Lifeletter #173: The Bear’s Claw

I received a powerful and mysterious gift, a few years ago, when I was working with a friend who had cancer.  I spoke one day with an indigenous friend of mine about the healing work I was doing with this woman, and how challenging it was. He decided to loan me a sacred tool that his people used for healing. His people called this tool ‘the thing with no name’ because they believed that putting any kind of label on this implement would diminish its power to bless and to heal. I was the first white woman who ever used this tool, and I did not take the gift lightly, since my friend’s life was in danger, and she had asked me to for help.

There were different dimensions to this sacred tool, which were described to me as it was passed with great generosity into my hands. For me, the most powerful part of this tool was a bear’s claw that hung from it, that swung as I moved it. My friend told me that the bear’s claw held the medicine, the nourishment, that comes to the bear when he or she rakes the ground, looking for food. This image made profound sense to me, instinctively. I practiced opening myself, again and again, to the feeling of what happens when the ground is raked. In my body something awakened. It was a deep sense of the necessity of this raking, when something needs to be healed.

I worked for a few weeks with that bear claw. There was one session in which a critical shift happened for my friend. A deep current of healing energy entered the room and flowed through her body and mine. She is better now, and I cannot know precisely what part the medicine of the bear’s claw played in her healing. I have reverence for the fact that she was willing to open herself up to something that was mysterious and unknown to her. The presence of death often invites us into radically new territory.

Since that time, the presence of the bear’s claw has been with me, long after I returned the healing tool to my dear friend. I live now with a lot of clarity about how important it is that we learn to ‘rake the ground’  of our life. Without this raking, the ground gets frozen, solid, hard and impenetrable. Habits and tendencies crystallize and refuse to melt and dissolve. We lose contact with the living creative flow of existence. If we rake the ground, things open, the ground becomes soft and receptive. Then we can water and fertilize that ground, and plant new seeds of inspiration, compassion and insight.

How do we rake the ground of our life? There are thousands of ways, and many of them cause us to feel unsettled, uncomfortable, de-stabilized, stirred up. It’s easy to avoid raking the ground, to let it get hard and rigid. We might think we are safe and secure on such solid ground, but really we are imprisoned there, cut off from the immense vitality of life.

Having a difficult but essential conversation with someone rakes the ground. Asking real questions and not settling for easy answers rakes the ground. So does dancing, and painting and singing. Speaking from a deeply vulnerable places rakes the ground. Sitting in silence, and opening to ourselves just as we are rakes the ground. Moving to a new place, paying attention to our disturbing dreams, listening to voices inside us that we have always pushed away…there are so many ways for us to rake the ground. To kneel and rake the ground, as Rumi might have put it.

If we find others who are ready for this, for the new beginnings that this raking brings us, and for the endings, then we are in good company. The blessings of such company can hardly be expressed. We find courage, inspiration and power when we are not travelling alone. It changes everything. We don’t need to spend our days tip-toeing around, avoiding discomfort, trying not to stir things up. We need to stir things up!  There are so many things inside us, waiting to emerge, waiting for us to turn towards them. We need to participate in this wild ride that is our life together, knowing that the journey is never really over.

 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

With love,
Shayla

 

photo credit: Peggy Coleman, pegcoleman.com