Bears eating a caribou carcass in Denali National Park (Public Domain)

Dear Readers, I have been ploughing through a collection of the essays of Barry Lopez (1945-2020) (best known for his book ‘Arctic Dreams’) and have been much taken by his writing – he manages to combine thoughtfulness, close scientific observation and open mindedness, a rare collection of attributes. A modest man, he spent a lot of time in the company of the Indigenous people of Alaska, and in his essay ‘The Invitation’, he makes some thought-provoking suggestions about the different ways that people from different cultures view the world.

First up, he notices that the Indigenous people that he travels with rarely converse. I have to say here that this sounds blissful:  during the eclipse,  folk just wouldn’t stop verbalising their every impression until I couldn’t hear myself think or feel anything, so I had to walk away, rude as it must have appeared. I know that we can get a better range of sensory input if we just shut up sometimes.

But I think that Lopez is making a more subtle point too. Language tends to crystallise impressions, to ‘fix’ them in space and time, and to block out the more subtle things that happen – the scents, the sound of the wind in the branches. Here’s what he says:

“When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.”

Lopez uses the example of finding a bear feeding on a caribou carcass. For Lopez, and I suspect for most of us, it would be all about the bear. But for the Indigenous people that he knew, Lopez describes it as ‘an unfolding’. The bear is situated not only in space, but also in time – there may have been signs before, in the footprints in mud or hairs snagged on a thorn bush, and there will be something after as the bear is challenged for its food, or drags it away, or cubs come, or the animal is disturbed. And this is something that I honestly believe we can develop even within an urban setting – the particular sound of crows mobbing a heron or a bird of prey always makes me look up, a  specific smell of decay and buzzing of bluebottles makes me search for a carcass to see what might have been killed, and by what. The natural world  is a long story, not a series of unrelated events. It’s all about context. But Lopez also makes the point that we mustn’t rush too quickly to attempt to find an explanation, a resolution to the ‘problem’ of the bear.

“The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way Indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what  they encounter than to isolated objects“.

Lopez’s second point is that, as we rush to analyse and define, we start to ‘leave our body’ – we begin to ignore all the sensory input that our bodies are still gathering, and instead rely on the rational mind. How familiar does this sound?

“As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was travelling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place.”

There is much to consider here, for me at least. How often do we allow ourselves, in our busyness, to sit in a place and just let what happens happens, without trying to analyse it and tuck it safely away? For example, I love knowing ‘stuff’, and it feels respectful to me to understand the differences between birds, but I wonder if it’s not more helpful, and maybe in these difficult days more important, to consider the pattern that the bird is part of, to observe more closely the way that it feeds, the relationship between it and the hawthorn tree and the tangle of honeysuckle where it maybe has its nest.

Lopez is not romanticising the Indigenous people that he travelled with: he points out that there are inattentive, lazy and undiscerning individuals in both Indigenous and so-called ‘advanced’ cultures.

“But they tend to value more highly the importance of intimacy with a place. When you travel with them, you’re acutely aware that theirs is a fundamentally different praxis from your own. They’re more attentive, more patient, less willing to say what they know, to collapse mystery into language”.

What do you think, Readers? Does any of this ring true to you? I think that the ability to remain quiet, attentive and unjudgmental as natural events unfold around us is something that can and should be learned – witness a small child completely focussed on a piece of gravel, or a flower, and I sense that we all could do this once. Can we still enter into an event with our senses alive, our sense of mystery intact, our need to categorise and analyse for once on the back burner? Lopez describes such moments thus:

“A grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket is more than a bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else, believing we’ll be better off just thinking about a grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. 

The moment is an invitation, and the bear’s invitation to participate is offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.”