Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 13

7

After that morning I engaged in regular Journey sessions, curling up with my phone almost every day in a private spot in the house and listening quietly for what might come. I still faltered, my voice unsteady, my heart not quite daring to believe. Yet from each session I gained a feeling that I was not alone on this journey of life, that someone unseen had my back. In each session my question of the day would be addressed, and always there would come a sense of completion, a feeling that “we’re over for today,” whether or not I was ready for the time to end. With each session my sense of amazement grew. This Journey business—it wasn’t a one-time deal.

As I began to trust the conversations, my feeling of disorientation deepened. Outwardly I kept doing the work of promoting a book—reaching out to people in emails, sending out book copies for reviews—but inside I was being tugged somewhere else, somewhere away from books, away from the writer identity that just a few weeks ago I’d been so sure I wanted. I felt the pull of another world. I tired easily, my eyes glazing over and my brain switching off sooner than expected. If reading a book had turned suddenly difficult during the preceding weeks of crisis, now it became impossible. I lost all mental focus. I had zero interest in other people’s words.

Grasping for something to do, I hauled old jigsaw puzzles out from storage, hoping to feel under my fingers that sense of easy fit. For most of a week Tim and I hunkered together over the dining room table, fitting puzzle pieces into place.

During this time Bear showed me a close-up image of feet planted on a path. Next to this path was another one aimed in a slightly different direction so that by the time they reached the horizon, the two paths had grown very far apart. As I watched, first one foot and then the other lifted off the path it was on and picked its way sideways onto the other. “Pay attention to how the feet are planted,” Bear advised. “It is not a trivial matter to step crosswise from one path to another.”

It was true; my body was beginning to feel like putty, as if I’d had a little too much to drink and now was having to concentrate very hard to cross a room without weaving. The ground itself seemed less solid, threatening to heave upward at the lightest footfall. I stepped gingerly through each day and tried to avoid driving.

Some days I felt raw, my heart sliced open. Simple things seemed unbearably sweet. When, about a week after my first Journey with Bear, I visited a tiny school up in the mountains to speak with young children about connecting with nature, my eyes glistened the entire time. The stories the children told about their dog or their cat or the love they felt for a fox they’d glimpsed in the woods near their house or the kindness they’d shown a spider; how they knew, just knew, at six or seven or eight years old, exactly how to let other beings touch their hearts; how they savored this love, and how it lit their wide-open, sincere faces—I could barely make it through the hour for the sweetness.

Many days I felt murky, more confused than it seemed possible. One morning Bear drew my attention to the clay pots resting in the bay window—their pleasing lines, their intriguing colors. I’d fashioned them during fifteen years of taking ceramics classes at local studios. The pots looked clear and peaceful, but I knew that the hours spent laboring over them in the studio had not felt that way. Especially when I worked on the wheel, there seemed to be no connection at all between how I felt on the inside and what my hands turned out. After a day that radiated with clarity, I might arrive at the studio and not be able to center the clay at all. The opposite was just as true: I might sit down one evening at the wheel feeling completely off balance, only to witness the clay growing as if by itself into graceful miracles under my hands. These pots on the windowsill were some of my largest and most graceful, and I remembered they had arrived in this way as gifts.

“Such things of beauty that can come out of murkiness,” Bear observed. Did I see a twitch of a smile?

“Okay, I think I got that!” I said, laughing.

“Good work is a gift,” Bear went on. “It doesn’t depend on the maker’s state of mind.” Matter of fact, he said, when a person creates something while experiencing that sense of internal clarity, they are tempted to take full credit for the result. They think they can manage the output. “Many people do manage the product in that way,” he added. “And it’s much harder to reach the deeper gift when you go that route.”

He said in a reassuring tone, “One doesn’t have to feel clear to be of great value and make a great contribution. One only needs to be malleable.”