The Blue Bear

By Christopher Shaw

Appeared in Maurice Kenny and Neal Burdick’s Anthology Adirondack Reflections

The other day a friend told me that, years before, I had given her a gift. We were standing in late afternoon on the steps of my house in a Vermont village, on a day of shifting light and shadow. It was the twenties of November. “I had been complaining about how much I hated November,” she said, “and you told me you loved the light. I never looked at November the same way again.” The sun fell below the cloud deck and beamed with weak intensity on the west facing cliffs to the south. I didn’t remember saying it, but I definitely agreed with her right then.

I must have been remembering November afternoons in my late twenties, I said, in the Adirondacks, before I gave up hunting. The leaves would have fallen from the hardwoods, exposing the stark bones of the landscape and hazy blue-gray views, usually screened by leaves, extending into the distance. I hunted alone and only after mid-month or so, when it got colder, there might be tracking snow and most of the hunters had traveled to the easier pickings of late season in the southern tier. By then the bucks were insane with hormones, drooling, careless, leaving hysterical scrapes and rubs all over the higher slopes, tearing apart groves of striped maple or birch saplings with their antlers. Tracking, you could try to predict their route, circle around and intercept them, or approach slowly to catch them in flagrante, as I did once a shy doe with a gray muzzled 11-pointer that I shot.

Days like that sharpened the senses and turned off the internal conversation. You had to be acute for hours at a time, and became absorbed easily. Shifting gears, maybe after realizing that I had strayed far enough to make it hard getting home before dark, the intensity of hunting concentration turned into stillness and immediacy. A stain of pale peach or violet would shade a gray hardwood slope or rock face, or weightless parachutes of snow would drift under a gauzy film of cloud and the diffuse light that you could almost but not quite see blazing on the other side.

​ On moments like this I first realized the landscape didn’t show its original face until late November, when things were ending, when the sun went away and stopped the sap in the trees. The fair weather migrants and breeders, the all-winter snoozers, had disappeared—the bears, chipmunks, white-throats, hermit thrushes—as if they never existed. Only the chickadees, red squirrels, corvids persisted: the irritable complainers and elusive tricksters. But in leaving, in their absence, those other species pointed to the season’s real meaning. The emptiness, the leaving, the turning inward.  Everything was leaving, contracting, ending.  

It reflected the winding down of the aging process, the contraction of the northern hemisphere’s light and biology. The Haudenosaunee had it right. Dreams came thicker in those longer nights, and with the body sheltered from the outer world for extended periods, the inner world of the mind stood forth bright and clear.  ​

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One recent November I went to my small cabin on a remote stretch of the Saranacs—to see if I could get a little closer to the landscape’s original face. I was working on a book about how place gave rise to consciousness, having felt over my fifty-year adult experience, that place, this place, the Adirondacks, was trying to show me something, something that I still needed to experience directly, unfiltered. If I could do it, it might show me the kind of subjective experience that people would have had of Paleolithic Europe, for instance, with its cold arid grasslands and migrating reindeer, or the southern coast of Africa in the middle stone age, where people were just figuring out how to eat shellfish and tortoises, and, possibly, killing larger game, two places where we had material evidence of the earliest symbolic expression in design, art, and technology. Somewhere in there, I believed, the thing we call consciousness had become separated from what we call the world, with a bewildering cascade of consequences.

​ I had a few days off from work. The cabin lacked running water or electricity. No road led to it and our boat was stored for the winter. I canoed across the lake planning to survive on water, cider, tea, chicken broth and pumpkin seeds, maybe less, for at least three days. I would neither play the radio nor write, and would read only after getting in bed at the end of the day. Otherwise I would meditate, sweat in the sauna, and work or explore outside.

In the cabin a weasel had cleared out the mice, and chickadees scolded me for not being there at this critical season of survival. I started the fire in the cabin and in the sauna, took out my cushion and sat, facing through the balsams toward the marsh between shore and the lake. Low clouds obscured the mountains, the temperature was in the thirties, the northwest wind raw. Birch and maple leaves littered the ground, opening up the view and admitting pale light through the understory.

​ The anglers and other camp dwellers had fled. One year-round neighbor was taking care of an ailing mother in the village, and another his dying father. The gunfire and internal combustion had gone with them, like the birds, though a last plaintive and muted loon call occasionally carried over the wind.  

​ That evening I took a sauna. The next day I alternated meditating for an hour and working around camp or canoeing for an hour. I split and stacked firewood and dropped a couple of maples for next year’s fuel. By the middle of the second day I had lost the feeling of gnawing hunger, and felt light, sharp and deliberate in motion. Thoughts of home and work fell away, along with most other thoughts. In the cabin, no motors or whirring mechanical innards competed with the sound of the fire ticking and the distant crows.

​ I took another long sauna as the cloudy afternoon went from gray to black, going in and out, alternating heat and cold for as long as I could. The firelight on the interior logs and motion of the balsams in the wind made my body and the logs and the trees themselves feel tenuous and fluid. Time seemed more a vertical column of conditioned events all playing out at once than a horizontal line of temporal progression. Previous eras of experience telescoped into view.

​ At night coyotes called within a few feet of the cabin, close enough I could distinguish male, female and two adolescent pups. By the middle of the third day the feeling of lightness and precision remained but had turned into slow motion and 3-D. Everything magnified, clarified. I sat for hours without a break, empty, a conduit for the voices of crows, ravens, and blue jays.

​In the deepening silence the resident species gathered. Faces leered from the creaking tree trunks. At times like these initiates of the Iroquois False Face Societies, having fasted and danced and indulged other mind-altering practices, would see and carve the faces free from the trunks, then wear them as masks to dance, heal the sick, and sanctify the mid-winter celebration.  

That night, my third, the ground froze and a film of snow made the hill slick between the cabin, the sauna and the dock. By midday I hadn’t had a thought or written a word for forty-eight hours. When not sitting or sweating I split firewood and tended fires. When I sat the breeze, the play of light on the water, the wood smoke, the brightness behind my eyelids, all the sense impressions of my body got blurry and ran together.  Nothing separated “me” from the bog, the lake beyond it, or the Western High Peaks Wilderness at my back.  

Toward dusk the trees groaned in the wind and faces leered from trunks. As I cooled on the deck between sweats a motion in my right peripheral vision caught my attention--a Golden-crowned kinglet perched in a balsam two feet from my right eye, driven down from the high dwarf conifers by snow and ice. I felt its breathing and heartbeat and heard the words “There is no point of view in nature.” The bog, the fish in its shallow channels, the turtles settling into the mud, the eagle perched in the pine on the point, the loon with its shamanic overtones floated together on a plane with no perspective, no north or south, up or down, like the animal representations I had seen painted on hides or cave walls.

I sat there a long time, the kinglet at my side, following the cold’s slow advance from my skin to my core.  The wind blew in my face out of the northwest, the approximate direction of Hudson Bay. Out over the lake, a mile or so away, a blue bear hovered over the water in a half lotus, the wind blowing its long guard hairs into wavy curls.

This was not the two or three year-old male that had visited the bird feeder in June. That bear had been jet black with no trace of brown, even on its muzzle or brows, a black that sucked light into its vortex along with all your reactions and interpretations. He stood upright ten feet from the cabin’s back door, exposing his impressive ursine package and turning his muzzle sideways, using his paw and tongue to shovel sunflower seeds into his mouth. I watched from the rear stoop, just outside the door, and talked to him in a normal voice. Our eyes locked and stayed locked. I breathed and concentrated instead of thinking about it or planning this essay before the experience even played itself out, pouring concentration on him to sear it into memory. But he was overbold. Eventually by clapping I persuaded him to leave.  

Visions were probably common among people whose capacity for spoken language and symbolic expression was just emerging, 150,000 to 50,000 years ago in Africa and Eurasia, especially when they were sick or close to starvation or death. Such circumstances may have produced the first inklings of the sacred, or a “beyond” with meaning. Later the experience became codified in rites of passage. The seeker went “on the hill” for three or four days without food, water, or sleep. Singing, chanting, perhaps eating psychotropic plants, the person eventually met the animal helper or vision that would help guide decisions, protect family and tribe for the rest of theirlife. Often the vision found material expression on a rock wall or cave, or in a hand-held figurine. In the northern hemisphere, especially among the Sami, Kamchatkan, Ainu, Alaskan and Athabaskan people, bears and loons were among the commonest animal helpers.

In Japanese Zen, visions that arise in the course of extended meditation are called makyo. The practitioner ignores them to avoid being attracted or repelled, and distracted from the path to enlightenment. They belong to the realm of powers, called in Sanskrit Sambogakaya, intermediate between the consensual reality of everyday life and the non-dual, non-conditioned reality of the liberated state, called Dharmakaya.  Makyo did, however, mean you were on the right track.

Sambogakaya was the Otherworld or place of ancestors visited by shamans, sorcerers and other pre-agricultural people faced with extraordinary choices. It still rises in us in times of stress, drug or near-death experience and may have been easily at hand for people in a world with simple technology and no illusion of certainty. As David Abram says, we hear voices and see visions when reading a book. Similar cognitive experiences would have attended preliterate people reading the signs of nature in a landscape.

Their awareness was as embedded in the immediate surroundings, the world outside their bodies, as ours is in work, electronics, internal conversation. They knew that to reach out and embrace the vision, to desire or fear it, was to lose the image, to make it blur and fade back into the conditions that produced it. It only gained solidity through calm attention and concentration, and they knew how to make that happen. For me all it had taken was three days without food, electronics, sex, motors or mechanical sounds, and extended exposure to heat and cold, conditions that would have been common to the pre-colonial inhabitants of the lake, especially during November’s steepening slide into seasonal contraction and death.

The blue bear hovered over mid-lake, growing, gaining focus and clarity. In color and sitting posture, in fact, it might have resembled certain Tibetan thangka paintings I had seen. Yet it was three-dimensional, serene but fierce, and by all means there.

My faculties were sound, as far as I could tell. I wasn’t crazy. My breath was smooth and slow, the wind in my face. We regarded each other. Then the bear rushed forward in an explosive burst, still in the half lotus position, driven across the lake by the wind, long guard hairs twirling. My pulse increased but I didn’t look away, instead pouring attention on him as I had the all-black macho that June. His gaze bore into me as his body overwhelmed and rushed through mine with a cold blast that finally penetrated my core and blew me out like a candle flame.