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| (Image: 'Bear Mother: You Are In Her Belly', Aoife Valley - used with permission) |
I
am not good or brave or strong. This
week, I have felt lost, confused, ungrounded, seeking the strong Bear
Mother curled in my belly and not finding her. Tonight, I
followed a thread and I
remembered fairytales. Now I see that I am on a quest; silence, love,
transformation, swan feathers, and nettle stings. I can do this. I
was born to do this. My heart is wild and
I
am in awe of her ability to push through the wildest tangles and
brambles and thorns of feeling, but beside her I feel small and
vulnerable. But
I can do this. I am not
good or brave or strong but the Bear Mother is all these things and
has been my companion for many years. I rarely call her consciously
but, sometimes, and often when life challenges the ability of my
heart to keep on beating, I just find her there with her musty scent
and sure paws. Sometimes she takes me to dive in the holy river of
the sacred. Sometimes she helps me to hunt herbs for my healing or
teaches me to dream in the shadow places of tears and deep magic.
Sometimes she comes when I am feeling strong, walking boldly upright
in my Woman self, looking the world in the eye, and I feel her weight
leaning against me in support and solidarity. Sometimes she comes
when I have a need to connect deeply with my earth. It's then that I
find her curled sleeping in the dark cave of my belly and I sink into
myself and into her with a grateful outbreath. And sometimes she
comes when when I am raw, stripped to the bone by my determination to
live a wild life surrounded by the not-wild, when I can find no place
for what moves within and am wandering lost without a map to follow.
Often I stumble and, knowing that my belly is hollow and empty and
not the place for her, she splits herself open so that I can crawl
inside her still warm body, become bear, rest. Often there is blood.
The Bear Mother is
the oldest of the old. She was one of the first beings to be
worshipped by our far off ancestors, possibly as far back as the
middle Palaeolithic period, which lasted from 300,000 to 30,000 years
ago. She is revered in the North American, Northern Eurasian, and
circumpolar regions, particularly amongst the Sami people, the Ainu
of Japan, and the tribes of Celtic Gaul and Britain. The Ainu call
the bear 'kamui', which means God. In each area the bear is
recognised as a supernatural messenger and walker between the worlds,
traveller amongst the stars above, below, and within. Cave Bear
skulls have been found in a cave at Saône-et-Loire, France arranged
in a circle and marked with red ochre. They are believed to be
between 45,000 and 75,000 years old and to date from the time of the
Neanderthals. It is believed that even the more 'modern' beliefs of
our own Northern ancestors date to a “common ancestral belief-system of Asiatic origin dating back to the time ofthe Magdalenian period of 20,000 years ago”. Bear tracks appear in the
rock carvings of the Altai people of Northern Norway from as long as
6,200 years ago. When we walk with Bear we too become the oldest of
the old. We become once again the people who carry the red ochre. We
become real and our ancestors are beside us.
But the one who is
truly always beside us is the Bear Mother. She has touched my life
many times. In 2007 my mother, who had been very ill, was not
expected to live through the night. Her spirit chose to remain and
she stayed for another few months before she left. I was relieved
that she was still alive and, once the turbulence of that time had
settled, I expected to carry on with my life as before but I found
that I was agitated and couldn't settle back into my everyday life. I
realised that I had been so convinced that my mother would die, and
only a few months after my father’s death, that I had stepped
partly into the Otherworld to hold her hand as she passed and had
never quite returned. A few weeks later, I found myself in a little
crystal shop in Glastonbury, Somerset, and there I found a bone
pendant carved with the image of a bear mother holding her cub in her
arms. I couldn't afford her but I felt her call and so I let the wild
part of me in and she was mine. I wore her for several months and
came back to myself but she wouldn't stay. Instead she has travelled
to several friends, and friends of friends, who have had need of her.
Some have received deep healing and become well again. Some have
received deep healing and have died. Always she has come back to me
and I trust that this time she will. I don't even have a photograph;
for a creature so powerful and so big she knows how to slip unseen
between the cracks of healing.
I have written
before of the painful journey that I had with my partner, Will, and
of the healing that Heron brought me, but there was also a whiff of
Bear. When I was at my most ragged and raw I went to a drumming
circle to celebrate Winter Solstice. It was all that I could do to
get myself there at all and I was sure that I would feel cut off in
my broken state. There were five drum journeys that night and in each
one the Bear Mother came and curled up with me, wrapping around me a
sanctuary of stillness and safety. In her warmth something in me was
healed. It was enough.
She is not always, what we would think of as, kind and she can be a fierce mother. She is an ancestress, a mother life-giver, and even now we talk of 'bearing' children. In Eastern Lithuania, a woman immediately after childbirth is called 'Bear' (Meška). The saying ''licked into shape' comes from the belief that,
during hibernation, bear mothers would literally create their young
by licking formless flesh and fur into bear cubs before emerging with
them in the spring. Sometimes, she has done this to me too; pushing
me to be more, try harder, walk wilder, shaping me, when I would rather just lie
down and give up. I
am a wilful and defiant woman and sometimes she has to 'cuff' me. She is not to be trifled with, this Bear Mother.
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| 'Bear Mother and Cubs', Anna Hyatt-Huntington (Wiki Commons) |
And now, when I have
undertaken a brave quest to find a new and wild life and I am all
love, silence, and transformation, the Bear Mother has returned
curling into the cave of my belly and has drawn me down into the deep
dreaming of her holy story, and of my own. I lost her, remembered
fairytales, and she came back through words and tears. I am not good
or brave or strong but the Bear Mother is with me and I am blessed.
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| (Wiki Commons) |
And here, as a special treat for us all and for anyone who knows their bears to be, 'made of ice and river-wood and the bones of otters, full of pebbles and pine resin and the lost songs of bees', is a story of beauty and power from the wonderful Tom Hirons, first published in 'Earthlines' journal and shared here with his permission. Thank you, Tom.
https://coyopa.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-bear-outside/
Bibliography:
'The Significance of the Bear Among the Sami and Other Northern Cultures', Brandon "Kál'lá" Bledsoe. http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/diehtu/siida/religion/bear.htm
'The Language of the Goddess', Marija Gimbutas, Thames & Hudson, 1989.
'The Great Bear Mother', Jude Lally https://ilikelichen.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/the-great-bear-mother-by-jude-lally.pdf
'The Great Bear Mother', Jude Lally https://ilikelichen.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/the-great-bear-mother-by-jude-lally.pdf