Dear Readers and Writers,
This year I want to begin with Bear, and song.
I’ve never seen a Bear in the wild, but over the years they’ve shown up in my dreams. Ever wonder why Teddy Bears are so well-beloved? Why they accompany so many children into sleep?
In many Native American tribes, Bears are associated with dreams… and healing.
According to David Rockwell’s book Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals, and Images of the Bear:
Nearly all the plains tribes considered shamans with bear power to be the greatest healers of all. The list includes the Lakota, Yanktonai, Assiniboin, Pawnee, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Ponca, Mandan, Arapaho, and Iowa. The easter woodland and prairie tribes that employed shamans’ bear power included the Potawatomi, Winnebago, Huron, Fox, Cree and Ojibwa. In the southwest, the Pueblo word for shamans who cured the sick was the same as the word for bear.
Please understand that the above tribal groups spent thousands of years in situations in which it was necessary to their survival to closely observe, attune to and reverently receive the beneficent powers of plant and animal beings living around them. Their reverence for Bear came from ages of direct experience with its heavy-duty power to heal, to aid in hunting and herb-gathering, and to potentiate dreaming.
I’ve received Bear teachings from a friend and elder of the Canadian Cree over the years.
In need of steadying in the wild wake of recent political events, I felt drawn to Bear Power and received this healing song:
Click here to listen to Four Bear Healing Chant
That’s the “Four Bear Healing Chant.” The melody came all at once, the words followed a little more slowly. My wife and I have sung it a lot in the past few months. It brightens and lifts us.
Tamed by a Bear, Coming Home to Nature, Spirit, Self by Priscilla Stuckey, is the heart-opening story of the author’s profoundly healing communion with Bear. There’s much wisdom in it. Leslie and I loved it.
You might want to deepen your communion with some of the Plant or Animal Powers you most relate to this year. If you do, consider song as a time-honored way to connect with them. This can really happen.
In his book The Real Work, Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, the poet Gary Snyder addresses the question, “As you see it, what is the function of poetry?” answering:
You ask me what is the function of poetry so I think, ‘What is the function of poetry since 40,000 years ago?’ In all cultures of the world—total planetary overview. And in that sense the function of poetry is not only the intensification and clarification of the inherent potentials of the language, which means a sharpening, a bringing of more delight to the normal functions of language and making maybe language even work better since communication is what it’s all about. But on another level poetry is intimately linked to any culture’s fundamental worldview, body of lore, which is its myth base, its symbol base, and the source of much of its values—that myth-lore foundation that underlies any society. That foundation is most commonly expressed and transmitted in the culture by poems, which is to say by songs. By songs that are linked to a dramatic or ritual performance much of the time. The oral tradition almost always puts its transmission into the form of measured language, which is much easier to remember and can be chanted. Much of the world’s lore has been transmitted, in one form or another, via poetic forms, measured language or sung language.
Song sounds spring from the body, from the heart, stirring air and ear and soma more tangibly and directly than written language can. We’ve been singing and chanting a lot longer than we’ve been making clay tablets, scrolls and books. I’ll share some of my songs with you this year as one very venerable mode of energetic, poetic expression.
Have you written songs? Heard songs in your Mind’s Ear? See if sometime you might invite, conceive and/or receive a simple song or chant from some aspect of Nature you feel en rapport with. Then sing it. It may change as you do so. It may change you as you do so.
It may charge you as you do so.
It’s snowing here in NW Arkansas and throughout the Ozark bioregion as I write this from the warmth of my Den, sending you all
Warm Blessings,
Geoff O
1.8.25