Metztli Wolf

While the Empire Crumbles, the Animals Still Need to Eat

Mētztli Wolf: Wild Lessons — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:03:30 GMT

Let’s say the quiet part out loud.

When fascism rises, the economy falters, the need for animal rescue does not slow down.
It accelerates. Like wildfire.

Surrenders increase.
Medical neglect increases.
Emergency placements multiply.
Shelters overflow.

In 2024 alone, approximately 607,000 (documented) animals were euthanized in U.S. shelters — not because people suddenly stopped caring, but because the infrastructure meant to hold them could not keep up. Capacity strained. Staffing strained. Donations strained. And the most vulnerable paid the price with their lives.

Animal rescue has always operated at the margins.
But now, those margins are beyond fraying.

We are living through a convergence of economic precarity, rising cost of living, shrinking donor pools, and collapsing social safety nets — and sanctuaries are quietly being tasked with absorbing the downstream consequences of all of it.

Not because we are mismanaged.
Not because we are reckless.
But because we care in a system that externalizes its failures onto caregivers. See: Patriarchy.

And we are doing it largely alone.

Animals Are Collateral in Human Precarity

There is a pattern those of us in rescue witness in real time — not as theory, but as intake.

As housing becomes unstable, and ICE detains people, animals are surrendered.
As veterinary care becomes less accessible, preventable illness becomes emergency intake.
As wages stagnate and safety nets shrink, families delay care until crisis — and then relinquish animals they love because they have no other option. Often to take on 2nd and 3rd jobs to get by.

Most people do not surrender animals because they are careless.
They surrender them because they are cornered.

By rent.
By medical debt.
By job instability.
By policies that treat survival as an individual responsibility rather than a collective one.

Cornered by the death cult that is capitalism.

What is framed as an “animal welfare crisis” is, at its root, a human welfare crisis –manufactured by colonialism and empire.
One shaped by corrupt government, policy failures, housing systems, healthcare inaccessibility, and the quiet violence of classism.

When working-class conditions deteriorate, sanctuary demand expands at the exact moment that community capacity contracts. That demand often lands on the working-poor, neurodiverse, disabled–those of us who live in the margins ourselves. We understand that if we don’t show up, no one is coming to save anyone but us.

New donor acquisition across the nonprofit sector has declined even as operational costs continue to rise. Sanctuaries are doing more triage with fewer resources — inside a culture that still treats animal welfare as a niche passion project rather than what it actually is: emergency infrastructure for both humans and animals. Animal rescue is not separate from human survival — it is woven into it.

You cannot build a just society while treating the care of living beings as expendable.

Our future and liberation are intertangled.

Our conditioning to see ourselves as separate from or above our animal relatives and nature is our undoing.

We have the ability and moral obligation to dismantle the systems of power we create and perpetuate that hurt us and other sentient beings. The animals do not, they’re at our mercy.

Firefighters Without Infrastructure

Frontline animal care workers are not simply caregivers. Or recreational do-gooders.

On any given day, a sanctuary operator may function as:
an emergency medical coordinator,
a transport logistics manager,
a fundraiser,
a grief counselor,

a content creator,
a facilities manager,
a crisis communicator,
and yes — the one scooping poop in freezing rain or sweltering humid heat.

Often simultaneously.
Often without adequate pay.
Often while chronically ill, sleep-deprived, and emotionally saturated.

Researchers and journalists alike have documented epidemic rates of burnout, compassion fatigue, and “moral injury” among shelter workers — the psychological toll of making impossible life-and-death decisions under conditions of resource scarcity. Moral injury as a term, I feel is inadequate, it puts the onus on frontline workers instead of where it belongs, on the systems creating and fueling the problems at hand. It’s colonial systemic abuse and neglect, and it’s masters have names.

This is not martyrdom culture.

This is structural overexposure to community crisis sustained over years without institutional support.

Emergency responders in other fields operate within systems that at least acknowledge the weight of their labor.
Animal care workers largely do not.

Because rescue is framed as a “calling,” compensation expectations are suppressed, policy attention is minimal, and the labor — deeply physical, emotional, psychological, financial, and strategic — is rendered invisible.

The Algorithm Economy of Suffering

There is another system shaping modern rescue work that almost no one wants to name directly:

The algorithm.

Most sanctuaries build platforms online out of necessity, not vanity.
We at Black Moon do not have marketing teams or PR budgets… yet.
We have urgency, phones, humans and animals who need to eat today.

But platform algorithms reward crisis.
Shock.
Before-and-after trauma arcs.
High rescue numbers.
Fast adoption turnarounds.
Clean, whitewashed, savior narratives.

They do not reward stewardship.
They do not reward slow rehabilitation.
They do not reward sustainable infrastructure-building.

This creates a brutal paradox.

Be transparent — but not “too negative.”
Show crisis — but don’t appear desperate.
Share cute moments — but gaslight the reality that you are under-resourced and the world around you is burning. Don’t make viewers uncomfortable.

So real suffering becomes content or is bypassed for likes.
Not by choice.
By necessity. And that’s abuse.

Compassion, in this fast-scrolling attention economy, is quantified in engagement metrics rather than sustained material support.

Crisis goes viral.
Cultivating stability does not.

What’s worse? People are more apt to help only when things become dire, emotionally provocative, and life-threatening, — not when a basic necessity needs to be met. We’ve become a culture of reactive (short-lived) individual care, instead of proactive sustainable community care.

A Personal Reality: The Cost of Visibility

For the first four formative years of Black Moon becoming a sanctuary, I intentionally flew under the radar within rescue and wolfdog communities.
Not out of secrecy.
Out of self-preservation.

With the quiet awareness that these spaces were not typically built with people like me in mind.
With the lived understanding that when you are Black, Indigenous, and land-based in your work, visibility does not always equal safety — it often invites scrutiny, gatekeeping, and unsolicited authority… and sometimes targeted death threats from hate groups.

I have seen, and felt, how colonial patterns replicate even in spaces that claim to be about wild, freedom, and care.
Gatekeeping.
Informal hierarchies.
Authority performance disguised as concern.
Territorial ego masquerading as expertise.

Staying quiet spared me from some of the noise.
But not from the dynamics.

I still encountered boundary violations.
Inappropriate interferences.
And what I can only describe as surveillance framed as accountability — individuals attempting to insert themselves into my sanctuary’s operations without invitation, under the guise of “help.”

Not support.
Control.
Not collaboration.
Policing.

Not because I was doing anything unethical.
But because I was taking up space — land, leadership, stewardship — in ways that did not fit the unspoken cultural expectations of who is “allowed” to lead in rescue spaces.

And when you are building a sanctuary rooted in trauma-informed/healing-centered care, decolonial ethics, and collective responsibility, operating outside of ego-driven rescue culture can itself be perceived as defiance. My “why” is a threat to the delusion of theirs.

When Crisis Forced Visibility

When Black Moon reached peak crisis and was forced to relocate across the country for safety due to a documented extremist threat living adjacent to our property, privacy was no longer an option.

Relocating a sanctuary is not moving a household.
It is mass-coordinating animal transport, containment planning, financial upheaval, loss of hard-earned supplies, and continuous caregiving — all at once.

I reached out publicly for help.
Transport.
Fundraiser amplification.
Solidarity.

What I encountered was not overwhelming mobilization.

It was scrutiny.
Silence.
Distance.

A select few OGs in the wolfdog rescue community stepped up and helped us and 10 of our wolfdogs reach safety across the country.
A handful of volunteers from other organizations assisted — sometimes generously, sometimes begrudgingly, and other times with resentment masked as saviorism.

Their support mattered. Even the resentful ones. Especially the OGs. All of it helped save us.

But the disparity between the scale of crisis and the scale of response was clarifying.
And deeply disillusioning. It’s the kind of isolation that leaves a mark on your nervous system foreseeably.

The Funding Gap No One Wants to Name

It is also important to say plainly: Black Moon is a Black and Indigenous founded and led 501c(3) nonprofit.

That is not incidental or “pick me” context.
It is structural context.

Philanthropic research consistently shows that Black and Indigenous-led organizations receive a disproportionately small share of funding — often hovering around 1–2% of total philanthropic giving despite serving communities facing greater systemic barriers and need.

So when a marginalized-led sanctuary doing serious, boots-on-the-ground, documented work still has to over-explain its need for support, that is not a coincidence.
That is inequity.

Culturally, we are conditioned to scrutinize the vulnerable while trusting the powerful.

We hesitate to give ten dollars to a sanctuary saving lives, or to an unhoused neighbor trying to survive, because we fear “misuse.”
Meanwhile, systemic financial abuse by corporations and wealthy billionaires operates at scales orders of magnitude larger — and far less questioned. In fact, we all financially back them every day.

That asymmetry is not neutral.
It is internalized capitalism.
It is classism.
It is scarcity conditioning.

It’s an example of the sad truth: we’ve been conditioned to hate the poor and turn away from the needy, so we can continue to consume in peace.

What Solidarity Actually Looks Like

Animal rescue is not a niche hobby. I don’t do this for fun. Sanctuary is not a personal dream– manifest.
It is emergency infrastructure.

Infrastructure that exists because other systems have failed.
Infrastructure that serves both humans and animals.
Infrastructure that requires collective support to function.

The current model — where individual sanctuaries are expected to absorb the consequences of economic instability, housing policy failures, healthcare inaccessibility, and social collapse while fundraising through each crisis cycle — is not sustainable.

It was never designed to be visible.
It was designed to quietly hold the line for a shaky system.

Making it visible requires a cultural shift from spectator to stakeholder.

Support rescues consistently, not just during viral emergencies or when we are forced to beg for scraps.

Assume good will when nonprofits ask for help. Verify our organization if you need. Most of us small nonprofits aren’t scam artists.
See the humanity in front-line caregivers and unhoused neighbors alike.

Interrogate the reflex that says “they might misuse it” when someone in need asks for support.

Because more often than not, what you are witnessing is not mismanagement.
It is survival inside systemic neglect. And your privileged-prejudice is showing.

Show solidarity because the animals — innocent witnesses to our societal failures — deserve nothing less.

In a time of accelerating crisis, that scrutiny and silence do more than wound — they isolate leadership and reinforce the dangerous myth that sanctuary work is a personal burden, when in reality it has always been a collective responsibility.

When We Make Rescue a Personal Burden, We Lose People Too

We need to talk about the cost of making rescue a personal burden — because the cost is not only animal lives.

It is human lives, too.

Animal caregivers, shelter workers, veterinarians, and rescue professionals operate under chronic exposure to trauma, grief, euthanasia, crisis decision-making, and moral injury aka systemic abuse. Research shows shelter workers experience disproportionately high rates of burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and PTSD — in some cases at rates multiple times higher than the general population. More than half of shelter staff report high burnout, and the vast majority report significant secondary traumatic stress from the nature of the work itself.

Occupational data also indicates that animal rescue and welfare workers face suicide risks comparable to other first responders — a devastating but rarely acknowledged reality in a sector that is culturally framed as “passion work” rather than crisis labor.

When care work is chronically underfunded, socially scrutinized, and structurally unsupported, compassion fatigue does not remain an abstract concept. It becomes lived psychological strain. It becomes depression. It becomes grief accumulation. It becomes isolation.

And sometimes, it becomes tragic loss.

I am writing this in part from that place of grief.

For colleagues we have lost.
For caregivers who carried too much, for too long, with too little support.
For Mikayla Raines, and for the many rescue workers whose names never make headlines but whose absence leaves a permanent silence in the spaces they once held with care. For the animals and humans that loved and lost their people.

Because when society treats rescue and sanctuary as an individual moral obligation instead of shared infrastructure, we create conditions where caregivers are expected to absorb endless crisis without adequate resources, rest, or communal reinforcement.

That is not resilience.
That is slow erosion.

And if we do not change our relationship to rescue and sanctuary work — culturally, materially, and collectively — we will not only continue losing animals to systemic neglect.

We will continue losing the very people who were trying to save them, and the light and hope they brought to unprecedented suffering on this planet.

Care Is Infrastructure

We–The caretakers on the frontlines are not asking to be rescued.

We are asking not to carry the weight of systemic collapse alone.

Care is not weakness.
Care is infrastructure.
Care is mutual survival.

And while the empire debates policy, markets, and optics, the animals still need to eat.
The medical emergencies and abuse cases still arrive.
The surrenders still happen.
The crises do not pause for economic downturns.

If we want sanctuaries, rescues, and ethical animal welfare systems to survive in an era of compounding instability, we must move differently.

Not as isolated spectators.
Not as passive consumers of crisis content.
But as a collective community willing to share responsibility for displaced lives.

Consistently.
Materially.
And together.

Because this was never a “me” problem.
It has always been a “we” responsibility.

The Wild Doesn’t Want Your Awareness

Mētztli Wolf: Wild Lessons — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:28:30 GMT

What wolves can teach us about shadow work, sovereignty, and radical acceptance

Every October, the hashtags start howling. Wolf Awareness Week floods the feed—photos of golden eyes, sentimental captions about protecting the wild.

But awareness doesn’t save wolves. It soothes humans.

Awareness is easy. It lets us feel righteous, virtue signaling to other humans without changing anything. It keeps us at the center of the story—humans as observers, as saviors, as the ones with the power to bestow compassion upon the world. But wolves don’t need our pity. They need our participation in a new paradigm.

To address our issue with wolves, we have to see them not as charity cases but as mirrors. They reflect everything we’ve exiled from ourselves: instinct, sovereignty, interdependence, wildness. This isn’t just conservation—it’s shadow work.

And shadow work asks uncomfortable questions. How dare we create the problem—sever our bond with nature—and then design awareness campaigns that still center our extractive, colonial gaze? How dare we call for protection while believing we are separate from what we seek to save?

Acceptance of wolves is acceptance of the wild—of nature, and of our own nature. The denial of that truth is a spiritual sickness, manifesting and metastasizing as ecological collapse and human alienation. It’s 2025, and we’re still fighting fairytales about big bad wolves—and the same myths projected onto marginalized communities. When those false narratives inform political policy, we create systemic endangerment for all nature. Us included.

Colonialism taught us to control, extract, and destroy. Wolves defy all three. Their existence is resistance. So is ours, if we could only remember our place in the pack—not above it.

Running Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary has taught me that acceptance is a daily practice, a moving prayer. It’s choosing to honor what cannot be tamed. When my wolfdog Finny enters his winter wolf syndrome, he growls and snaps, and my heart breaks. But that’s the human in me—the one who craves control. Acceptance reminds me: this isn’t about me. It’s about trusting the intelligence of the Earth, and the wild beings it birthed.

The Hidden Ego of Awareness Culture

Awareness is often painted as virtue, but in practice, it’s another form of control.

It keeps humans in the role of narrator—the ones who decide what deserves empathy, what deserves saving, what deserves to exist. It centers our feelings about the world instead of the world itself. Anthropocentrism.

When we make ourselves the lens through which all life is seen, awareness becomes an act of dominance disguised as care. It’s performative intimacy: we look, we feel, we hashtag, but we never actually decenter ourselves.

This is the hidden ego of awareness culture. The same force that drives white saviorism in humanitarian spaces drives it in animal welfare and conservation—the need to be the hero in a story of our own making. We extract meaning, validation, even identity from our “concern.” We post the wolves and the children, the forests and the floods, but rarely question how our gaze perpetuates the systems causing their suffering.

As an autistic adult, I’ve seen this play out in other “awareness” movements too. Autism awareness campaigns often frame neurodivergent people as problems to be managed, not equals to be respected, nor essentials to be valued. They center pity instead of policy. Sympathy instead of systemic change. The same pattern applies to wolves and wild canids—we render them symbols of fear or fascination, but never full participants in the ecological story. Our story and intertwined future.

Awareness allows us to stay human-centered in a crisis that demands we become Earth-centered.

It keeps the hierarchy intact: us on top, nature below.

But what if awareness isn’t the goal? What if the goal is humility—the radical act of stepping back, listening, and letting the land and its inhabitants define their own narratives of being?

That is the threshold between awareness and acceptance. The point where our gaze softens, our language shifts, and our relationship to the living world begins to heal… along with our spirit.

Acceptance as an Evolution of Consciousness

Acceptance asks more of us than awareness ever will.

It demands that we dismantle the illusion of human exceptionalism—the belief that intellect or morality grants us dominion over the living world. Awareness observes; acceptance participates. It says: I am not above this web. I am of it.

To accept wolves is to accept the logic of the land itself—cyclical, interdependent, self-regulating. It’s to trust that nature already knows how to balance, to regenerate, to endure. The wisdom of our Sacred Mother Earth. Science affirms this through trophic cascades and biodiversity metrics; Indigenous knowledge affirms it through stories older than empire. Both speak the same truth: when wolves return, balance returns, and harmony cultivates sustainability.

This kind of acceptance requires an evolution of consciousness. Facts alone can’t move us there. Data doesn’t undo domination. Only humility does. Only relationship.

And I’ll be honest—I fail at this every day.

Running Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary should make me a model of ecological integrity, but I still catch myself replicating the very hierarchies I critique. I measure productivity. I plan efficiency. I strategize optics. I worry about palatability—whether our work will seem “respectable” enough to attract support from the mainstream. I slip into extraction mindsets: What can I get—funding, attention, legitimacy—to keep this mission alive?

That’s my colonial inheritance showing. My own domestication.

Acceptance means noticing it, forgiving it, and beginning again.

Sometimes I watch a wolfdog pacing the fence line and realize I’ve built another enclosure—not just for them, but for myself. I created this sanctuary to free them, but the work only matters if it also frees me from the savior story.

So I practice. I slow down. I listen until the land speaks plainly: You are not here to fix. You are here to remember.

When I operate from that place—when the mission becomes a mutual act of belonging—the work shifts from management to communion. The fences become temporary boundaries within a larger field of reciprocity. The sanctuary becomes ceremony.

Acceptance, then, is not passive. It’s participatory reverence—the willingness to be changed by what we claim to protect.

What Wolves Teach Us About Humanity

To live beside wolves is to live beside the truth of what we are—beautiful, instinctive, contradictory creatures learning how to belong. They are not just animals we observe; they are mirrors we avoid.

Every projection humanity casts onto wolves—dangerous, savage, untrustworthy—reveals our own shadow. What we fear in them is what we have exiled in ourselves: autonomy, unpredictability, the refusal to submit. Wolves remind us that hierarchy is not harmony. They show us what community looks like when power is distributed through trust, not domination.

For centuries, we’ve waged psychological war against that reflection. We called them monsters to justify our appetite for control. We erased them from the landscape and congratulated ourselves for making it “safe.” But in every ecosystem where wolves vanished, imbalance took root. The world began to mirror our inner desolation.

Wolves are not the villains of the story. We are. But we can also be the ones who rewrite it.

Finny teaches me this daily. When he turns on me in his winter wolf syndrome—hackles high, teeth bared—I feel my instinct to retreat, to dominate, to demand that he be the version of himself that comforts me. Yet the lesson he offers isn’t obedience. It’s honesty. His ferality reminds me that love without control is possible—that safety and sovereignty can coexist.

His growls are not rejection; they’re reminders that even devotion must breathe. He’s teaching me the same truth the wild teaches the world: boundaries are not barriers. They’re the rhythm that makes coexistence possible.

Acceptance is not taming the wolf. It’s learning to stay present when the wolf won’t be tamed. It’s allowing the wild—within and without—to exist without apology.

That’s what humanity has yet to learn.

Until we stop demanding the wild conform to our comfort, we’ll continue to destroy what’s meant to save us.

The wolf’s survival isn’t just an ecological issue—it’s a spiritual mirror. How we treat the wild will always reveal how we treat ourselves.

The Cultural Impasse: Facts vs. Feelings

Eye to eye with a wolfdog every day keeps truth in perspective. Washakie’s wise gaze is piercing and loving.

We are living at the crossroads of collapse and awakening. The data is undeniable: melting ice caps, vanishing species, rising temperatures. Yet facts alone can’t pierce the armor of identity. We’ve entered an era where feelings outweigh evidence, where political allegiance matters more than planetary survival.

This is the impasse—where culture meets consciousness. We are no longer arguing about wolves or weather. We’re arguing about reality itself.

Our crisis is not just ecological; it’s epistemological. It’s a breakdown in how we know what’s true. And that fracture, that distrust of both science and story, is exactly what colonialism thrives on—division, hierarchy, separation.

The wolf has become a scapegoat for that dissonance. To one side, a symbol of wild freedom; to the other, a threat to profit, property, and control. The debates over wolf reintroduction, predator management, and “livestock protection” mirror the same polarized narratives that split our society over race, gender, borders, and belonging. We project our inner war onto the landscape, and call it policy.

Acceptance doesn’t fit neatly into that framework because it refuses sides. It doesn’t ask who’s right; it asks who’s ready to evolve.

It’s not bipartisan—it’s biological. The Earth doesn’t care about our parties or platforms. She cares about balance.

And balance doesn’t require our permission—it requires our participation.

The wolf’s howl is the sound of that participation calling us home. It’s the reminder that ecosystems don’t vote. They respond.

We must stop pretending coexistence is radical. It’s natural. It’s the baseline condition of life on Earth.

Every time a state votes to delist wolves from protection, every time we legislate fear instead of relationship, we reveal that our species still believes domination equals safety. But domination is a trauma response, not a survival strategy.

We can’t out-legislate our disconnection.

We can only outgrow it.

That’s the real work of acceptance—the evolution of consciousness that allows us to move from argument to alignment, from control to cooperation, from awareness to belonging.

Rewilding Our Relationship

Rewilding is not a project. It’s a remembering.

It begins in the quiet—before the hashtags, before the headlines—when you notice the pulse beneath your feet and realize the Earth is still speaking.

The wolves have never forgotten how to listen.

They move in conversation with the wind, the water, the herd. They know when to lead and when to yield. Their survival depends on reciprocity, not rule.

We’ve spent centuries forgetting that rhythm. We built fences, cities, and systems to protect ourselves from the truth of interdependence. Yet no wall, no ideology, no empire has ever made us feel as safe as belonging does.

Rewilding our relationship to the world means learning again how to belong. It asks us to meet the wild not as a metaphor but as a mentor—to listen for the ways the land is always teaching balance, always inviting cooperation.

For me, it begins every morning at the sanctuary. I walk the fenceline around dawn, fog draped over the red clay, breath of wolves rising like prayer smoke. Some mornings they sing, some mornings they watch in silence. Either way, they remind me that I am both guardian and student. Their eyes hold the same question the Earth asks of all of us: Can you be trusted with what you claim to love?

Rewilding is how we answer.

It’s not about running feral or abandoning the world; it’s about unbecoming the lie that we were ever separate from it. It’s the slow, radical act of re-rooting our nervous systems into the soil of interconnection.

Acceptance lives here—in the pause before reaction, in the choice to listen rather than label, in the small daily practice of reverence.

When we stop trying to fix or criminalize the wild and start learning from it, a new kind of activism emerges—one grounded in reciprocity, empathy, and awe.

Because the truth is simple: when we remember how to belong, everything else remembers too.

From Awareness to Action

Showing Winnie the trash I removed from the land just while she finished her breakfast.

Awareness begins the story, but action sustains it.

If this essay has stirred something in you—grief, wonder, fury, hope—let it move you. Let it become relationship. Let it become reciprocity.

Rewilding doesn’t demand that you do everything, or save us all. It invites you to do something, and to do it with intention.

Whether you have a little energy or a lot, there is a place for you in the pack. There is divinity in diversity, nature is variety.

Low Spoons — Everyday Acts of Reverence

Listen. Step outside and listen to the more-than-human world. Let yourself be taught.
Learn. Read Indigenous-led ecological teachings, wildlife science, and the stories of those who live in coexistence with predators.
Question. Challenge the myths you were taught about wolves, wilderness, and control.
Share. When you speak of wolves, speak of them as kin, not curiosity or cautious colloquialism. E.g. “Wolf in sheep’s clothing.” “Feed them to the wolves.” Use your platforms with intention.

Medium Spoons — Building Right Relationship

Support sanctuaries that center ethics, education, and lifelong care—like Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary.
Sponsor an animal or a project. Small monthly contributions become dens, vet care, and safety.
Refuse exploitation. Don’t share or engage with viral wolf content that objectifies or romanticizes captivity.
Vote for coexistence. Advocate for non-lethal wildlife management and the protection of keystone species. Join us by staying informed, sign up at teamwolf.org

High Spoons — Collective Rewilding

Volunteer your skills. Builders, artists, organizers, communicators—every role strengthens the ecosystem of change.
Start conversations. Bring rewilding into your communities, classrooms, and movements.
Protect the protectors. Support rescuers, activists, and sanctuary founders facing burnout or harassment.
Organize. Work to end policies rooted in domination, fear, and extraction—because the wolf’s liberation is bound up in our own.

Rewilding isn’t a trend. It’s a restorative transformation.

Acceptance is its prayer.

Every act of reverence—every donation, conversation, or shift in perception—ripples outward into the collective field. It strengthens the possibility of a world where coexistence isn’t revolutionary; it’s remembered.

The wild doesn’t want our awareness.

It wants our return.

Author’s Note

I write these words from the red clay of Eden, North Carolina—where Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary is slowly becoming the kind of refuge I once dreamed of finding.

Here, among wolves, wolfdogs, and singing dogs, I am learning—over and over—that coexistence is ceremony.

Every howl at dusk reminds me that healing isn’t linear, and belonging isn’t earned. It’s remembered.

If this essay resonated, I invite you to stay connected—to walk this path of wild reciprocity with me. To sign up for a paid subscription to sustain this work of sanctuary.

You can support our sanctuary directly, sponsor one of our residents, or join my writing and spellcraft community through Revolutionary Mystic and my Substack, Wild Lessons: Field Notes from the Sanctuary.

May your days be guided by instinct, may your heart stay untamed, and may we all remember:

The wild isn’t out there.

It’s in us.

— Mētztli Wolf

Evolutionary Astrologer • Medium • Founder, Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary & Revolutionary Mystic

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Sanctuary Rebirth: What to Do When It’s All Too Much

Mētztli Wolf: Wild Lessons — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:49:19 GMT

🌿 A Beginning

Welcome, pack.

This is the first entry in what I’m calling Field Notes from the Sanctuary—a space where I’ll be writing about life among rescued wolfdogs, astrology as a map for healing, and the sacred activism of tending the wild.

If you’ve followed me through Revolutionary Mystic or supported our journey on Patreon, you’ve already been part of this story. Just 3 weeks ago, my partner and I traveled over 3,000 miles from Washington to North Carolina with ten wolfdogs, relocating our sanctuary, fleeing from our domestic terrorist next door neighbors, The Order, and answering the call to take over a struggling refuge and restore it into what is now Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary.

The land where we landed was tired—overgrown, cluttered, and carrying generations of neglect—but it still pulsed with possibility. We arrived not with perfection, but with purpose: to heal what we could, to save who we could, and to rebuild something sacred from what remained.

Now, as we begin again here at our sanctuary’s new location in Eden, I’m transitioning my writing and community from Patreon to Substack, where everything—astrology, essays, rituals, and sanctuary stories—can live together in one shared hearth. Less platform noise, more depth, dialogue, and breath.

I’m so glad you’re here at this new beginning.

🌕 When the Noise Feels Endless

Every time I log onto social media lately, the world feels heavier.
Genocide, ecocide, inhumanity. Governments turning more authoritarian by the day. The planet burning while the powerful profit from the ashes.

It’s easy to feel like we’re standing at the edge of something breaking—something that was never built to last, but still holds so much of our daily life within its crumbling bones.

I know that feeling well: the paralysis that comes when it’s all too much at once.

As an AuDHD’er with hyper-empathy, and a calling to rescue canids and wild hearts, I know this struggle intimately. Like many in the animal welfare field, I wrestle and reckon with that brutal truth: I can’t save them all. But I can save as many as possible.

So what do I do with the grief I’m left holding?
I save as many as I can.
I start right here, today.

I remember this truth too: If I can save even one life, it’s worth it.
I’ve already done that. Every additional life saved is an added blessing.
This keeps me humble and in gratitude while our world, our Mother is on fire.

And yet—out here, at the sanctuary, the land keeps whispering an antidote.

I am often asked how to make land offerings, acknowledgements. Listen. Be responsible to its asks.

🌿 Clearing the Cobwebs, Finding Breath

These past weeks we’ve been clearing away the cobwebs.
Raking up years of magnolia leaves.
Pulling bits of plastic, shards of broken glass, trash and rusted metal from the soil.

With each sweep, the land exhales a little deeper—finally able to breathe again.

Interestingly, so did I. Since arriving here in Eden, my own lungs have softened open, my breath easier. It’s as if this land and I are remembering how to breathe together. 🌿

Already, little seedlings have begun to sprout underfoot—proof that healing begins the moment we create space for it.

This work isn’t glamorous. It’s dirty, slow, and at times overwhelming.
But in that grounded rhythm of care—hands in the soil, sweat on my back, wolfdogs and New Guinea singing dogs watching from their dens—there’s something holy.
Something that feels like the answer to despair.

A moving prayer and love letter; devotion.

The land here, showing signs of new life after a few weeks of tender care.

🐺 The Medicine of Small Acts

When Cherokee, our newly inherited Eden wolfdog, lost his beloved companion Odin right before our arrival, he carried mostly grief in his underweight body.
When we greeted him he was sunken and sallow. Laying along the fence, forlorn with his head resting on his paws, eyes waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Grief does that—to animals, to land, to us.

Then, after a few weeks of nourishment, loving affection, and a long-needed bath, he stood taller. His coat gleams again, its fuller. He is smiling and wagging his tail, tippy-tap dancing for treats. Light and life has returned to his eyes. I feel it’s what Odin would’ve wanted for him, and I dedicate what we couldn’t do in time to save Odin, to Cherokee. He gets double our love now.

That simple act of care became a reminder:

Revolution, much like any great transformation, happens through unrelenting devotion and accountability for what we can heal today, right in front of us.

Not through perfection.
Not through waiting for the “right time” or the world to change.
But through the quiet, consistent tending of what’s ours to nurture.
Honoring our Sacred Inheritance.

Receiving my first of many Cherokee kisses.

🌍 When the World Is Crumbling

I know the weight of eco-grief, existential crisis and humanitarian grief. The deep ancestral ache of watching systems collapse, destroying the sacred—lives, dreams, futures and places that cannot be replaced while people you love turn away or numb out. Most of us are cornered into survival, backed up against barriers we don’t have access to cross. How are we supposed to respond to a world that is crumbling beneath our worn out feet?

I know what it’s like to feel powerless in the face of empire.
Like these wolves, this land, I was born inherently in its capitalist, colonial crosshairs.
A descendant of the layered story of this land turned nation; genocide and chattel slavery, persecution and prejudice.
Black and Indigenous. Queer and femme. Neurodivergent and disabled. Resilient and proud.

Yet all of us are to be exploited and discarded by the machine. Its design ultimately only serves destruction. Carrying on during collapse? —disorienting.

But the Earth has always known what to do with collapse: she composts it.
She turns what’s rotted into nourishment for what comes next.

Our role, as witches, healers, dreamers, and revolutionaries, is to learn from her—to keep tending the soil of our lives, even when it feels futile.

We rake.
We plant.
We feed who’s in front of us.
We breathe with the land again.

My partner, Jackson, with Paul and Lil’ Bones—Eden New Guinea Singing Dog mixes in need of adoption and forever families.

This Is What We Do When It’s All Too Much

We remember that care is not small—it’s sacred, interconnected.
We return to the rhythm of tending what we love.
We give extra to the unloved.
We practice devotion in the face of despair.

That is activism.
That is ancestral veneration.
That is magic.
That is how worlds are rebuilt.

Because revolution doesn’t always look like protest or policy.
Sometimes it looks like washing a wolfdog.
Sometimes it looks like pulling rusted wire from the soil.
Sometimes it looks like taking one deep, conscious breath.

💌 Field Notes from the Sanctuary

This Substack will be where I share reflections on astrology, witchcraft, decolonial spirituality, and life among the rescued canids of Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary.

If you’ve been craving spiritual insight that doesn’t turn away from the world’s pain but moves through it with integrity and magic, you’re in the right place.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share:
🌕 Astrology insights for collective healing
🌿 Rituals and reflections on ecological reciprocity
🐺 Stories and lessons from our rescued wolfdogs, dingoes and wild canids
🔥 Thoughts on sacred activism, resilience, and wild kinship

Subscribe below to receive these field notes directly in your inbox—and join a growing pack of people tending the sacred in a world that needs it most.

With breath, devotion, and dirt under my nails,
Mētztli Wolf
Founder of Revolutionary Mystic & Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary

🐾 Author’s Note

This Substack is an act of devotion—to the land, to the wild canids, to you, our sacred relatives of the four directions, to the work of remembering how to be human in right relationship with the wild.

If these words nourished you, I invite you to support our ongoing work at Black Moon Wild Canid Sanctuary, where 21 rescued wolfdogs, dingoes, and soon—other wild canids are healing alongside us.

💫 Here’s how you can help:

Subscribe to Wild Lessons: Field Notes from the Sanctuary for future posts.
Book a reading for clarity, guidance, and reconnection with your purpose.
Shop at Revolutionary Mystic—every candle and ritual tool funds sanctuary care.
Donate directly to help us build safe enclosures, cover vet care, and restore this land.

Every act of care—reading, sharing, contributing—ripples outward.
Thank you for helping us make the impossible sacred again. 🖤

Thanks for reading Metztli Wolf! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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