I have spent most of my life in one cave or another, going room to room, seat to seat, a cobbled together patchwork of whereabouts doing their best to be home. 

 

There, can you see me? Hibernating until the world felt like a place I could wake in.

 

So many days, day after day in a 20/21st century dystopian daze, using up the same air everyone else who's lived here has inspired and expired. Now that is sustaining life despite the pain of vulnerability.

 

I could tell that I was prepared to share about my neurodivergent bedazzled bear,  because I sat down and began writing. Then I blinked my eyes a million times and was standing in front of a hundred people, ready.  

 

I was maybe 2500 days old, about seven years old, when I intentionally started exploring different life forces. You know that chi, prana, energy, ase thing they speak of braiding all forms of the dream. I was looking for protection through the trauma of being. 

 

Have you ever felt a volcano erupt in one of those out of sight places? You know, a place like right between your heart and gut, like where your diaphragm connects to your spine and sternum. Do you know what it's like to be woken from a dream unwanted? Screaming because the heat has inflamed the last of the ancient spun cotton and dried cotton bristles that tore at the hands and wrists of our ancestors once again persecuted – once again enslaved.

 

That is a tender knowing that sends chills up my spine

When I am all alone

Here

Right here, can you see me?

 

I sense it, their enduring memory braided into me with those same precursed hands, in the shape of a double helix. They tried to erase them, remove all traces of them through supremacist assimilation, a sort of soul theft, by banning them from human allowances, by banning them from us, yet our ancestors braided the stories into us, in secret places, out of sight, in order to teach us. 

 

There can be so much dignity in disobedience, despite or as a consequence of the violent warnings of history. There is integrity in a refusal to obey, a refusal to obey even the wishes of those parts of ourselves that are terrified and sweep away their onus to participate in the exodus from internment. 

I don't understand this place, where highly sensitive co-conspirators must spend lifetimes in cold oceans to integrate our wrought and mangled inheritance of terror. An integration meant to sure up our foundations so our bodies don't give way under the weight of oppressive cultural somas. It's heavy, the body of it, it’s heavy, bloated and solid as the inequitable inheritance causes shooting pain. We know we all deserve a home, a place where one's dignity and safety is protected by a legacy of radically caring structures, that encourage deep soul filling and rest supporting breaths. Yet, we've been learning to breathe, while simultaneously being suffocated. You can feel it in the air too, can't you? 

There, can you see them?

 

All those souls breathing the same air as you, leaving messages in the molecules. Messages of alarm. The impact of the warning I can't fully give voice to, I acknowledge it, the historical. the familial, the foul parallel reality without solution.

 

What care will my system respond to? Who else needs this care? What types of care can we imagine for ourselves and the world? What caring possibilities become real by embracing our creative power? 

 

Thanks ancestors for evolving to survive in a world with prisons and enslavement, grizzly bears and great white sharks. Thanks for granting death to all those who were born into this world. Thanks for keeping us safe enough to replant the power of beauty in our stories and bodies.

 

And that beauty is why I want to share about my bear, bedazzled bear, aka bare witness, aka bearing straight, aka bearly there, aka bold beary, aka bear my naked soul. My bear told me in a low whispering growl, “I diverge from the common lore, I am not a mythical spirit animal, a folkloric kindred, a fabled guide, or a fantastical familiar, I am an agent, a representative, a co-conspirator, I am power from the first place you lived, your first country, your motherland. I am what arises from surviving a legacy of depravity, what arises when your grandmother loses her first child 9 hours into their life and dies when her eldest is 10 and her youngest 1. I am what is born out of knowing all the eggs a person will ever carry form in their ovaries while they are a four-month-old fetus in their mother's womb…our life begins in the wombs of our grandmothers. I am a part of the universe that birthed them. I am the embodied recognition of “life to life”, of “the apocalypse is always now”, of “we're all gonna die” and that we will navigate crisis after crisis, that many of us are in some state of "oh my god", entangled in some overwhelmed panic spasm that has the flavor of doom, and yet we live, day by day” 

 

Do you know what made my bear jump out of my threadbare heart and into my dreams? I believe it is that we are a multiplicity, with no self, in order to know ourselves. This is a soul retrieval, an this under the skin, underground freedom line has lit candles along the way to illuminate the path to safety.

 

I first remember dreaming of my bear when I was like 8 years old, around 2800s days sharing air. I remember feeling and hearing the slap, slap, slap of my bare feet hitting the ground as I ran. Each time I'd look back it felt like the bear was gaining on me. Each twist and turn left me feeling weary and as though I'd soon be caught.  Then, I saw the old victorian street light up ahead, like an iron companion there to save me, the street light dimly lit what surrounded it, which seemed to be thick forest, that disappeared into darkness outside of the lights reach. When I got to the light, I began to climb, barely escaping as the bear swiped at me. I sat in the u shaped divet and felt the relief of having escaped, then woke feeling the fear of having been chased. 

 

That was the first dream. Over the next 30 years, like 11,000 days, the bear kept coming back like they'd forgotten something, and the dream transformed from nightmare to daydream, from panic to possibility. 

 

First, the bear chased me up the light pole, then the bear showed me it could climb, yet chose not to, then the bear sat there, guarding the base of the light, then I climbed down, and we sat together for many years, asking and answering each other's questions.  

 

A question I recently asked Bear Witness was, why have you grown in this way, and why are you bedazzled? What they said was, "our emancipatory possibility resides here, in this hide, tanned, dressed and jeweled. I grow as you do, I am 40 feet tall because I am the same as you. These gemstones represent the vibrational frequencies that we can tap into, work with, and amplify. They began to grow from your visualizations, the spheres of light that you realized exist in your body, that you grew in positivity and began to radiate out to all living beings. We believe they were seeded by our ancestors. The visualizations became stronger and more vibrant with each breath noticed, it became your spiritual practice, your meditation, your altar, and a reminder of your intentions and integrity. These lights, these gems are subtle energies."  

 

Bear my naked soul touched the gemstone at their perineum, which they called our RootEarth gem, then grabbed it and with a pop pop plop plunk pow pulled it from their body and placed it in my hands. They said, "this is our foundation, it holds the memory of our first body most intimately, holds our lessons on survival, security, connection to reality and our past lives and most intimate possibilities." The RootEarth gem was a blend of many Reds and different types of gemstones. Bear told me, "it is made of Hematite, which is the reddish black mineral, and many rare gemstones like red diamond, red emerald and a doppelganger of the coveted MaGem that was set at its center." After holding it for a time, noticing its warmth, its smoothness and softness, I handed it back to bear who placed the stone back where it was, with a surprising silent ease. 

 

Bearly their repeated these types of explanations with the SacralWater gem, SolarPlexusFire gem, the HeartAir gem, the ThroatEtherSpace gem, the ThirdEyeLight gem, and the CrownThought gem. Each time they pulled a stone from they hide, body, it came with an accompaniment, groan splash eek, squish sputter gulp, squirt scrape splat belch blurt, chatter growl giggle grunt gurgle moan, and all sorts of other sounds.

 

Then I pointed out all the gems covering their body that weren't the ones they shared about, they said, "our emotional landscape reveals itself in a mosaic, closely set, small parts of emotional material such as stoned-anger, tiled-shock, glassed-despair, shelled-numbness, banded amethyst-denial, rough black obsidian-anxiety, rough orange calcite-depression, leopard skin jasper-guilt, gold tigers eye-relief, rose pink quartz-hopefulness." They then placed their paws on my head and chest, and said, "this body, mind and heart, finds an uncomfortable comfort in hiding and yet so much of us is buried under zinc, copper, and selenium — under the skin." 

 

I told bear that I think their words are an easy antidote to some forms of freeze. That their words are a magical act, an antidote to being in a body dealing with shook, dealing with the terror that comes with uncertainty. I felt it, the help, the assist when I was deep in a loop bound to trauma. Bear would also share about integrity, dignity, entitlement, gentleness, legacy, truth, love and so much more.

 

In regards to love and what our loved ones are entitled to, bear said to me, "they are entitled to their will imprinted by ancestors and push and pulled by cosmic lines. Entitled to everything that love is for them, the choice and feeling of love. Entitled to their own ideas and requirements about love. Entitled to the type of love that is playful, edgy, and requires deep listening, if they want it. And in a context where human listening, human imagination and human possibilty has suffered through crisis after crisis, in a context where it has been hijacked by socially constructed internalized externalized corrupted constables, these perceived limitations leave us butt ass naked — Bear naked soul exposed." 

 

Bear pauses, takes a deep breath, that I feel in my belly and chest and whispers, "you are entitled to the type of love that helps you feel safe enough to share, even about me and all sorts of other unsightly shadowed things. Hear, your magic through imagination bedazzled bear." 

 

And here I am, exposed, standing in front of 100 people, sharing about my bedazzled bear.  

 

I have spent most of my life in one cave or another, going from room to room, seat to seat, it's a cobbled together patchwork of whereabouts doing their best to be home. 

 

Here I am, can you see me? Hibernating until the world feels like a place I could wake in.