Afraid of the bear

Stories are one of the oldest forms of medicine, especially when they tell us how to relate, and where we belong in the world. The Crescent Moon Bear (see the 3 part series posted earlier this month) is a medicine story. We're told that patience and compassion go in hand in hand, and that both are required for healing. The story is especially powerful because the lesson can be applied to one's own psyche as well as to relationships with other people and even other beings or creatures. But we're not used to turning to stories for advice, and this story is not as simple as it appears. Not for me anyway. So I want to share some of the thoughts that telling this tale has provoked in me.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who is my original source for the story, says that handling rage is inevitably part of healing. Rage shows up in the Crescent Moon Bear in the actions of the husband and in the ferocity of the bear, which points I think, to the capacity for rage in the woman. Collectively, we don't understand this emotion very well and often deny its value and even its existence. But that is like being afraid of the bear.

Strong emotions can consume a person, burn up a life. I've suffered from "burn out" before. Maybe you have too. But is passivity or numbness the only way to avoid it? The story tells us that strong feelings like rage give us strength if they are properly respected and channeled. Do we need more of this fuel I wonder, those of us who want both justice and wisdom, who want to actively love the world? If so, how? How do we heal the husband or approach the bear when faced with the temptation to either kill them or walk away? Do we need to recognize the relationship between anger and love, learn to put one into the service of the other, use the passion and the heat to forge a durable love? Maybe that's how the bowl gets filled with food one more day, every day, until one can get close enough to get permission to pluck a hair.

But what about the compassion? How does one nurture that? I find an answer in the notion of healing wounds, in the idea that healing is required, and in extending my imagination far enough to imagine that what I despise in the world, what I feel is wrong, is the symptom of deep wounding. This is not the explanation I generally offer when I rant about human greed and pride and soullessness. But I sense some possibilities in the wound healing metaphor, a metaphor that makes my own wounds more visible to me.

The husband, old healer, wife, and bear are bound up together. We offer the world what we need. In healing others, we heal ourselves.

(If you missed the story, here is the link to Part One of  The Crescent Moon Bear).