The kiss was really what sent Anne Firestone over the edge-a sloppy, clumsy smooch from the same creature that terrorized Little Red Riding Hood.
Of course, the kiss was delivered through a silver chain-link fence because the 16 wolves at the Timber Wolf Preservation Society in Greendale, Wis., southwest of Milwaukee, aren’t strolling around as if they own the place. But it sent shivers down Firestone’s spine.
“I was kneeling down, the ground was mucky and wet, and this she-wolf with golden eyes sniffed my hand, licked my hand, then gave me this big sloppy kiss on my face,” Firestone recalled, her blue eyes wide and bright. “It was like in fairy tales when you’ve been kissed by the prince. I was in another state.”
That kiss, in March 1993, wasn’t Firestone’s first encounter with wolves, but it was just the spark the 48-year-old needed to abandon a 20-year career in social work. She decided to spend as much time as possible with wolves-since 1973 an endangered species in all states but Alaska-and has now produced an audio cassette called “The Inner Wolf, Immune System of the Soul.”
The self-help tape, which is a compilation of “stories and songs to strengthen you in life,” grew out of a series of wolf-related events and is the basis of workshops, transformational counseling and wolf-spirit sessions that Firestone periodically offers in Chicago.
“It took me a long time to get the courage to do this,” said the 5-foot-1-inch Firestone, a compact woman with short, cranberry-colored hair and a soothing voice. “I’ve been on a path for a long time, looking for something but didn’t know what. It was like being kissed by Prince Charming. I was kissed by a wolf. What can I say?”
Her tape, which is categorized at the Lincoln Park store Healing Earth Resources in the “And Now for Something Completely Different-What a Mind Trip,” section, almost says it all for her.
Granted, there are more unusual tapes than Firestone’s in the store, which sells new age books, music, incense and other mystical and spiritual products. But hers is the only one involving wolves as healers.
“What wolves have is spiritual power,” Firestone says on the tape in a lyrical but dark voice. The inner wolf “is being in touch with energy of the wild, instinctive self, the body self.
“Not power over someone, but power which comes from knowing who you are, why you’re here and what your place is in the universe. It’s a power that prevents you from being devastated by crisis.”
Imitator or innovator?
It sounds suspiciously similar to the ideas in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ 1992 best-selling book, “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.” Estes, a Jungian analyst, invited women to reclaim their more instinctive, creative selves and find their trapped soul through stories and fables.
But writer Loretta Hoback, who reviewed Firestone’s tape for the September issue of New Age Retailer, a trade magazine for new age stores, says there “are oceans of difference between the two works.
“Anne definitely leaned heavily towards a concrete therapy, and her work has more of an immediacy about it,” said Hoback, a San Francisco-based writer who reviews about 15 self-help books or tapes a month. “Estes leans on mythology and understanding through stories and myths we have built. (Firestone’s work) seemed to connect with something very primal in the human psyche. People who loved `Women Who Run With the Wolves’ will magnetically be drawn to Anne’s work.”
Firestone’s first call from the wild came 15 years ago. In a dream, she saw herself dropping down on her arms, which were turning into front legs. After crying out, “I’m running with the wolves!” she transformed into the furry creature and bounded ahead to catch up with the rest of the pack.
Still, it had no meaning for her until 13 years later, when she bought an audio-tape version of Estes’ 520-page epic.
“That’s when I realized other women had the same dream,” Firestone said.
After listening to the tapes, Firestone took a shamanic journey, a creative visualization exercise in the mind. In the trip, a person ventures into a light meditative trance and allows a movie-like vision to unfold.
When Firestone tried it, she met a she-wolf in a cave, and the wolf invited her to nurse. “I suppose that’s the different part,” said Firestone, almost apologetically. “But when I accepted (the offer), my whole being was flooded with feelings of love and bliss and shivers, and tears came to my eyes. It was powerful.”
Those two inner experiences, combined later with the kiss from Angelique the she-wolf and support from friends, convinced her to leave her job at Resurrection Hospital and start helping people find what she calls “the inner wolf.”
It isn’t easy. Jim Rieder, who started the Timber Wolf Preservation Society in 1967 and who owns Angelique, rolls his eyes when he hears the phrase “inner wolf.”
Wolves are wild animals, he said, and if someone tells you they’re something more, well, they’re a little off.
“She doesn’t have any mystical relationship; these animals are what I made them,” said Rieder. “They trust me and, consequently, they trust other people. They’re wild underneath. People can come up here for $1 and see them without this metaphysical part. . . . I resent someone coming in for monetary purposes.”
A different kind of class
Firestone, who first heard about Rieder’s preserve from friends and went up to take a look, recently brought a 12-person continuing-education class from Palatine’s Harper College to see the animals. The first thing Firestone did after scuttling over to say hello to her wolf friends was to urge everyone to pick a wolf to whom they felt connected.
An engaging instructor who isn’t beyond howling if the urge strikes, Firestone talked at length about each wolf, giving the group juicy personal tidbits, from the wolves’ love trysts to their medical histories.
By the end of the morning, the class knew that Tokata was the kind of wolf who “likes to be barefoot and pregnant.” Nantan, the pack’s spiritual leader, lost her baby pups and was currently grieving. Misfit has a tendency to stomach tumors.
“They’re as distinct to me as people,” said Firestone, cooing to the wolves through the fence as if they were small children.
But for Firestone, connecting with the inner wolf is more important than looking at their outer fur.
In the afternoon, the class went to Clare Hall in Milwaukee, a nearby retirement home for nuns where Firestone had arranged for the group to have lunch.
There, the somewhat bewildered group ate to the sounds of an audio tape of wolves howling and then gathered in a therapy-like circle while Firestone explained the concept of the inner wolf.
“I was a little put out by it because I don’t believe in it, and I didn’t appreciate it being forced on me,” said Debbie Sipola of Arlington Heights, who noted that nothing in the course description mentioned the afternoon session.
“Basically, she has a captive audience to tell her inner wolf stuff. I totally believe in a connection with nature and human beings, but it’s all animals and nature. She’s just wolves. Why do we have an inner wolf and not an inner dolphin or an inner fish or an inner dog?”
Said Firestone later: “I just use the wolf because it’s my connection. I’m not trying to proselytize. It’s for people who have already had a feeling wolves are important or maybe they’ve dreamed about wolves, or they’re in transition and want to feel empowered.”
New take on old tale
Firestone, whose car interior is covered with the fur and feathers from her four cats, two dogs and parrot, has always loved animals. An only child born and raised in Troy, N.Y., she said she used to untie the neighbor’s dog and run off into the woods with him when she was 3.
She came to Chicago in 1968 after receiving a Ford Foundation fellowship to the University of Chicago; she has a master’s degree in English. At the U. of C., Firestone specialized in Arthurian romance, modern fantasy and myth criticism, disciplines that carry over into her work with wolves.
On the tape, for example, she tells a different “Little Red Riding Hood” story, and in a dark, foreboding voice tells a “real, wolf-friendly” story that drastically strays from the fairy tale.
Borrowing from the movie “In the Company of Wolves” and combining her own dreams and shamanic journeys, Firestone tells the story that might have been told had, as she explains it, “the vital, instinctual energy of the wolf been honored during the Middle Ages, as it was during the Roman times.”
In Firestone’s version, the grandmother is replaced by an old woman who makes a young girl a long red cloak. The old woman’s hair is “really quite a lot like the wolves’ fur.”
The girl, who ran away from home, is cared for by the wolves and eventually bitten by one.
“When (her father) arrived at the clearing, he saw a large wolf and his daughter, and he saw the blood on her hand,” Firestone narrates ominously. “He looked away just for a moment to pull out his gun, and when he looked back there were two wolves.”
Many years later the father dies. The daughter, who still lives with the wolves, attends the funeral dressed in a long red cloak with a red hood. She is accompanied by a man who is “tall and long-limbed, whose eyes were brown with a glint of gold in them.
“And that is the real story of Little Red Riding Hood, and that is the truth,” Firestone says in a sepulchral voice.
How does she know?
“A wolf told it to me.”
