I am no sheep. I eat no sheep. I fuck no sheep. I pity no sheep.
I take a class in improvisational comedy on Sunday night’s. In our first class, about half-way through, we were asked by the instructor to play a game.
The game would work as follows:
All in the class (about 30 of us) would dance around the room. Any person, could at any time, stop. When everyone noticed that someone had stopped they would stop. Soon everyone will have stopped and the freeze for a brief moment and then one person would start dancing and everyone would start dancing. The instructor predicted to that we would achieve synchronicity in our stopping and starting like good little sheep.
But no, not this boy chaos, not this wolf. I took the road less traveled, an unspoken fuck you.
As we began to move, our bodies twisting and turning in motion, I exaggerated, pushing my limbs to the edge of ugly. I became a big, flailing, awkward ballerina, and everyone saw me. Then it happened, the first sheep stopped. All the sheep followed until everyone was frozen in a cacophonous web. That was everyone but me. I did not stop but continued to swing my limbs around with grotesque ambiguity, I never stopped.
As the momentum grew, the energy of the stopping and the starting grew with it. The sheep fell into their comfortable rhythm of following the rules, they achieved, as the boss expected, harmony. Well, everyone but the wolf…
Food for thoughtless…
When thinking about sheep and wolves I may want to look at the wolf closely… Is he there to be destructive to the flock or to stir them up and awaken the Shepard? Is he another sheep in wolves clothing? Or coyote spirit in wolves clothing? Or is he a wolf who has not eaten and is hungry?
And then the sheep, what about those furry things that supply us with our winter sweater? What might they have to teach us about community and relationship? Or about destruction? Or about domestication?
Which came first, the sheep or the wolf?