Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 16

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Bear, I soon discovered, was a fan of being oneself, whoever that self happened to be. “One needs to live from that foundation of knowing the beauty of spirit within oneself,” Bear said one day in early April. To find one’s place in the world, he recommended settling deeper into one’s own skin: “Feeling one’s worth, one’s infinite worth.” Bear suggested that each person needs to come home to their own heart, come home to the Great Heart—different ways of talking about the same thing, the essential thing: “Feeling at home. Here. As oneself.”

When a person pursues an identity that may not be quite right for them, he said, “it’s not the thing itself they want but the side benefits they imagine go with it—the respect or awards or money. Purity of purpose lies in wanting the thing itself, loving the activity rather than the things that go with it.” Wanting side benefits could extend to something as subtle as wanting to find a place in the world. “One can even want the path,” he said, “and yet within the wanting resides this deeper yearning to have a place in the world.”

“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?” I said. I was beginning to recognize Bear’s respectful, indirect way.

“It’s bigger than just you,” he replied. “The thing that needs to be addressed is a person’s place in the world. One gets more solid in one’s sense of place by following the way that’s right for them, the very unique way.”

Different people would come up against different challenges in trying to find their own place, he added. “For one person, it might mean treasuring the beauty of spirit within. For another, allowing oneself to be more comfortable in the physical world.”

Then Bear paused. “For you,” he said, “it might have to do with communion. Dwelling in the sense of back-and-forth.”

A week or so later Bear returned to the theme of uniqueness. “Nature—reality—values individual variation,” he said one morning. Then he repeated, “Nature loves yet another version. But not in the sense of a stale, repeated version. Something new. Something marvelous.” One only has to look out the window, he suggested, to glimpse this flowering of endless variety.

All of nature’s experimenting, Bear went on, adds up to a picture of continuously unfolding possibility. “It gives people the biggest freedom to pursue that which is theirs,” he said. “Among the Helpers,” he added, “there is a great respect for individuality.”