Tamed By a Bear. Priscilla Stuckey
down the glass. And when I was very small, I did occasionally hear on snowy nights something that seemed to my child-mind to be the whistle and moan of the winter wind in the electrical wires above our house. I listened with happiness: Who knew that the wires could sing such beautiful harmonies? The chords were sustained and rich; they went on for minutes at a time, resolving with unexpected turns. The music was haunting, unearthly.
Years later, an aptitude for music led me to enter college as a music major, and until I was thirty I toyed with the idea of becoming a professional musician. But music had been one of those puzzle pieces that almost but didn’t quite fit; it required a little too much effort to push it into place. So I’d gone on to find my professional home among words, my other first love.
I’d learned to read at three or four years old, and from the time I could sound out words on the page I’d sought out books as if famished, starving. Throughout childhood books gave my imagination space to roam—to other times, other places, other ways of seeing and experiencing. As many hours as I could, every day, I lost myself in the landscape of books. But books also stole me away from the landscape beneath my own feet, the sensory world of tickling grasses and wiggling damp earthworms and the stiff brown clay that my older brother and I used to dig up from below the sandbox with our child-size shovels.
As I entered adulthood, reading became my ground, my solace, the center of my various professions. When people at parties asked what I did, I sometimes grinned and said, “I do books. I read them, edit them, teach them, and teach others how to write them.”
Yet now as I explored communing with Bear, I found myself being encouraged to set aside time for letting my mind wander. Bear talked about a way of being that was bigger and more spacious than the intellect. One could think of the intellect as being pointed like a sharp object. This other way of being was amorphous, diffuse. It was the place of inspiration, the place of creativity and freedom—the heart center. It belonged on the same continuum, Bear said, as the place where we go after we die. Though most of us spend our everyday lives in pointed awareness, this more spacious place is accessible in every moment and can be reached at any time. “Nature is a true and certain avenue for contacting that spaciousness,” Bear said. When one lives from that spacious place, life flows more easily, he added. One can see more clearly.
Bear said it would be important for me to recognize the difference between these two ways of being and, even more, to be able to cross the threshold between them with ease—to enter the spacious place at a moment’s notice, day or night. The implication was clear. Up to now I had spent the vast majority of my life in the pointed mind, the intellect; now I needed practice dwelling in this other place.
Like many of the things Bear said in the early days, I heard the words, I spoke them into the phone recorder, I even typed them up later—and then I completely forgot about them, not comprehending.
This much I knew: I was being discouraged from doing work that required me to focus the mind in that old, pointed way on written words. In spite of Tim’s and my tight finances, no new editing clients came my way that spring, which frightened me and at the same time filled me with relief because I didn’t have the mental energy to concentrate on a new project. Bear seemed to be encouraging me to reacquaint myself with that dreamy state of childhood, to “let things go a little fuzzy,” as he put it, to return to a half-remembered country where words were not yet crucial and knowledge flowed through other, more intimate, paths—through breath, and blood, and feeling.
I can’t say that I relaxed into this advice. The truth is, I chafed at it. I grumbled about it to Tim and despaired of ever again finding my comfort zone. I experienced Bear’s strategy for what it was—a taking apart of my accomplished adult self, piece by piece. But at the same time, I had to admit that letting go of the self I thought I knew seemed to be delivering me to a place I may have inhabited long, long ago. Even though I was leaving familiar territory, I sensed—I hoped—that I might be returning home.
12
April that year dipped frequently into cold and snow, six or eight or twelve inches of wet cement falling once a week, every week, throughout the month. A few days after each snowstorm, the ground would clear and the temperature rise to the sixties or seventies, the sun coaxing spring flowers into bloom and providing relief to residents weary of shoveling their walks. Then, a week later, more snow. The buyers of our house put theirs on the market, but I figured there was no need to think about moving just yet because no one would be shopping for houses in this weather.
Bear’s words on April Fool’s Day about “ebullient good enjoyment” turned out to be merely a warm-up for a whole series of conversations that snowy April about enjoying life. Bear brought it up in every Journey I engaged in that month. Every single one. I guess I needed a lot of reminding.
Bear recommended a particular flavor of enjoyment: “enjoying with no urge to change anything.” (Who, me? Wanting to change things? Like, maybe, heavy snows for starters? Then, oh, I don’t know, social inequality? And environmental madness?)
“There will always be things amiss,” Bear said. “Finding enjoyment is not a matter of finding what’s right in the world. When one feels that something is out of balance—and you will feel that, over and over—it’s a good idea to return to the inner state of enjoyment.” I kept wanting to use the word acceptance, but Bear wanted enjoyment instead.
“Go to that place of enjoyment, and start from there. Return to the place of no need to change anything, and then the ego is more out of the picture. It’s when you need something to change that the mind and ego can come in and try to direct what is being changed. And when you let go and sink into the deeper place of the Great Heart, which is often signaled by a great peace with no need to change anything—when you start from that great peace, which looks like enjoyment—then the most wide-open changes, the most freedom-creating changes, the most magical, transformative changes can happen.”
Bear said that such wide-open enjoyment is in fact love. “Root yourself in love,” he said. “It’s more about being deeply present to what-is.” He added that it was a good practice to follow with every person in my life, since people can sniff out instantly when someone wants to change them. If I wished to avoid setting off someone’s early warning system, enjoying them with no urge to change a thing was a good place to start. “The paradox,” he said, “is that love, or enjoyment, is where change can arise from. It’s one of the few places where change can arise from.”
On another day Bear guided me through reflecting on some experiences in the past that I wasn’t satisfied with—tough things that had consumed years of my life, the results of not-so-good decisions I’d made. Looking back, I wished I’d known better at the time. Bear said not to worry about any of it, adding quietly, “There’s no need for disquiet. No need.” This was accompanied by a feeling that I was being wrapped in an enormous blanket of comfort.
“The mysteries run deeper than human beings can go,” Bear said, bringing tears to my eyes. Better to regard each choice as a rung on the ladder taking me where I needed to go. “In this way one can approach even the past from that place of enjoying without feeling any urge to change. That is the best platform for living: to approach each moment—in the present, in the past—with appreciation. This provides the most resilience, the most elastic approach to living.”
Appreciation, he said on another day, was the same thing as enjoying. Whether one was giving it or receiving it didn’t matter; appreciation in either form worked the same magic. “It fills one’s being. It gives one a sense of joyful fullness inside.”
I asked, “What if someone is trying to practice appreciation for a situation that may not be good for them?”
He clarified: “Appreciation can be misdirected. Appreciating a bad situation is disempowering.” He added, “Appreciation is enjoyment, remember. And enjoyment of a bad situation is negating one’s own perception, tamping down and silencing one’s own voice.
“Make sure the object of appreciation is worthy of appreciation,” Bear went on. “The things most worthy of appreciation are living things.” One can practice appreciating oneself, or one can appreciate and enjoy nature. “When