Tamed By a Bear. Priscilla Stuckey
How each reading, each talk, reminded me that all of us—animals, trees, rocks, galaxies—are in it together on this journey. Each reading took me to that still and loving center where we’re all connected and we’re all whole. I wanted more of that.
So I kept on setting dates for book events, sending out bios and photos for publicity, making travel plans, and calling faraway friends. And kept on being dogged by the sinking realization that not only did we not have the money to support this habit—and it was using a frightful amount of energy, both mine and the Earth’s—but also that in the long run it would never, ever be worth it.
3
As February slid into March and snow glistened outside the window, my inner crisis deepened. I felt stymied, all forward motion grinding to a halt. I might have been seventeen again, waiting for my real life to begin. Almost forty years later, with all those decades of living behind me, how could I possibly be staring again at the same impasse?
“I don’t know where I belong!” I wailed to Tim, my longtime love. The book had gathered up seemingly unrelated pieces of experience and fitted them into one place. Writing it had required all of me—a demand that was both joyous and satisfying to fulfill. At last I’d found my real work! And now I wanted more of it. Or at least more of what “being a writer” had to give. The fact that most of the time I didn’t actually feel like writing seemed beside the point; I barely registered it.
More troubling by far was what the plunging book numbers seemed to suggest about the future. What if the “something more” I wanted from writing never did materialize? What did that say about all the beliefs I held dear—of the Universe as a friendly, welcoming place, ready to make room for each person’s gifts? Ready to make room—more to the point—for mine?
A chasm was opening in front of me.
I sat around the house feeling unglued. Reading, my go-to solace, held no pleasure. For the first time in decades I found it difficult to concentrate on a book. I got hooked on phone games instead, losing hours at a time to Solitaire or Words with Friends. Desperate to fill more time, I downloaded Angry Birds and spent several days nonstop lobbing tiny bird bombs into impenetrable fortresses.
Finally I had to agree with the small part of me that whispered, “This is madness.” With Tim as my witness—so I’d be less tempted to change my mind—I deleted the app and all its data from my phone.
And then, in mid-March, I started my next four sessions with the shaman.
4
Chris was a woman of near sixty, born and raised in the Midwest, who in her early forties, with two decades of a business career behind her, had been called to work with what she called Spirit Helpers. Because the friend who had recommended Chris to me was a down-to-earth and gutsy woman, and especially because this same friend had been a Rhodes Scholar, I figured Chris couldn’t be too much of a slouch.
On the phone with Chris for the first time, months before, I’d heard a calm and thoughtful voice, warm and reassuring but no-nonsense. At the time I’d just finished writing the book, and I needed clarity about what was to happen next—all the questions I’d let slide during the writing process. Plus I was dreading the upcoming months of waiting until the book would finally emerge. An edge had crept into my voice—impatient, self-justifying; I can hear it now in the recordings of those sessions, though at the time I was anything but aware of it.
Chris practiced a straightforward kind of conversation with spirit. She said that each person is watched over by their own Spirit Helper, often an animal or other being, who loves and supports a person throughout their life and who provides a face—a point of contact, a relationship—for connecting with spirit. Chris called Helpers “ambassadors of the Living Spirit”; they are always ready to share advice and wisdom from a source beyond human knowing if only a person gets up the courage to ask for it. Chris, who had been tuning her ear to Helpers for twenty years, was practiced in hearing each person’s Helper, and on the phone she acted as a translator, listening quietly for a few moments and then passing along what she’d heard.
From the start, more than a year earlier, I had loved those phone sessions. I took to them like a duckling to water, wading onto the surface and bobbing happily. In each session I felt deeply listened to, the desires of my heart known and addressed, often without my having to articulate them. Every suggestion for the next steps to take arrived in down-to-earth language, with words that often carried the ring of my own vocabulary. Each session gave me the sense that help is available for this murky thing called life. I felt deeply nourished.
My Helper, whom Chris identified as Bear, got down to business right away. I was given affirmation for the path I was taking as well as suggestions for how to walk in it more effectively. Bear did hint ever so gently that when it came to listening to spirit I had a great deal more to learn—that even though I’d just written a whole book about spirit in nature, I had barely scratched the surface. “If one believes that help from a source outside human knowing is not possible, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Bear said one day, an impersonal generality that gives me a chuckle because now I can hear the clue that Bear was offering—politely, obliquely—about my beliefs and my next step. But at the time I was tone-deaf to his nuances.
I did have to agree with Bear’s point, however. For no matter how much my heart was feasting on the sessions, my mind was drumming it in to me, with the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker at a tree, that this Helper business was likely all a crock. Communicating directly with anything unseen is not possible, it said, and to think otherwise suggests some serious misperceptions of reality.
It’s not that I didn’t believe that something greater than human wisdom exists. I liked to hint now and then, as people do, about “the Universe,” a word satisfyingly vague, not like God or spirit or any of the old words belonging to religions we had left behind or now regarded—often for good reason—with mistrust.
But to speak directly with that Universe? Let alone in a conversational, friendly way? Not possible. What happened in those sessions offended every rational notion I held dear.
For one thing, there was that word shamanism. It was the term Chris used to describe her path, but it made me wince. I was aware how contentious it is, how it triggers pain for every Native person I have ever met or whose writings I have read. Shaman is a Tungus word—from the northern Indigenous peoples of Siberia—to name the person who keeps the human community safe and healthy by communicating with all those who are not human, such as the animals or the land or the deceased. Decades ago, white anthropologists took the word and applied it to any Indigenous nature-based healer and spirit worker they found anywhere in the world. So when a white person calls themselves a shaman, using that Indigenous term, what Indians usually hear is that the white person is trying to steal or at least copy Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous sacred traditions, Indigenous ways. It’s the whole of colonialism summed up in a single word.
“Why wouldn’t people just call themselves healers? Or ministers? Or soul-doctors—something like that?” an Indian friend of mine asked, staring sharply at me, when I brought it up with her. “Why do you have to use an Indigenous word?” It was a good question.
Then there was that translating business. Chris said she heard a spirit-being talking with her, giving her things to say, but how did she know it wasn’t her own voice? I didn’t for a moment think she was trying to make it up—she had far too much integrity for that—but neither did I think it was possible to hear across the great divide between the visible and the invisible, at least not without the message getting considerably skewed by the messenger. Maybe spirit does flow like pure water, but doesn’t every pitcher change the water’s shape? A person’s own physiology, their personality, their social context, their history—it all bends what they hear, doesn’t it?
Not to mention how easy it is to fool ourselves. Perception is such a shifty character! A shape-shifting octopus, now rough-skinned and blotchy on the mottled reef, now lifting off in a burst of inky darkness and smooth writhing limbs. We thought we knew what we were seeing, but the reality wasn’t what we saw. I’d long ago heard the parable of the snake from centuries-old Vedanta. A man walking along a road at dusk sees a snake