Coyote Wisdom

 

I was pedaling and panting, the wind whooshing in my ears, deafening, muffling all other sounds. Then I saw the coyotes. I pulled hard on my brakes and skidded to a stop. Suddenly the Bosque was quiet except for the maraca rustle of cottonwood leaves and my heaving breath. The summer sky was dark, a portent of the afternoon monsoon rains that would soon pelt the dry earth. 

Four of them, two adults and two adolescents, striding over the bridge spanning the acequia towards me. One of the adults yawned, head low in the heat while the other adult looked back at the teenaged coyotes trailing behind. They came up the bridge and spotted me on the rise not 50 feet away, yellow eyes looking me over as they continued on, unconcerned with my presence. 

This was my second encounter with coyotes in as many weeks. As the month dragged on, I would see a coyote every time I traveled through the Bosque. 

—

“The Bosque” as the locals call it, is the Rio Grande Valley State Park. I had to look up that name because to everyone I know, it’s the Bosque. It’s a riparian cottonwood forest bordering both sides of the Rio Grande as it passes through Albuquerque. For many Burqueños, it is the Central Park of Albuquerque - but more wild. 

A canopied oasis in the high desert, a verdant ribbon vertically bisecting the city, visible from both the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and the West Mesa. It is a refuge from the hot concrete and bare dirt in the rest of the city.  

I frequently make my way through the Bosque by bicycle, on the El Paseo Del Bosque trail. I take it to go to my meditation center, to shop at the Grower’s Market, just for exercise, to clear my head. 

— 

Every time I saw another coyote in the middle of the day in the Bosque, I became more and more sure it had to mean something. 

Seeing a coyote in daylight is jarring. 

They mainly move under the cover of darkness, when it’s cooler and they can commit their mischief away from the diurnal eyes of humans. They eat dead things, hunt small mammals, they sneak into our backyards - making off with chickens, snacking on pet food and sometimes pets. They eat vegetables from our gardens and pick fruit off our trees. 

Despite their adaptation to urban environments, coyotes are undeniably wild. Every encounter felt both undeniably wild and dreamlike. The feeling of time slowing to a crawl,  a connection to an energy beyond all of us that ties us to the Earth and our misunderstood reliance on it. Call it Universe, call it Source, call it Creator - it runs through us, along us, in us, in all of us. 

It demands we listen; it demanded I listen. At the time, I just wasn’t sure what I was listening for. 

— 

After my second and third sightings, I became coyote obsessed. 

The new obsession was refreshing after months of obsessing over my failed attempts at becoming a part-time writer. 

A promising start on Medium fizzled out. I was failing to understand SEO or how to get people to find my blog. I couldn’t find anything to write about and when I did, my writing fell flat. Uninspired. Uninteresting. 

I was failing at what I had privately considered my calling.

After three weeks of coyote sightings, a tarot reading from a close friend in the back of a coffee shop resulted in three cards: The Fool, The Ace of Pentacles, The Wheel of Fortune - start new, restart, start again. 

Riding home on the Bosque after the reading, feeling the bodily stress of desert biking, vision blurring, getting chills despite the furnace wind and blistering sun, regretting not refilling my water - I saw another coyote. It crawled out from under a bush on the bank of the acequia and peered up at me - the wild yellow eyes pulling me to another place, another time. Finally I understood.  

Over a century ago the United States government tried to eradicate all large predators. It poisoned hundreds of thousands of wild coyotes, wolves, condors, bears, and mountain lions to keep them from impeding the slow march of colonization. However the coyote is the only species to resist the pull of anthropogenic extinction. 

Coyotes engage in what’s called compensatory reproduction - female coyotes have larger litters when they sense that there are fewer coyotes around (and hopefully more food for those pups). So despite the concerted effort and significant investment to rid the United States of them, coyotes could never be eradicated. They’d migrate, start again, birth large litters, find new food sources, adapt to urban environments. 

Start new, restart, start again. 

—

The wisdom of the coyote is the wisdom of persistence and adaptation through play. Inventiveness, curiosity, creativity, and play helps you survive and (pro)create. 

Wild coyotes play to hone hunting skills, to cement the social bonds that aid survival, to learn new ways to acquire food. The internet is replete with camera footage of wild coyotes playing with dog toys, with their food, and with each other. 

While survival is serious business, coyotes don’t seem to see it that way. 

Try something, try something else, and soon you’re getting fat off cat food and garden fresh watermelons. 

The trickster transforms himself to adapt. Become the urban coyote, dodging cars and cyclists as you search for the roadkill and food waste generated by human habitation. Become nocturnal to avoid human interference.

What I was doing when I felt stagnant, failing, and stuck was taking myself too seriously. Not allowing play into my life. No longer creative in any part of my life, I had lost the spark. 

I felt very little joy, and instead focused on going through the motions, checking the boxes I thought I should. Eat healthy, exercise, show up to work, be physically present with my partner, pay the bills. It felt soulless. 

I had to let go - of being taken seriously, of being respected, of who I thought I should be as a writer and as a person - and let myself just create without expectation, just for the sake of creation. And I did. 

—

Since the sighting after the tarot reading, I stopped seeing coyotes. It was heartbreaking at first, to go around every curve of the Bosque expecting sandy speckled fur and not finding any. 

I was sad and wondered why that special time had to end. I wondered if it was real at all; if I really had seen all those coyotes.

After a week’s worth of trips on the Bosque without an encounter, I finally accepted that my time with the coyote was over. The message delivered, the lesson learned.