A topic I’ve always been interested in and that ties in nicely with Luanne’s previous blog entry about the umwelt, or perceptive world, of animals, is our human fear of wilderness and of animals. Our human umwelt. So much of the way we interact with nature is coloured or even dictated by these fears. They are so pervasive in modern urban culture, I believe, that most people don’t even discuss, much less question these fears, they are just taken for given. When someone steps out of that unwelt of human fear, they are seen as excessively brave, strange or just plain crazy.
A conversation that I keep wanting to have is: what are we afraid of? Why are we afraid? What is the result of this fear? And if we don’t like the results, is there anything we can do to alleviate or transform our personal and collective fears?
A conversation of this nature can begin in many places but since it’s just me here at the keyboard, I’ll begin with my own experience.
All through my teens and twenties, I suffered from chronic and re-occurring nightmares. In these dreams, I was relentlessly pursued and attacked by various animals, wild and domestic. One night, I’d be wrestling to the death with some giant fish on a bathroom floor. The next, I’d be climbing on furniture desperate to escape the menacing claws of a trio of ocelots (how do I even know what ocelots look like?). But the most frequent scenario was one of being pursued by bears. Sometimes there was just one, other times, lumbering groups of them, but always, as soon as they saw me, they’d come for me with the intent of tearing me to pieces and eating me up. I’d inevitably jolt out of sleep, heart pounding, hands sweating, limbs and lungs primed for flight. I would resist falling back to sleep for fear that the bears were waiting for me on the other side of that thin curtain of consciousness.
This night-time torment translated, not surprisingly, into a fear of bears. Okay, it was a terror of bears. To put this into context, I’m generally not a fearful person. In fact, when confronted with something worthy of fear, I’m more likely to go in search of it rather than retreat. Hence, my solo travels across Africa as a 20-year-old, my fascination with motorcycles and my adventures into the worlds of troubled people like convicts. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that I moved to the Columbia Mountains, a region known for its bear population.
I could spend a few pages elucidating the psychological roots and symbolism of my bear nightmares, but more interesting is what has become of my bear phobia in the past 20 years that I’ve lived among them.
My first waking encounter with a bear came just weeks after I moved to the Kootenays. I hadn’t yet found a place to live and was sleeping in the back of my truck where ever it was convenient to park. It was one such night when I was parked in a wild area that I was jolted awake by the rocking of my truck. I sat bolt upright, only to find myself nose to nose and paws with a small grizzly, a mere plexiglass window between us. Adrenalin hit the system at full gallop. Once I caught my breath, I grabbed a pot and lid from the food box (which should have been elsewhere, not with me) and banged them together with the full ferocity of fear. The bear fell back on all fours in a very leisurely way and snuffled back up the road to where its massive grizzly mama was waiting for it. Yikes.
The nightmares intensified.
Fast forward two years. I was in New Mexico on a winter adventure when I spotted an ad requesting chronic nightmare sufferers for a nightmare reduction study. At the few sessions I attended, the group of us were taught a relatively simple nightmare management technique which is based on the theory that nightmares are a bad habit in response to stress, much like biting one’s nails. The technique was supposed to deal a blow to my bear dreams within three months.
About two months later, having been diligent in the practice of the technique, I had a classic bear pursuit dream. The snarly, fang-toothed fur beast is after me and I am panicked, unable to move fast enough to evade it. My legs are gluey and slow, it is coming closer, closer… I wake up, as much frustrated as scared, and immediately practice the technique that involves creating an alternate version of the dream. I choose to imagine the bear eating me. I then will myself back to sleep. In my sleep, the dream continues where it left off. The bear devours me. And then the most extraordinary thing occurs: I become the bear.
Being the bear is both a visceral and mental experience. I am struck by the sensation of my solidity, of being hunkered down, all my innards protected beneath me. I also feel sluggish, as though it takes so much more energy to move this body and mind around. As I gaze about me, I realize I’m in my own back yard, but my vision is different – I can see more to the sides. My nostrils fill with a odour: the rotting, sweetness of compost. Compost, I think, the thought a scent image not a word. I lumber towards the pile. I wake up.
Who can say what happened in my psyche that night. I have no logical explanation for that distinct sensation of being that was entirely different, entirely alien to me. Who knows how closely it resembled the bubble of perception, the umwelt, of a real bear. But it had an effect (as have the other two dreams I've had about being a hawk and being a deer). What I understood from that experience is that bears aren’t really interested in me, that’s just my paranoid fantasy. They have a world unto themselves that I may enter from time to time in a peripheral way, but a bear is all about itself. What entered me that night was curiosity and respect.
I stopped having bear nightmares and my irrational fear of bears began to subside. I have had many, many close encounters with bears since. I now meet ursine wanderers with the knowledge that I am not all that important to them, just an odd figure that may cross their paths. Even when one attacked my outdoor fridge at 2 a.m. (yes, I know, I’ve brought it indoors), I wasn’t afraid to go out and yell at the big black bruin. It wanted food and I let it know that this food wasn’t available. I also have met numerous people who have been attacked by grizzlies in unfortunate circumstances. Consequently, I do my best to not create unfortunate circumstances when I’m in bear country. I make sure my umwelt includes bears in the most positive way possible, as fellow inhabitants of my homeplace who need more space than we humans often afford them. I view them as equals, whatever that means.
This evolution of my psyche has profoundly altered my relationship with the natural world. I am not adversary, I am not separate, I am not irrationally afraid. There is no longer a sharp line between me and the wilds. I am now “us” and I move through the world in that “usness.” It is what propels my environmental activism. It is what informs my each and every day as I rise and step out my door into home. This is not to say that I live in beautiful harmony in eternal connected bliss. No, it’s more real than that and my relationship to all the animals I encounter continues to evolve, as does my human community's relationship to wilderness, as do I. As do I.
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