Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 17

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As I groped my way forward in Journeys, I began to let go of trying too hard to figure them out and started to relax more easily into the communion. A feeling began to creep over me—a feeling that I had known how to do this long ago, that talking with unseen realms was familiar in some way that only the deepest-down, longest-buried part of me remembered. I was being delivered back to the land of my birth, back to my native tongue. It was a language I’d barely learned to speak before I’d been snatched away from it all too soon—by rows and files of desks in school, by trying to be like my friends, by succeeding in the work of the mind. My adult life, I was beginning to see, had been a story of exile.

It’s not that as a child I enjoyed extraordinary experiences of communing in some special way with spirit. My experiences were the common kind, a moment here or there when the world discarded its usual garb and suddenly glowed in a new costume. Many children, perhaps all children, are shown such secrets. Some glimpse a shining world hidden just behind everyday sight or enjoy the feeling of being watched over by someone bigger than their parents. Some have an imaginary friend, like the comic strip character Calvin’s stuffed tiger who, out of sight of other people, snaps to vivid life.

In my case, I rarely played with dolls and had only a few stuffed animals, none of which ever came alive for me. I never saw the shining world, at least as a child, and I couldn’t quite place God either, though I did have the sense that the world is more mysterious than we know—that the birch tree in my yard might one day whisper secrets, that birds might be telling stories in their songs.

From time to time I enjoyed a dreamy state that I could sink into when the house was quiet, perhaps sitting beside a window on a rainy day and watching moisture gather into droplets on the glass, a droplet here or there growing heavier and heavier until suddenly it would slice downward, leaving behind a dotted line that soon melted away under other droplets, other lines, a tracery of moisture flowing 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.