Wolf Moon Reflections
On Saturday 3rd January 2026, we saw the first supermoon of the year rising, also known as the Wolf Moon. This year my daughter Charlotte and I carried out a small ceremony with our newly purchased wolf blankets, which came from the recent auction run by the International Wildlife Coexistence Network. With them was a special prayer specially written to honour and celebrate the Wolf Moon and to celebrate and honour wolves.
The Wolf Moon has always been associated with endurance, kinship and survival through the deepest winter. It is a moon that asks us to pay attention, to slow down and to remember.
Our relationship with wolves has been shaped by fear, myth and political convenience rather than truth. Across cultures, wolves have been teachers. They show us how families hold together. How cooperation sustains life. How balance is maintained not through domination but through relationship. Yet in much of the modern world, the wolf has been recast as a threat, a symbol of something to be controlled or eliminated.
The blankets were created to challenge that narrative.
They were specially designed by Mikailah Thompson, a Nez Perce or Nimiipuu tribal member whose work draws on traditional Indigenous design and ancestral memory. Her design speaks directly to relationship. The teepees represent home and community. The mountains honour the words of Nez Perce elder Charles Hayes, that the mountains still remember the wolf and will welcome them home. The running wolves reflect the work of Levi Holt, who worked to dream back the lost Wolf Dance and organised the 2012 Running Wolf Pow Wow in honour of wolves. Even the movement in the design carries story.
The Wolf Prayer and the Power of Collective Intention
The Wolf Prayer accompanying the blankets was intended to be spoken aloud under the Wolf Moon. It is not a performance. It is an act of remembrance and responsibility.
The prayer asks for safety, sanctuary and freedom from persecution. It asks for silence where guns have spoken, for compassion where traps and snares still exist, for laws shaped by kindness rather than fear. Most importantly, it asks something of us. That we remember the wild as our cradle. That we recognise the wolf as a mirror of our own forgotten grace.
There is something quietly radical about prayer in a world driven by policy briefs and court rulings. But prayer does not replace action. It strengthens it. It reframes why action matters. When many people speak the same words with the same intention, something shifts. Perception softens. Stories change.
That is how coexistence begins.
The Wolf Moon as a Way Forward
The Wolf Moon does not offer comfort in the way softer seasons do. It arrives in the hard months. It speaks of endurance, honesty and survival. It asks us to look clearly at what we are part of, and what we are responsible for.
Wrapping ourselves in the blankets felt like choosing a side, but not a simplistic one. It is choosing relationship over removal. Understanding over myth. Coexistence over control.
Wolves do not need us to romanticise them. What they need is for us to grow up in how we hold power, policy and land. To stop pretending that persecution is protection, and that silence is neutrality.
Under the Wolf Moon, we asked to remember that where wolves thrive, ecosystems breathe more freely.
The Wolf Prayer
On this night of the Wolf Moon, we gather our hearts in gratitude.
We honor those who run through snow and silence,
Wolves who keep the balance of the Wild alive.
May the Wild always hold sanctuary for you,
Where wind moves through pine and meadow,
And moonlight lays its silver blessing upon your back.
May your trails be safe, your dens undisturbed.
May you and your kind be free from suffering and persecution.
May the Earth cradle your steps,
And the stars remember your spirits.
May your family stay whole, your bonds unbroken.
May hunger be brief, and fear and pain be strangers.
May your howls rise through the stillness of the night
And find only hearts that resonate in shared sacred gratitude.
May humankind remember that the Wild is our cradle,
And you are a mirror of our own forgotten grace.
May the guns fall silent.
May traps and snares give way to compassion.
May respect guide every rancher,
And kindness guide every law that touches you.
For where you and yours thrive, the Earth breathes freely.
Where your kind returns, balance begins anew.
So we offer this blessing to you—
Voice of the Old Ones,
Teacher of kinship,
Keeper of courage.
Run where the rivers remember your reflection.
Sleep peacefully beneath the vast and merciful sky.
May we all live in peace,
And may we as humans be worthy of sharing this world with you.
This we offer as our sincere blessing for wolves and for all life.