Un Lupo in Rivolta Non Si Tocca | Mark Lindsay
One doesn't touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Most every day I look through my images to see what resonates with me. Today I stopped at this photo taken in Parma a few years ago. Italian graffiti is so much more imaginative than what we generally find in America. It's angrier, wittier, and often more poignant. Don't touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Words of wisdom with a hint of Italian drama.
While I'm not one to organize a revolution, my world seems to be swirling and churning with it's own brand of drama. Death, illness, aging loved ones, change—the human condition is in constant upheaval. Sometimes it proceeds sneakily where we hardly notice it. The grass grows quietly. Then it all shifts with the force of tectonic plates. The past few months have revealed forces that are beyond my control. Maybe the wolf that is in revolution is the universe itself.
Change is something that we avoid as we age on this planet. There is the illusion, as we look back, that things were crystallized and stable in the past, like grainy old photos captured with silver salts. Unmoving, nonthreatening, as still as a summer lake, our past sits there like an old, wrinkled uncle. Yet things were never still at all. It was all changing before our eyes, even back then.
Don't touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. We tend to want to stabilize things, to normalize, placate, and make them comfortable for our ego. The ego acts and makes things worse. Don't touch could also mean don't do. Leave it alone. Let the changes happen and watch with amazement. It all comes and goes. And a wolf bites.