel like that. Think of the last time you stood beneath an immense night sky, or entered an ancient woodland, or watched a murmuration of starlings folding and unfolding above winter fields, or sat quietly beside a river until, almost without noticing, something in you became still.
It is difficult to describe such moments without saying things like:
The place felt alive.
It seemed to ask something of me.
I felt something move in me.
None of these sentences makes scientific sense, yet almost everyone knows what they mean. Something happened that was more than observation. The encounter changed the observer.
—
Perhaps this is why Lopez’s ‘We create wolves’ matters. He is not inviting us to abandon reality in favour of fantasy, he is asking us to become more honest about the nature of perception itself. We never encounter the world in its complete state. Every act of seeing is also an act of interpretation, of reduction. Every act of seeing has already been shaped by relationships that began long before we were born.
Language.
Culture.
Stories.
Family.
Education.
Religion.
Memory.
Desire.
Fear.
Love.
We inherit ways of seeing long before we become aware that they are ways of seeing. The danger is not that we interpret, because interpretation is unavoidable. The danger lies in forgetting that we are interpreting, reducing, because that is when our wolves harden into truths, into facts. Into reality itself. We no longer say,
This is how the wolf appears to me.
We begin saying,
This is what a wolf is.
—
The consequences extend far beyond wildlife. A five-pound note is paper and ink, or perhaps polymer. It can neither feed us nor keep us warm. Yet because millions of us participate in the same story, it buys bread, builds houses and changes lives. The note is real, and the value is real too. But they are not the same kind of reality. One belongs to the chemistry of atoms. The other belongs to relationship. The same can be said of borders. There is no line running across the hills between England and Scotland. No line visible from space. Yet lives have been shaped, wars have been fought and identities have been forged around something that exists because enough people have learned to see it together. A nation is not imaginary. Neither is it simply found in nature. It exists in the living space between land, memory, language, law and belonging.
Leadership is no different. Ask a room full of people to describe a leader and a familiar list of qualities quickly appear. These qualities feel obvious, even natural. Yet another culture might recognise leadership in the person who speaks least, or notices first, or who refuses power. The people remain, but the leader changes. Exactly as the wolf changes.
—
A possibility begins to emerge. Perhaps we do not simply create wolves. Perhaps we participate in creating every world we inhabit.
Not the rocks.
Not the rivers.
Not the stars.
But the worlds through which rocks, rivers and stars become meaningful to us.
The worlds in which they become resources.
Or sacred places.
Or scientific objects.
Or memories.
Or home.
The physical world does not disappear. It becomes even more astonishing, because it continually exceeds the worlds we make of it. The river is always more than our river. The wolf is always more than our wolf. The stranger is always more than our story about them. Reality keeps slipping beyond the boundaries we draw around it. Perhaps that is one of its greatest gifts. It refuses to become entirely ours. It continually reminds us that there is always more to see.
—
None of this means that reality is simply whatever we choose to believe. The wolf still has teeth, the river still floods and the mountain is unmoved by our opinion of it. Reality has a nature of its own. One of the greatest gifts the living world offers us is its refusal to become whatever we want it to be. Again and again it escapes our attempts to reduce it to our categories. Life keeps slipping beyond the worlds we make of it. It reminds us that there is always more here than we have yet seen.
—
Humility can be found in Lopez’s observation. If every encounter tells us something about ourselves as well as the world, then certainty becomes less interesting than attention. Instead of asking,
What is this?
we begin asking,
How has this become visible to me?
The question softens judgement, invites curiosity and loosens the grip of certainty without abandoning truth. It reminds us that seeing is not something we do alone. It is something that happens in relationship. We become less concerned with defending our wolves and more interested in discovering what they reveal about us.
—
Perhaps this is what wisdom has always looked like. Not possessing the correct description of the world, or constructing the perfect theory, or finally seeing reality exactly as it is, but becoming increasingly aware of the distance between the living world and the worlds we continuously make of it. That awareness does not make us weaker. It makes us more attentive, more hospitable and more open to surprise. We become slower to assume we have understood and quicker to notice what escapes our understanding. The world becomes less a problem to be solved and more a companion to be encountered.
—
Something else begins to change. The question is no longer simply whether our descriptions are accurate, it becomes whether they are faithful.
Do they allow the world to remain larger than our ideas about it?
Do they leave room for mystery?
For contradiction?
For astonishment?
For the possibility that every encounter might reveal something we had not expected?
Perhaps that is why poets, artists, shepherds, gardeners and naturalists have so often understood things that philosophers and scientists have overlooked, not because they possessed some secret knowledge, but because they learned to linger and to notice. To let the world disclose itself at its own pace.
—
The wolf is real. Our wolf is real too. The first walks through forests, deserts and across frozen valleys. The second walks through stories, memories, politics, fears and dreams. The trouble begins when we mistake one for the other. For then we imagine we are defending reality, when often we are only defending our way of seeing it. Perhaps this is why disagreements become so fierce. People are rarely arguing about wolves. They are arguing about the worlds in which those wolves already live.
—
Barry Lopez’s sentence turns out not to be about wolves at all. It is about us. Every creature we encounter, every landscape we inhabit, every stranger we meet, every institution we build and every idea we inherit. Each invites the same question.
What kind of world is becoming visible here?
And another that follows.
What kind of person must I become if I wish to see more faithfully?
Perhaps that is where wisdom begins, not in finally seeing the world as it is. But in recognising that every act of seeing is also an invitation to become.
Perhaps faithful seeing is where faithful living begins?
Your lovely essay reminds of the Annais Nin saying: We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are
thank you so much for this invitation to linger with the many wolves and ways of seeing