Bear-Seeing: Part Two

Nature Notes - January 2024

The author utilizes “bear-seeing” to visualize a special place until that place becomes a part of him.
 
- By James Inabinet 

​In earlier essays, I introduced the idea that everything we know begins as a “dream.” Then there was Thomas Berry’s idea that having “earth dreams” might be a pathway to becoming better Earth stewards. Finally, there was the idea that we initiate earth dreams by participating in what I call “bear-earth dreams.” I’ll continue in that vein with bear-seeing, what I think is a pathway to getting a sense of the “wholeness” of a place, of where we are, where we live, in a word: home.
 

 
Bears wander. To initiate bear-seeing, we will wander. We may wander with our eyes, rooted in one place, or we may walk around. Either way, we wander, seeking out places of interest, compelling “spots” within the whole of the place that has the power to lure us. Bear-seeing is like meditation, but with eyes open–we must stay in the world! A bear in his cave follows what lures him in his world. We adopt this bear-way by focusing on human views of the place, noting the unique or unusual. Psychically centered, with an attitude of mindful focus, we go within while actively encountering the outer world. Upon finding an area of interest, we carefully look, but in a unique way.
 

 
Bear-seeing is modeled after Exact Sensorial Imagination (E-S-I), a process the poet Goethe used to seek out the primordial plant – a model of plant-ness. By taking individual “mind’s-eye snapshots” of plant parts, Goethe found the whole to be implicated in the parts. Each part [i.e., limb, leaf, flower] implied the whole [i.e., the plant itself]. Bear-seeing uses E-S-I to find the wholeness of a place or ecosystem by focusing on the parts (i.e., these areas of interest that lure).
 
To begin, choose a particular spot within the whole. It could be a cluster of trees or bushes that are special somehow, a meadow’s edge, a huge sycamore in a city park, or a vacant lot. After becoming mindfully centered, carefully look at a “snapshot” of the spot. Note the details! Do this with this snapshot for a while, then close your eyes and conjure up a detailed mind’s-eye image of what was seen – exactly as it is. Repeat this process with several perspectives of this one spot. Then find another spot, another “special place” within the whole, and repeat. Then go to another and another until the whole place has been investigated in this way.
 

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With bear-seeing, we go inside to go outside. then inside again. By dreaming bear-earth dreams, we get a sense of our relationship to the whole, how we fit, where we stand. We see the parts (i.e., trees, tree clusters, bush assemblages, dead logs, puddles, the staccato cry of a woodpecker) and surmise the whole (i.e., an ecosystem that supports, sustains, and holds them all, including me!). At this point, again, if we are faithful to the process, we might penetrate the inside of the place and interact with its soul. In that place, in that state, we commune.
 

 
Bear-seeing, by evoking imagination, leads to insights about the spiritual invisible that underlies, precedes, delineates, and informs the terrestrial visible. Each place is uniquely imbued with spiritual energies, mana, that are ever in flux. Mana may gather in a place, enkindling it here, then there. We feel its presence as a sense of numinous expectation; that tingling on the back of the neck. Sometimes, rarely, these energies can be seen in visions. We cannot control mana and how or where it accumulates and dissipates, where it moves, but we can pave the way for our recognition of it. When my watery, experiencing soul penetrates into the soul of the place, enveloping it with my wandering imagination, shapeshifting to share in a common state of being, the stage is set.
 

 
E-S-I initiates a dialogue between self and place, a fluid exchange between sense data (originating outside of me) and ideas (originating inside of me). If faithful to the process, these exchanges eventually result in a coincidence. Something inside me (an idea, image, or feeling) and sensory data from the place (what my eyes take in) become one. A burst of pure meaning arises in us, a flash of insight, an image, a soulfully felt sense of profound meaning. With this, a sense of relationship arises between person and place as that person acknowledges herself to be “part of the pattern” of the place, the collective pattern of “thou-ness.” Concomitantly, a palpable light begins to shine from within the place–a shimmer of numinous, archetypal, indescribable “suchness.” As place and person become so linked, a person is moved, often to tears. She will never see that place the same way again.
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