There's A Bear By The Creek

There’s a bear by the edge of the woodland. on the other side of the creek!

We’ve never seen her. But her signs are everywhere. Her woofing growl rises out through the brambles as we approach. She grumbles out a warning. It’s a very bear like sound. I consider her world. She’s protecting a cub or a den or herself. Why would I expect her to do anything else but growl? She is herself, fierce.

I drift into a few more insights when I gaze out over her green forest ribbon. I consider my life and how I’d once experienced fierceness as behavior or words that were violent toward me. Strong boundaries don’t have to come from the shadow lands of cruelty or even anger. It only has to be a growl rumbling from the heart most of the time. A bear that is well is not violent. She is not cruel in the sense of coming from a place of right and wrong. She just does what she does for a reason that would make sense to any mother.

It’s also clear that she must live a life on the edge. Why elese would she choose to live so close to us? Perhaps the berry sources in the mountains are skimpy? I spent much of the night worrying about money and broken toilets and challenges with the kids. I don’t know if she worries or not. But I do know that we share the fact that life presents us with needs and possibilities. Sometimes it takes fierce, hard work to manifest and protect our particular lives. She eats our plums at night and scrounges for moles (thank you bear for that service). We keep the cat in at night. Our whole household is out during the day making our way back to the kitchen table. I wonder what she sees on the other side of our window?

The other lesson is that we need bears. We don’t really know she is real. The signs left in the spirals of our field could actually be the ever present coyote. Who knows? We need the idea that bear would live on the edge of our world, five hundred feet from our kitchen sink. The myth of the bear feeds us as much as the groceries we scrounge for daily. Heather and I both gain so much by considering her life. We have even been thinking that she is a wild counterpart to us. Perhaps she is even a spirit protector. But probably she is just a regular bear. And that is totally sufficient… even magical.

Rick