It’s been eight to ten days of “firsts.” Last week, we woke up to find a hawk, with a bleeding chipmunk in its claws, sitting on a branch of the old apple tree outside the front door. That was a first.
A few days later, after midnight, a raccoon came in the second-floor cat window to the bedroom. We only knew it was there because one of our cats stood up on the bed and loudly hissed, waking us up. My wife and I got up and yelled at the coon. It climbed back out the window and we ran out the front door pursuing it, trying to frighten it enough so it wouldn’t return
The most dramatic and surprising visitor was the bear. Black bears are not unknown to the area. We had birdfeeders destroyed by bears in the past but only saw the mangled feeders left behind. But at 8:15 am this morning, with the sun shining behind it, we saw a bear cuddling a birdfeeder in the yard of our house.
Years ago, I had had nightmares about bears breaking into the house. And here one was, walking toward the apple tree where the hawk had rested just a few days earlier, and where the bird feeder had once rested. No nightmare, just fascination. All I thought about was preserving the moment, finding the camera, and taking pictures. I went from window to window looking for good angles for photos.
The bear seemed so soft when I studied it, so— not human, yet not that different. A cousin in the animal world and a fellow mammal. It had an inquisitive face and wasn’t afraid to look up at the window where I stood with the camera. It was driven more by thirst for food, for seeds dropped by birds from the feeder, than by watching us.
But when it walked right up to the front door, stood up on its hind legs, and reached out as if to knock on the door or knock out the window⎼ everything changed. My wife started shouting at it and banged her fists against the wall. I ran out the side door with 2 metal bars and started hitting them together making a wonderful clanging sound. The bear disappeared so fast we didn’t perceive where it went. It was like it was never here⎼ except for the photos, memories, and mangled birdfeeder. Too bad we didn’t take a picture of it at the door.
What should we make of this event? Clearly, the human and non-human are meeting more often than expected, not that the human world was ever separate from the rest of nature. But we humans are spreading everywhere. The realms where non-humans could live without our interference are getting smaller and rarer.
Many primatologists, zoologists and others have speculated that wild creatures like bears live immersed in the world of trees, bees, rivers, fish, rain, as well as other bears, just like we are immersed in sunshine, buildings, cars, technology, religions, politics, history, and other humans. Their world is one of more direct sensation. Ours, more abstracted, languaged, filled with our human imagination and thus with time, plans, and worries.
So, what happens when a bear lives so close to humans? Does it develop worries? Does it suddenly want to wear a watch and listen to the weather report? Does it begin to feel as lost in the world as many of us humans do?
At one point, humans lived more closely aligned with the seasons, with bears and other species. Non-human animals not only supplied us with food but inhabited our spirit. About 12 – 7,000 years ago this changed. Most humans switched from hunter-gathering to farming. Some of us continued to live in relatively egalitarian societies while many tried to wall themselves off from natural threats, from predators and weather, and so changed their relationship with the place they lived and the different species they lived with. They developed the concept of possessions and were, in turn, possessed. Seasonal knowledge became facts to gather. The species they lived with were mostly transformed from living relatives to livestock, objects respected mostly for how they could exploit them.
More modern hunter-gatherers, such as those in the Kalahari, or Australian Aboriginals, however, continued to live more closely aligned with other species, not just as pets but cousins. They knew their world leaf by leaf, rock by rock, creature by creature. We, today, also know or define ourselves and our world through the particular details we focus on. But this definition is, whether we realize it or not, fluid.
One way I’ve learned to better apprehend the beautiful and wild details of any moment is through mindfulness. We can notice the breath and each part of the breath. The exhale, a pause, the inhale, and another pause. Notice feelings or the quality of attention, whether something registers as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral; then attraction, aversion, or disinterest. Sensations, and where they’re located in our body; their quality⎼ whether they’re hot or cold, the level of tension or pressure exerted. And thoughts, memories, and the story we tell ourselves about whatever situation we’re in and how to respond.
Thoughts include not only remnants of personal history but the collective history of humanity. Sensations include the wind, rain, or sun on our face, the gravel under our feet, the smell of honeysuckle. In each breath we can find the whole of the human and non-human world. When we lose this awareness, we lose so much.
Nature includes everything, not just nonhuman species but all of life, and death, the seen and the unseen. When we wall ourselves off, we need to be careful not to wall off our eyes, ears, and other senses and fail to believe what we feel, see, smell, and hear⎼ our anxiety, weather extremes, warnings of approaching giant hurricanes, dangerous droughts, fires, and floods, illnesses, and temperatures so high we can hardly stand them. We then don’t believe what’s coming until it sweeps or burns away our walls and everything else.
Maybe we should let the sight of a bear knocking on our front door be a gentle reminder: we are all here together, everyone and everything. We can’t let a bear into the house, but we can let it into our awareness and respond to its cries, and to everyone’s cries. Protecting animal life from extinction is protecting all life.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock