The Circle and The Bear - Tales from 28 Days of Solitude - Part 2

Continued from part 1…

Little do I know, however, that I will need to face yet another fear very soon. 

That night, having already had a week’s worth of food stolen by a bear, I hear a sound in the middle of the night and I can’t pretend to myself I don’t know what it is. There is a bear in my circle and it’s hungry. What it doesn’t know is that I’ve just left my 8 foot circle, and so am I!  And so armed with nothing but my head torch, a sickly feeling in my stomach and some carefully rehearsed lines, I go on the charm offensive. 

I can see the eyes reflect back at me before I see the body. They sit so far apart from one another I’m considering whether dinosaurs have somehow survived all along in Colorado. John had previously told us that all animals are telepathic and so if you are going to approach a bear, he said, you need to get your self together, because its going to know if you don’t. 

I start talking to him in a deep growling voice; the most confident and persuasive I can muster. I explain the risks versus rewards of plastic wrapped chocolate bars in his stomach. Not good, I conclude. I explain that the salmon in the canister isn’t actually fresh, and regrettably I don’t know the area well enough to recommend another place that serves fresh salmon. I explain that generally although I am happy to see him, there is a part of me, quite a big part in fact, that also kind of wishes he would leave? Please?

He doesn’t leave. 

He looks like one of those veteran black bears that has seen it all before, robbed thousands of other hikers of delicious granola, dried fruit, nuts and maybe even salmon, if there were any other idiots out there that thought that bringing salmon into a valley full of bears would be a good idea! 

He has this ‘I don’t give a shit’ expression on his face and the size of him makes it clear to me that he doesn’t need to give a shit – about anything. 

Now I am four meters away from him and shining my torch directly into his eyes. I am abundantly aware that he is unlikely to be appreciating this and with the food now in my possession my instinct tells me it could get messy if I stepped back. 

He starts to whine. 

Frantically, I try to remember if whining came up in the bear brief!? Could this be a sign of an impending attack? 

Nothing happens. 

Perhaps he is lonely? Two lonely souls in the Coloradan wilderness……  He might follow me back into my tent, where there certainly isn’t room for both of us. I consider a more mature and hospitable approach might be to sit down and share some granola with my honored guest, but that doesn’t last long since I’m freezing my tits off here.

I explain to him that I am not trying to prove anything any longer, there is no inner conflict here, I left that all behind in my circle, you see? It’s just that…… I am hungry. 

‘My food!’ I declare, as if he is being a little slow to catch on. 

He still doesn’t catch on. 

It’s stalemate and something has to give. I force myself to take one more step forward, a critical step. He backs away, and still remembering he can read my mind I try not to act so freakin’ relieved! 

I stow the food under the same rock and go back to bed……. Moments later another SMASH, SMASH, SMASH, breaks the silence of the night and any semblance of pride in my short-lived victory. I arrive back on the scene, almost as if I were summoned. This time I have a big stick and I see him standing over my food with the canister, thankfully, still in tact. I push him away again, ‘hide’ the food under the same rock and go back to bed. 

He comes back. 

And after some toing and froing and the bear looking increasingly sheepish and me getting more and more impatient, it dawns on me that I am the one to be slow to catch on. He really has been reading me all along. Those prehistoric eyes reflect an old and worn out story: I have been locked into another battle of resistance and I am too slow to change the script. 

I chuckle to myself at the absurdity of the situation, say goodbye to the last of any food I might see for several days and retreat to my tent.

In the morning the food has disappeared. I search far and wide for several painstaking hours before finding it at the bottom of the hill, way outside my circle, cooking in the sun and with the bear nowhere to be seen. 

Inspired by the bear and my vision quest, I remind myself that nothing repeats itself; everything is constantly changing, both internally and externally. It is one thing to get this at the intellectual level, but quite another to experience it and there is no better way than to spend time alone in the wild. 

All we have to do is look, sense and listen to what is going on, surrender to it and adapt accordingly. Nature is a phenomenal guide as it only lives in the present moment. No being in nature, no animal, no flower, no tree gets lost in their own story like we do. 

I am free to change the script in any given moment and I can choose the meaning I make from whatever I do. But first I need to be aware of and surrender to what is going on. That is not necessarily to be a passive observer, but more to internally align with what is going on before taking action. 

To surrender and trust is often to go towards what we most fear, in which is also often what we most want. We cower in anticipation of the blow, but it never arrives and in it’s place freedom comes and with that the realization that perhaps all along we already had what we were looking for.