Adventures in blogging...begins

Why Wolf in the Garden? I have identified myself with wolves from as long as I can remember. When I first thought about starting a business I wanted to call it the Stone Wolf. It was named mostly after a poem I wrote in high school, Stone Fox. Why fox, instead of wolf? Because I had seen a statue of a fox in a garden and the thought tumbled around my mind, what does he do when no one is looking? It seemed a novel concept to me, this being around 1990 or so and the Toy Story movies still years away, so I wrote a poem about it. Maybe if my little meanderings of the mind catch on and anyone reads this I will post the poem. Years later the poem came back to me as I was struggling to find a name for a jewelry making business I was trying to launch. The business failed, the name stuck. I was the stone wolf. I suppose stone fit me at the time. I didn't want to open up to people and was scared to invest my emotions in anyone or anything. During my first marriage I spent a considerable amount of money and frustration in finding a sculptor who would make me a statue of a pair of wolves. The wolves never made it into my garden. The sculpture got damaged during shipping. The marriage was already damaged. By the time I got around to working with the sculptor to get a replacement shipped things had gone badly, mostly my fault and the dream of my perfect garden with its guardian wolves faded away.

Stone is something I am trying to leave behind. I eventually married again and have a four year old son. He needs me to open up and be emotionally available. Stone is not something I can afford anymore. The wolf in the garden now is me. I garden to chase away my doubts and fears about my failures in life, both real and imaginary. I garden to chase away the pain of so many dreams that I dashed on stone through a number of bad decisions and sometimes just bad luck. I wanted to be a botanist, traveling to faraway locales chasing a cure for cancer or something else similarly grand. Somewhere in my mind I figured that by nearly 40 I would have done something substantial with my life and I don't really feel I have. I'm currently in college, training to be a teacher. I hope to become a high school science teacher and hopefully with a little luck inspire some kids to love science and nature the way I do.

I remember a song my mother used to sing to me when I was very little, before things went badly in our lives. The song was the Circle Game and the lines that stand out to me now:

The child who dreamed, tomorrow now is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
(apologies for any errors, this is just how I remember it going)

I'm a lot older than 20 now but I like to think this is still true, that there can be new, better dreams to follow.