Once there was a guardian of the wolf world. He was my husband, and father to our three children — a man who dedicated his life to the restoration of an animal that civilization tried to erase. An endangered species biologist, his bare hands scruffed the pungent fur of the predators while operating deep inside the viscera of a controversial restoration project. Each day presented a renewed opportunity to offer his rough strength and playful agility to both the physical and political challenges of his work — but as thirty years of dedication approached, his body began a sudden and relentless decline. His work, his joy and his fatherhood dismantled in a relentless storm which terminally dissolved his motor nerves, robbing him of his ability to walk, swallow and speak over the course of one short and terrible year.

We raised our children in a garden oasis under the migratory path of swallows and swans, the skies overhead buzzing in honeybees and bird’s wings. We kept goats for milk and cheese, chickens and ducks for eggs, and our freezer was stocked with the venison Chris hunted humanely each fall. We worked hard to feed our family from homestead labors across the years, growing our own food free of chemicals and pesticides. Nevertheless, we found ourselves puzzling — often suddenly and at random intervals — over mysterious and troubling livestock deaths. Circling goats, stargazing blind and drooling. Strange twist-necked ducks, corkscrewing into collapse before dying. They’d last about three days before succumbing, their bodies sent to veterinary labs, but reports were inconclusive.

As Chris’s body descended a little more each day before the eyes of his children, we already understood it wasn't a stroke of random misfortune that had caused this disease to show up in his body. Surrounded by endless miles of wheat, soy and corn, hog and poultry feedlot waste, and stagnant drainage canals, the coastal plain’s industrial farm fields and runoff created a hot spot for neurotoxic cyanobacteria. Normally harmless, the blue-green algae metastasize to deadly levels in the presence of agricultural fertilizers to release a phantom poison into the air, drinking water, and bodies of edible fish. Two years earlier a neighbor within earshot of our home died of ALS. We were living in a disease cluster.

What causes a civilization to dismantle nervous systems and destroy waterways, families, neighbors, wolves and fathers? Chris and I were witness to the tragic consequence of a wrong tale told about a species. The wolf, brought to roam the world by nature’s design, was known to us as prudent in its avoidance of humans, but still is judged as an unquenchable blood ravener — justifying continued fear, bullets and poison — exterminated by farmer, trapper and government alike. The imagination that crafted the razored tooth and claw of wolf nature, has been crafting similar stories about human nature for three thousand years, prohibiting us from imagining the innate generativity of our own creative force, and our rightful place as protectors of life and our own children’s futures. We dig the graves of our sons, and as those who walked before us we fail the generations. Men are swallowed alive before the eyes of their babies, poisoned into their graves as nameless barnyard goats stargaze strangely before lying down to die. What engine burns all this as fuel? And what stories does it tell so it can keep running on like this, despite the evidence, and the cost?

In search of answers, I've been reading the West's three thousand year cosmological record the way a biologist tracks an animal. Across a mythic terrain marked by ruin and resilience, stagnancy and survival, I have sought our imaginal inheritance — found it trapped from its origins bound in service to a machine of merciless appetite. If you are feeling scarcity in your soul despite a storehouse of abundance — if the anxiety in your nervous system has no name and won't leave you be — you too are feeling its metabolic runoff.