Two wolves

I eat an apple every day on my way home from work. I like to think this is because I am a healthy woman who makes wise food choices.

Yah, that’s not it.

I eat the apple because I am ravenously hungry when I leave work, and if not for the apple, I’d sprint to Trader Joe’s and buy chocolate-covered carbohydrates and inhale them in the ten minutes it takes me to drive home. And actually, as long we’re going with the truth here, I’m not ravenously hungry, really. I’m only slightly hungry.  What I really am is stressed and uncomfortable and buzzy and itchy and facing with dread the window of time between when I get home and when Matt gets home, a “window of time” (hah! so cute!) that feels like I’m standing at the edge of a black abyss of WHAT IS THE POINT OF IT ALL that I sometimes long to leap into.

Wow. That went dark fast.

Back to the apple.

The apple is pretty and crunchy and delicious (of course I buy the frou frou apples that cost $3.99 a pound because, well, you know).  Eating it takes the whole ten minutes of drive time, which is good because I concentrate on the apple-eating and forget, for a few minutes, everything I left undone at work, everyone I likely let down, and all the things I wish had gone better. It’s just me and the apple. A little interlude between all of the too much I feel at work and all of the too little I feel at home.

We might as well call this apple-eating time meditation. There you go, Richard Rohr. I’m meditating.

When I get home, I toss the apple core under the shrubs next to the driveway. These shrubs used to be a gloriously tall viburnum hedge, but when we had our house renovated a few years ago, the construction trucks mostly flattened the hedge into what is now two lonely leftover shrubby looking humps that are covered in weedy stuff. Every few weeks, Matt takes the hedge trimmer to the mess to kill off the weedy stuff and encourage the viburnum back to its former self. And every few weeks, I ask Matt to rent a backhoe and yank the whole pile out and plant three crepe myrtles, preferably pink (yes, three, not two, and please don’t make me explain the principles of Feng-shui yet again, mister).

But Matt says one of the viburnums is fine and doing well. No need to kill it. The other one, though, is less well and attracting all the weedy stuff, which then leaps onto the healthy one … and so on. No need to yank up a perfectly healthy plant, he says. We only need to remove the sick one.

Something clicked for me when he told me this. Well, not immediately (my clue-to-realization ratio is seriously sluggish). It took me a few more days of apple-core tossing before it finally occurred to me that I’m fertilizing the unhealthy shrub. I’m encouraging weed growth. Hell, I’m feeding a plant I don’t even want to keep.

And … so … then … this: WHAT ELSE IN MY LIFE AM I FEEDING THAT I WANT TO GET RID OF?

There is a legend attributed to Cherokees that I heard back when I hit up a couple of AA and Al-Anon meetings a week. It is said that a wise man was teaching his grandson about life. “There are two wolves inside me,” the old man said, “and they fight a terrible fight. One wolf is angry, resentful, and afraid. He’s full of envy and greed. He’s proud, but also very lonely. The other wolf is good. He’s serene and loving, compassionate and kind. He tells the truth and lives a life of love.”

The grandson asks which wolf will win the battle. The grandfather replies, “The one I feed.”

Friends, no worries. I’m not jumping into any abysses. I love my job and I love my home and I capital L-O-V-E my man.

It’s just that I want to live my life as a Noticer, a woman who pays attention and course corrects. You  know?

I have a nagging feeling I’m fertilizing plants I don’t want to keep. I don’t know what they are. Yet.

But I do know there are two wolves. They are hungry, and they are fighting. And I decide which one wins.