Season of the Wolf

I’m back in North Carolina.

With dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, care needs are ever evolving and unpredictable. What works for a season rarely works forever.

The system held as long as it could, and now it needs to be revised. That’s the cyclical nature of everything. There’s a season for building. A season for sustaining. And a season for revising. Rinse. Repeat.

That rhythm feels natural to me now. Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just iterative. Responsive. Alive.

These days, when I come back to North Carolina, I am surrounded by people who love me.

It’s interesting to feel no anxiety or resistance to this place. A place that, up until seven months ago, I refused to even consider visiting for years. A place that has historically been painful and complicated in different ways. A place that never felt like home.

Now, when I get off the plane or park my car, I know I’ll be greeted by my people. People who love me. Who want the best for me. Who support me in the ways I need to be supported, not just the ones that are convenient or serve them.

It feels different on a soul level.

The ability to relax and trust. Even in moments of perceived crisis. Knowing I’ve got everything and everyone I need.

It’s a game changer.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in my life these days…

It’s interesting being the person people call when there’s a crisis.

It’s interesting having the kind of presence that lets people feel safe when they are grasping for certainty. It’s hard to fully describe what it feels like to walk into a room and see people physically relax in your presence. Facial expressions soften and you can almost hear the thoughts, Oh good, you’re here. Everything is going to be alright.

That wasn’t always the case.

I wasn’t always the one people could rely on. I wasn’t always trusted to make good choices. There were seasons of my life where I was the problem. Or at least the catalyst for chaos.

That’s not me anymore.

When I show up now, it puts people at ease.

A couple of decades ago, it was more like, here comes trouble.

This version of me didn’t just appear overnight.

It’s been this way for a while now, but I can remember the season where it really started to take shape.

It started on my farm in Northern California.

I had a business partner who was chaotic. Full of half-baked plans that were always falling apart. Half-assed efforts that led to crisis after crisis. I would leave to make sales calls and come back to a mess. And I would clean it up.

Over and over.

A mentor of mine started calling me The Wolf.

If you’ve ever seen Pulp Fiction, you know the character. The fixer. The cleaner. The one they call when everything has gone sideways.

John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are standing in a kitchen, panicked, covered in someone else’s mistake. There’s a body. There’s blood. There’s chaos. They’re spiraling, talking over each other, making it worse by the second.

And then Winston Wolf walks in.

Calm. Composed.

He assesses the room. He tells them exactly what needs to happen next.

“My name is Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

That energy.

Every time I pulled up, my mentor would grin and say, Thank God the Wolf is here.

We’d get a chuckle out of it. And then I’d get to work.

Things carried on like that for years. Calamity into calm. A ship set on a collision course with disaster, righted at the last minute. Plenty of opportunities to practice.

By the time I walked away from that partnership, I knew something in my bones. Whatever my future held, whatever I came up against, I could figure it out. Odds be damned.

Fifteen years working in the plant medicine industry in California will do that. When the rules change overnight, when the landscape shifts under your feet, when certainty is more rumor than reality, you learn to adapt or you get swallowed.

If you fight that reality, it exhausts you and gets you nowhere.

If you learn to read it, adjust to it, and move with it, you build capacity.

At some point, I stopped expecting stability to come from the environment.

I started building it myself.

I stopped calling change a problem.

I treated it like information.

Adapt and overcome.

So much of our suffering comes from the belief that if things aren’t going according to our plan, they’re going wrong.

Just because something doesn’t align with your preferences does not mean it’s incorrect.

We measure events against what we wanted. And when they deviate, we call them bad. We call them failure. We call them loss.

But what if that framework is the problem?

The Stoic philosopher Seneca said that to be happy you must eliminate two things: the fear of a bad future and the memory of a bad past.

And I agree with him. For the most part.

Most people are living somewhere between those two poles, either bracing for what might go wrong next or replaying what already did. Anticipating disaster. Rehearsing regret.

Both of those positions pull you out of the present moment, which is all we ever actually have and which is full of peace, if we are able to receive it.

But I think we can take it one step further.

Even in that framing, we are still using reductionist language. We are still calling the future bad. We are still calling the past bad.

And what if that is the real trap?

What if it just is?

Life is not unfolding in good or bad ways.

It is unfolding.

And in that unfolding, we are constantly being invited to choose our response.

Because the moment we label something as wrong, we begin resisting it.

And resistance has a cost.

Carl Jung called this the paradox of acceptance. What we resist does not disappear. It persists. It strengthens.

Surrender is the active state of nonresistance.

It is the moment you stop fighting the fact that something exists and begin engaging with it as it is.

So much of what we call control is just bracing. Just anticipating. Just trying to get ahead of discomfort before it arrives.

And bracing is exhausting.

When the Charlie situation first landed on my desk, every fiber of my being rejected it.

No.

Not me.

Not this.

Somebody else.

Anybody else.

But then I sat with it. I chewed on it for a while and something else started to surface.

This wasn’t just a disruption. It was an invitation.

An opportunity for personal growth that I had evolved enough to meet. Not perfectly. Not without discomfort. But with an open heart and a skill set I didn’t have twenty years ago.

If you spend your life honing a skill, developing your abilities, committing to your craft, you don’t shy away when the moment comes to use it.

If you dedicate yourself to becoming the best football player you can be and you get an invitation to the Super Bowl, you don’t not go.

You go.

That’s what this has felt like.

The emotional regulation and problem-solving Super Bowl.

I worked really hard to come to a place of forgiveness and peace around the history Charlie and I have had.

Years of work. Years of untangling. Years of learning how not to react from old wounds. So when the opportunity to see how far I’d actually come arrived, I didn’t want to let it pass.

You only learn how good you are by being tested.

And this was that arena.

This time, I didn’t collapse. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t fall back into the old patterns that used to run the show. I felt all of it. The history. The weight. The reflex to protect myself.

And I stayed.

There was a time when people braced when I walked into a room. Here comes trouble.

Now it’s different.

Now it’s, Oh good. It’s the Wolf.

Nothing had to change but me.

-Sunny