Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

it is called a neurological condition. Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals;

There are languages without words and violence is one of them.

My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.

Rewilding is how we fight climate change,

The children in us long for monsters to take forms we understand.

“The difficulty of working with wild animals,” he agrees. “I often ponder how their fear of us is not a natural state for them.

when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”

people do bad things to each other. And we remember those stories, we remember the pain, but we remember it because it stands out. It’s the blip in the timeline, the thing that doesn’t fit, and that’s because the rest of the timeline, which is our whole lives really, is made of kindness. That’s what’s normal, it’s so normal we don’t even notice it.”