Meeting Mountain, Mind, and the Momma Grizzly

An encounter of untold dimensions

The Rocky Mountains the day before my climb.

If you came straight here, it might be worthwhile reading this brief introduction first to give you a sense of what to expect. It’s not necessary though as this piece can stand alone.

Meeting Mountain, Mind, and the Momma Grizzly

Nature is always revealing us to ourselves, and all she requires is that we pay attention and participate. On one particular afternoon a three hundred pound mother grizzly bear became my instructor for a three hour workshop in respect, communication, and trusting your deepest intuitions. When she insisted that I respond to her queries, I found myself thoroughly enchanted by winning her approval of my answers. First she pressured me to declare whether I would fight for my food. Then, when I (quite literally) put my foot down, she decided she was comfortable to leave me alone with her cub.

My words are failing already, but the crude tools will have to do if I am to relate to you any sense at all of the wonder of this encounter with real life. Your imagination will have to fill in for the parts I can’t convey. The odds that you will know a similar, one-on-one, drawn-out, intimate close encounter with untamed nature like this are thousands, perhaps millions, to one. I didn’t expect to even see a bear, let alone climb a steep mountain all afternoon with a mother grizzly and cub coming up behind me. A decade before I was in this corner of the Rockies dozens of times and never once saw a bear, although populations have increased since then and carrying bear spray is now mandatory. Even after I spotted the bears, a close encounter is what I spent the afternoon trying to avoid. It couldn’t have been planned, since wanting it would be a whole different experience.

I will make my case, but in the end I cannot prove that for one eternal moment our felt senses met and mingled in some ethereal space between us and beyond us. A skeptic could say I report nothing but a projection of my anthropocentrism. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of my story: I make no claim that something supernatural or otherworldly occurred, only that a very natural, very intense, very brief communion of feeling occurred between myself and a highly sensitive fellow creature.

The reality is far more interesting than anything I could make up. If I could accomplish just one thing with this story, it would be to stir in you a longing to step outside for a moment to reflect on the mysteries of the everyday miracle.

~~~

In the last week of August 2022, I was on an overnight solo hike in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, an hour’s drive from Banff. Lucky timing had me in the area during the warmest, clearest, stillest days of a late summer heat wave. With night time temperatures higher than usual, I anticipated dazzling high-altitude stargazing. Though more than ten years older now and in my mid-fifties, these were the best conditions I could ever hope for.

The mountain I intended to climb is the highest one around with just under a mile of elevation gain. The six hundred foot high stone block at the summit came into view on my left, seemingly hovering and refusing to come nearer as I sped toward it on the gravel road. My stomach dropped for a second with a chill and a touch of vertigo from realizing how high up I would be.

It's hot and I've been walking for hours, but the real climb starts here. My objective is the 600 foot high stone block above my head, still many miles away.

Mid-afternoon on the first day, resting on a grassy, open slope a third of the way up, I spotted a mother grizzly and large cub a hundred yards below. I had been right there myself a short time before. The mother was digging, and then she had something in her mouth and the cub was running her in circles trying to take it from her. They were playing! My chin dropped as my eyes went wide and my face lit up.

Before that had come a stab of fear, when it dawned on me what I was looking at. I realized with a terrible shiver how easily a surprise close encounter could have happened earlier. But it didn’t, the thought’s echo rebounded, and I came back to the present sitting up and moderately adrenalized. It was comforting to see they were happy bears and not hungry bears, though less so to realize they now blocked my way down.

They were close enough to alarm me but far enough away that the threat was not immediate. With the clarifying chemical rush my state changed from enchanted, exhausted, and blissed-out to enchanted, energized and threat-focused. I had to accept the possibility of meeting a gruesome death in the most stunningly beautiful setting. Half-formed, looping impressions flashed through my mind, significant but ungraspable as in a dream. I quickened as time slowed down.

Beyond words, one flash went, “Oh, that’s why they call it a stab of fear.” Another went “Oh, that’s how Alfred Hitchcock came up with his Vertigo shot.” Cascading memories of the day recast themselves as near misses. Especially foregrounded were two times I napped in the shade to hide from the punishing sun. Either time I could have opened my eyes to a surprise encounter. I would almost certainly have reacted with shock and fear, bears being a million miles from my mind, and that could have triggered an aggressive response. Even if a mauling wasn’t immediately fatal, no one was coming up this way and there was no cell phone signal. Best case was a few hours from anywhere another person could find me, maybe today maybe tomorrow. Worst case I would be unable to move. I had registered my car for three days in case I wanted to stay. No one would be looking for me.

The chemical reorientation and memory shuffle spanned a few seconds at most, between registering movement to reflecting on the surprise encounter that didn’t happen. As the realizations rolled through me, my open attention slid analog, like a zipline crossing a canyon, into a tight narrow focus. I understood as it happened that my open attention was directing my spotlight attention to foreground and analyze this one tiny part of the universe. That’s interesting... Oh! Those are bears! Oh shit, they’re grizzlies! A mother and large cub! It’s hard to know how long the zooming-in process took, because suddenly I was lit up with sensory and cognitive impressions. Time became fluid and variable.

The adrenaline jolt quickly faded to an even-keeled assessment as I sat up. I had time to watch the bears and reflect on my situation. I took a few photos. Mostly I gazed, wonderstruck, while they carried on foraging, apparently unaware of my presence. Quite honestly, if this had been the entire encounter I would have considered myself lucky to experience it. But things got far more interesting. For the next few hours the bears and I climbed the mountain together, although I wouldn’t become aware of that for quite some time.

~~~

I was hiking a little-known, off-map, alternate route; steep, grassy and pathless. After three or four hours I was only a third of the way up, halfway to a level section where the scree begins at two thirds of the total elevation. Up until the moment of discovery, I tried to engage my open attention with the mountain views, the profound silence and the fresh air, but my efforts were undermined by groaning quadriceps and aching trapezoids. At the same time, since there was no path, I had to focus narrowly on choosing every step.

I am not conditioned for mountain hiking and a screeching monkey mind temptation blared at me continuously that I could simply turn around and spare myself a lot of future pain. I didn’t sleep the night before, shivering through the night in my car, and I was mentally fatigued from the start. The annoying verbosity buzzed me like a mad horsefly, looping incessantly on how much more pain lay ahead of me than behind me. This next step is really going to hurt, the thought fragments taunted me. While I never considered quitting because I was nowhere near my limit, I could only silence the predictive processing when I was resting.

 Nice of the bears to alert me to their presence with their horsing around, otherwise I might not have known they were there.

~~~

Perhaps this is a good time to introduce the discovery of Dr. Iain McGilchrist¹, whose work I encountered some months prior. You will have to know at least the basic idea in order to understand my experience and my telling of it. In the main, we always pay attention to the world with two mutually exclusive attention types: the left hemisphere narrow and reductive in order to get food; the right hemisphere open and perceptive to avoid becoming food. The hemisphere theory posits that a reverberative communication between these attention modes is hidden from us, because if they were not separated the modes would interfere with each other’s reason for being. Furthermore, this is not a specifically human thing since the asymmetric functioning is everywhere in the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. (I can’t do Dr. McGilchrist’s neuroscience research justice here, but I strongly encourage you to look into it. The explanatory power is unparalleled.)

For additional background, I had been on this slope a decade before, once up the official west face trail and twice up this little-known route. I preferred coming up the south face because even though it was steeper it was grassy and open and the sun was behind me. I always went down the west face though because when they’re visible the vistas and lake views are spectacular. On my first exploratory hike I packed lightly and slowly made my way down in the moonlight after sundown. The next time I started late and climbed down again through the night but armed with a flashlight. The last time I got close to the top but was driven down by vicious icy winds, at which I retreated to a lower elevation to wait for dawn. This time I intended to overnight on purpose, but my backpack weighed me down accordingly. I carried heavy winter clothes and food and water for three days. It turns out that thanks to an accessible snowpack and icemelt runoff I needn’t have carried all that water but the south face streambed is seasonal and I couldn’t have known.

As for the grizzly encounter itself, a perceptual time dilation opened the experience and another will close it. The three to four hours in between is a momentary blur by contrast. For all that time I could see tactical overlay on the terrain, like a heads up display for the mind’s eye. This was just one aspect of a most fascinating attentional bifurcation unlike anything I’ve ever heard of, which I will try to describe as best I can.

~~~

Storywise, we are still three to five seconds since a blur of movement caught my eye. The rush of fear has faded, having done its job of fixing my attention, and a crystalline clarity has settled over me. I noted the dual attention in context of an unusually translucent and heightened flow state. This is where the hemisphere theory becomes relevant. I immediately understood that while my narrow focus locked on to the bears with a singular intensity, my perceptive attention wrenched itself wide open to take in all that was knowable about the situation suddenly at hand.

If I could put this moment of realization into words, it would sound like an echo of the moment neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor became aware she was having a stroke: Amazing! I can feel, right now, both of my attention modes in a heightened state of awareness. I have an opportunity to observe the divided brain in the wild. Discovering her Ted Talk² long after my experience, Taylor’s description of the moment when she realizes what’s happening resonates. Wonder comingles with danger, and a field of inquiry we hold dear comes alive to our direct experience. I think there were many factors that allowed me to experience this unusual awareness, far more than I can include here, but one of the most salient might have been that the danger was close enough to activate my threat responses yet far enough away that I had time to reflect. Exhaustion likely played a role too, as there was a sense of letting go, although letting go of what exactly perhaps a neuroscientist or a monk could say better than I.

As the bears played and carried on, their bodies spoke of unbounded freedom. I sat watching them, enthralled, perhaps for a few minutes but really I’m not sure. Watching the bears I was watching the mountain going about its day. The sun hung mute in a glassy sea of unbroken blue. There was no separation between me, the sky, the mountains, the bears, the trees. Gravity flowed from the stone cathedrals all around me. I had no clear sense of where I ended and where everything else began, although I felt it to be somewhere outside myself. I exuded a glowing love and felt loved in return. This feeling, while momentary in its peak form, stayed with me residually. I’m not sure it’s ever really left me.

As I enjoyed this moment of unified stillness, I understood from Dr. McGilchrist that this is how the right hemisphere inhabits the world always, just as focusing narrowly on the bears as a problem to be solved is how the left hemisphere sees the same world. There seemed to be some part of me holding the right hemisphere’s open attention at arm’s length, just as the right hemisphere can hold the left’s narrow attention. My body awareness was heightened too, distinct from the mental bifurcation. It felt as if my body, or some deep neural process with direct access to it, experienced and observed both of my attention modes.

I have little academic knowledge of biology or consciousness however. I wonder what part of me permitted the curtains to be raised, allowing a hyper-awareness of open focus, narrow focus, and body simultaneously? It’s a fascinating question that I’ll never fully answer, meaning the fascination will endure. It’s worth noting that these processing modes occur all the time in everyone, but that awareness of them is mostly hidden from our view.

The story after threat realization involves the attention modes signaling back and forth (as it seemed to me.) I will have to say a few things about the limits of words (again) when I attempt to give voice to left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) awareness. As the hemisphere theory holds, we are never fully in either LH or RH attention mode. Rather, awareness as we normally experience it is a continuously reverberating and singular “between-ness”.

This makes sense to me and aligns with personal experience. If you ever find yourself entirely in LH or RH mode, then you’re either in a state of psychotic break or formless union. In order to convey the back and forth signaling between narrow and open attention, I simplify the re-creations as momentary impressions of “LH” or “RH,” even though it’s always that ever-changing “between-ness.” Another simplification is using words for impressions of the nonverbal RH, which are crude translations at best, or using words at all for what was almost entirely a wordless experience. There are likely more distortions and certainly some omissions but, while acknowledging elements of poetic license, it’s as faithful to the original experience as I can be.

~~~

With the flow state descending on me, ancient survival systems came online as I began to think. Thus far the signaling between attention modes could be summarized coarsely like this: the RH registers movement and passes that information to the LH; LH reports back that they’re bears, then that they’re grizzlies, and then that it’s a mother and cub; RH requests a detailed threat assessment. The LH is unusually (and blessedly!) silent from here on and signals nonverbally for the most part. The passages in italics are my attempts to translate those communication signals.

LH: The bears are busy playing and eating. They’re far enough away down a steep slope I’m in no immediate danger. If they know I’m here they don’t care, and if they don’t know then that’s even better. There’s a steady updraft so they can’t smell me or the food. I can get to the bear spray within 2-3 seconds if needed. It’s got a 30 foot range and the breeze is very light. The spray has 7 seconds in total. I go 3 seconds with the first shot and assess, then there is a second shot of 3 seconds and a final burst up close if needed. Remember to save some for the third shot in case the first two don’t deter. I want to maintain or increase our distance. I don’t know how fast they could bound up the slope if they decided to. Rest is over, time to climb faster.

RH: Our legs are shot and they’ve been shot for hours. Every step is torture. How are we going to go faster? LH, you take control of the ascent.

LH: Leave it to me. I don’t feel time or this body’s pains and I’ll drag it up myself if I have to.

I realized I should be able to lean on left hemisphere’s detachment to climb harder in spite of the pain and exhaustion, which unlocked a boost beyond the adrenaline. Knowledge of hemisphere functioning became a tool in my survival kit. It worked and I did climb faster, but the price paid is that I have little memory of the next few hours. Mostly I remember an elevated but moderate concern, looking over my shoulder every few seconds, and putting one foot in front of the other.

Halfway to my objective of the south/west crossing point, perhaps an hour and a half after spotting the bears, I stopped to rest. There was no sign of them. I sat for around 5 minutes in blissful exhaustion. I only hope you can imagine. I drifted in the flow of eternity, immersed in the wild beauty and utter silence. Gazing at the mountain faces, a sense of their impermanence made me appreciate them even more. In two million years the peaks would be gone, a local brochure had informed me. In spite of their apparent solidity they were slow-moving waves of stone, cresting and rolling inland from the western shore.

I reflected on my good luck at seeing two happy grizzlies from a safe enough distance, playing and going about their day. But while I felt blessed for the experience, I was also glad it was over. I was pleased to have seen them and even more pleased they’d moved on. Then I spotted them again, across and to the east now.

RH: Oh! They’re the same distance away, a hundred yards! They’re coming up behind us! Situation assessment?

LH: Keep going. Same pace. I’m close enough now I know I can make it. They’re still busy feeding and not paying me any attention. Soon I’ll be above any food sources and maybe they’ll turn around and go back down.

RH: To get where they are they move faster than us. They went from a hundred yards below to a hundred yards lateral, meaning they covered more distance in less time.

LH: Right. Time to go. They could close a hundred lateral yards in no time if they wanted to. That crevice would slow them down a few seconds, but only a few.

I figured out that they must have been travelling up the seasonal streambed, hidden by a shallow crevice which was one of the few places on this open slope I couldn’t see them. Later with Pythagoras’ theorem I put their speed at forty percent faster at a minimum, but probably more because their route was indirect and they started later. I myself had walked up the streambed for a while, but the heavy pack made my balance and footing precarious so I decided it was too treacherous. Even a minor injury could mean getting stranded. For quadrupeds with a low centre of gravity and big, grippy pads though, walking up the lightly trickling streambed and smooth polished stone would be ideal.

I continued to walk switchback, but now half the time while I faced east I could gaze at them doing their thing. Line of sight was enormously comforting. I didn’t have to worry they might charge anytime out of nowhere. I was doubly blessed now: During the initial sighting I watched them for just a few minutes, with wonder and enchantment but also an intense, guttural desire to move away from them. This time I got to watch them with sustained and delighted awe.

Eventually the slope’s irregularities took them out of my sight again, but by now we had company. I’m not sure when I first noticed the mountain goat far above us. It stood still as the stone all around it, horns carving a silhouette out of the vivid blue. It was fixated on the bears, never once looking my direction even though I was the one moving toward it. The goat was under no threat far away up the scree, other than being temporarily blocked from the south slope food sources. Was it watching the bears for the pleasure of it, as I was? While I would like to think so, one could just as easily speculate it was on alert, as I was, and waiting impatiently for the bears to move on. In any case, the mountain goat’s stare enabled me to keep my threat assessment low because I could triangulate where the bears were at all times. I knew they weren’t moving and that I was gaining distance.

Around this time the adjacent west cliff’s shadow had noticeably lengthened and I registered the first hint of an evening breeze. The sun was relentless all day, and while the updraft was continuous it was too slight and too hot to be any relief. The first touch of cool was scarcely a tickle through my arm and leg hairs, but realizing that the worst of the late afternoon heat was over was invigorating. I may have sped up slightly as the slope started rounding out and it became clear I could make it without stopping again.

The crossing point where the south and west faces of the mountain meet.

I got to the thirty yard stretch of smooth, level pathway where the south and west faces meet and just stood for a minute. The mountain goat wasn’t much higher than me now but safely far to the east. I didn’t remove the backpack right away because I wasn’t sure where I would sit and it was a dismal prospect to have to put it back on again after relieving my trapezoids. Grinning wildly I am sure, I thanked the bears in my head for forcing me up the slope.

I had eyes on them from here and could see I had more than doubled the distance between us. I was in need of a major rest, not like the five minute quickie I had before spotting them the second time. The coolness was delicious now, and I enjoyed my first shade since my earlier breaks below the treeline. The smallest animal pleasures, like the touch of cool breeze and a drink of cold water, gratified me to my core. The thought that I’d be off my feet in just another minute or two thrilled me with anticipation of an exquisite muscular release.

I took stock of my updated circumstances. Though I was quite safe now, more so than I had felt all afternoon, I still held my bifurcated attention modes in their heightened states. I called for an updated threat analysis.

RH: Two hundred yards. Situation assessment?

I can’t tell in this photo if she’s looking at me. They had line of sight on me too.

LH: Two options: Stay here and hope the bears turn around, or climb up the scree where they’ll never go. If I stay here and they do come up, they’ll almost certainly come this way. However, they’re further away now and they might not. Sun will be going down soon. The light will fade slow but the temperature will drop fast.

RH: Our legs are shot. Our shoulders are shot. We’re thoroughly depleted. We’re not going anywhere for a while.

LH: Okay since I’m staying here I’ll determine the most defensible spot. As it happens, it’s the high ground right above me, twenty feet up a sixty degree slope of small, sharp rocks. There’s a shin-high flat rock to sit on and be a bit of an obstacle if needed. There’s only the one way up. This spot won’t stop a grizzly but it will slow down a charge and better my chances of getting good shots off. If challenged I’ll have to hold this ground since the cliff is right behind me and there’s nowhere to retreat to.

RH: Body says rest, drink water, change clothes.

LH: Roger.

I sat for a long time with my eyes closed, emptied of all but release. I massaged my legs and stretched out my shoulders. Such a delightful state to be awestruck, exhilarated and exhausted all at once. Surrounded by massive stones on every side I felt like a stone myself, hardened and immortal, inhabiting primordial eternity. Sharing the afternoon with two grizzlies and a goat, I had come to feel at home as one of the mountain’s creatures.

Tactically defensible spot for a well-earned shady rest.

Unexpectedly, there was a telecom signal way up here, and while it was weak I was able to text family and a few people who tried to reach me that day. My phone battery drained rapidly so communication was short-lived. I took a couple more pictures but the bears were so far away I can hardly make them out against the background. While texting I noticed the bears were not where they were and the goat was looking more in my direction. An acquaintance remarked that the mother was teaching her young one to hunt. Funny! I signed off and got back to preparing for night time.

RH: The bears are moving up to the next berry patch. They’re the same distance as before, a hundred yards. There’s another small berry patch halfway between us in the last hardscrabble bit of green grass.

I had my shoes and shorts off and the contents of my backpack strewn around. As they continued approaching from inside a hundred yards, the option to withdraw up the scree toward the mountain goat was foreclosed. It would mean moving toward the bears as they marched toward me. I got my winter pants on just as they got to the last berry patch, fifty yards away. They didn’t stop.

It took a beat to register and then confirm that a close encounter was now inevitable. My predictive processing became stuck in time, removed from the flow. There was a flash of unreality and a double take, as if the tactical overlay couldn’t process the new development while the terrain just kept on rolling. I felt an urgent need to impress upon my abstract, two-dimensional, prediction-over-perception left hemisphere that this was not just a cartoon movie playing in my head. I needed myself back in sync, so I directly addressed the stuckness to snap it back into my timeline. I didn’t call for a threat analysis this time since it was perfectly obvious.

RH: Situation! This is real!

That was all it took. It wasn’t a hesitation so much as a validation check before committing to the new reality.

RH: The bears are coming up and will pass directly below. Fifty yards. Closing steady.

The tactical overlay updated. A close encounter was now predicted.

You might ask at this point, how did I feel? I still felt no fear. The closest word I can think of is engaged. I felt utterly clear and highly charged, a flow state of potential energy. As long as the bears were relaxed and uninterested in me then I was relaxed too. I felt the twinge of a second letting go as I accepted that the arrow of time would progress, entirely outside my control. Whatever would happen would happen and then become the past. The nowness grew more vivid as time warped again, quickening and slowing even more. I felt both ancient and timeless, as if reliving an eternally recurring theme. My movements were calm and deliberate. My emotions were calm and deliberate. My thoughts were calm and deliberate. The feeling of being a living stone rang through my body like a tuning fork.

LH: I need to get the shoes on, otherwise mobility will be limited, painful and very uncertain. I have time. I’ll yell at them to make sure they know I’m here. I won’t be able to hide, but at least I can ensure it’s not a surprise encounter.

RH: They heard us, although they don’t seem terribly impressed or frightened. They are not taking our suggestion to turn around and go back down. The altitude and exhaustion made our voice high and thin and squeaky, a ridiculous mouse-like sound we don’t even recognize.

LH: Best to be silent. That squeaky pitch will make me sound smaller and weaker than I am, which could lead to a misunderstanding. I have the high ground, a defensive rock, and am ready with the spray. Once I get the shoes on, then it’s just waiting to see what happens. Back over to [not I].

RH: Roger. Max perceptual aperture.

I didn’t ask for it and wouldn’t have chosen it, but I knew a close encounter was possible and now I had to trust that I’d prepared sufficiently. I reflected that the spray was three weapons in one: It was a nasty repellant in itself; it was a ranged weapon, giving me first strike and follow-up; and I would do all I could to spook her with the surprise of it, adding psy-op to the mix. But that would be up to her. If I hit her with the spray it would mean deterrence had failed and things were spinning out of control.

I remembered what someone who spent time in the woods up north had told me years before. When you meet a grizzly bear, he said, it wants to know three things: How big are you? How loud are you? How strong are you? When I yelled at them they glanced up and saw me as they kept moving, with an air of indifference I would say. I felt they knew where they were going and it had nothing to do with me. But still, while the recommended procedure up close is to repeat something like hello bear in a soothing tone, my voice was so utterly alien to me I decided right then not to try to use it again.

The time dilation stretched further, quickening and slowing with their advance. The nowness ratcheted up. As I worked on my shoes I became ever more still, the centre of a vortex coming into being. The unfolding moment poured into me. I prepared to meet not just the bear but to meet myself. Some … primordial self that knew the drill, as if it had been done a thousand times before.

For a short while they went out of my sight again due to the hard-to-reach position I had chosen. I got one shoe on and tied, and then I only had time to slip on the right shoe untied as the mother grizzly rounded the corner and became visible at twenty yards. She walked head down with a measured, unhurried pace. She avoided eye contact with a conspicuous intentionality, which I felt and mirrored back. Our concern was that if our eyes met, even by accident, we might get locked into a confrontation.

More importantly, as my body lit up with an animal sense of her proximity, I knew I would see more of her in my left field peripheral vision. To focus my gaze on her directly would break the spell and disrupt the flow of sense-knowing. I beheld, with a sublime humility, that in the sidelit twilight she would peer into my depths and I into hers. Instinctively I prepared to be known, just as I wished to know her.

Against a background of grey stone in shade, the bear was a hulking, monochrome shadow herself. My attention narrowed and wrenched open still further, beyond both her and myself, to the mystery of being we both shared in. A space opened somewhere between us and outside us and we met in that ethereal portal. The moment had arrived. The curtain was rising. All of eternity was a vortex funneling into this moment.

LH: Good enough. Won’t matter about the shoelace.

RH: Twenty yards. We are in the zone: perfectly calm, perfectly alert.

LH: I’ll stand up. They already know I’m here so best to look as big as possible. The high ground will help. Being in the zone is all kinds of excellent: if I have to take a shot I won’t hesitate or miss.

RH: Ten yards. Whoa. Momma is a zen master… She’s relaxed, power harnessed by grace. She’s walking nonchalantly, head down, still not looking at us. We are in communion with a common source. Her body and our body are entangled in direct communication, and we‘ve never been so sure of anything.

LH: That’s good. Standing by.

There came a third letting go, as time slowed to a trickle yet still refused to stop. It occurred to me that she and I were both accustomed to solitary immersion in nature. And then she was inside my head and I was inside hers. I was a radio tuned to every station. My nerves grappled for resolution, straining to know more, feel more, intuit more.

Feeling just a hint of a swoon at first contact with her animal magnetism, which I realized could be a sign of weakness, I remembered what I came for and explored my impressions: She is absolutely unstressed, perfectly relaxed. Her commanding, bonecrushing power lay uncoiled, held at arm’s length by a graceful contentment. She can feel my unbounded respect. She feels the same.

I kept my guard up, knowing bears are skilled at bluffing, masking and shifting their intentions. In our empathic link, any foreshadow of aggression on her part and I would know instantly, just as she would feel the slightest twitch of tension or fear on my part. We were both well-fed, omnivorous, embodied mammals, mutually wary and mutually curious.

We have never met. We’ve met countless times. We are each of us apex predators. We have shared this world forever.

The marvelous bifurcation held firm as it widened. With my tight focus riveted on defence I had space to open up to a profound transcendence. With my left hemisphere stone-cold ready to shoot her in the face, my right felt a love for her as big and as old as the world. She was more than just a bear, she was an emissary of the mountain come to greet me, my reward for a lifetime of communing with nature.

To match her unconcerned attention and vitality seemed appropriate, to show weakness or fear would be punishable. Though she didn’t own this mountain any more than I did, she was obviously at home and knew this path well.

~~~

Words start to fail here, if they haven’t already, but imagine a creature distinct from the human yet far from alien. There has always been something special about bears in the human imagination, and my experience goes right to the heart of that ancient bond. If asked, I would have called the link with her a spiritual connection. It felt like energy flows meeting to create an ethereal, inductive difference engine. Our overlapping fields constructively interfered to create a mounting pressure wave. Our relational synchronization created a portal through which we each onboarded information about the other’s emotional state. Though I have only intuition and imagination to guide me, and acknowledging that both can be misinterpreted, that’s how the encounter presenced to me. The sense of being outside the body yet still bound, transcendent yet tethered, is what makes me want to call the experience spiritual. If there is a world spirit, which I’ve always believed that there is, then that’s where it felt we were communing, inside and through something vastly larger than both of us.

And yet, I can say with more certainty that this was an intensely somatic experience. Once she got to around ten yards my body was drawn to hers as if in a mutual tractor beam. Imagine that feeling of animal magnetism when you stand next to a horse and sense its powerful heart. Now imagine the horse is not a domesticated herbivore, but rather is three hundred pounds of compact mass and muscle, with four inch claws, predator teeth and jaws that can crush a bowling ball, and she’s walking toward you with the air and grace of a dancer, absolutely unstressed and at home in this encounter. An arcing across my entire body told me that despite her apparent nonchalance she was as interested in me as I was in her.

Given that this felt at once both spiritual and somatic, what does that say about my sense of the spiritual? Was my imaginal sense of meeting somewhere outside ourselves a summation of physical sensations, reconfigured for my mind’s eye? Or was the perceived ethereal connection something complementary to and beyond the physical? Perhaps there is a more pragmatic way to examine these questions: Could I prove to a skeptic that Momma and I were in empathic union? No I could not, so next question: Would I trust my life to this instinct that I felt what she was feeling and what, intuitively, it felt like to be her? Yes, without hesitation, and I would trust those eddies of perception to inform my own responses.

~~~

Layers of self were steadily peeled like an onion. Stonelike and alert, I betrayed nothing I am certain because we both would have known it. My mind never knew such quiet before, and it came as a lovely revelation that this quietness was normal for her. What a blessing to have no language, even if it meant doing away with propositional knowing altogether. What an even greater blessing to have language and to set it aside.

Time was so slow now and I was so quickened I held eternity in a moment, to repurpose Blake’s famous phrasing. The full spectrum wave synchronization between Momma Bear and I, however one believes it is manifest, was cresting. The reverberating signals between my selves, between Momma and myself, and between everything and everything else, lifted me to an attentional peak: open->narrow->open->>>

RH: Five yards. Our body is acutely aware that she has us on her radar. She’s avoiding eye contact and she’s feeling no aggression. She’s attending with her open perception. We’re in her left field of vision. She’s showing us the same respect we’re showing her. The cub has stopped advancing though and has stayed out of sight. It’s just Momma and us.

LH: Good that she’s chill. I’ll keep her in close peripheral vision and avoid eye contact. I want her to know I’m watching closely and without fear, but have no intention to attack unprovoked.

She was right below, twenty feet away. It was almost over.

RH: Zero yards. She’s still not looking at us. Oh! She let out a loud, long snort, almost of surprise.

Just as I was ready to exhale, she obliterated the silence with a penetrating inhaled snort. It was effortlessly powerful yet not unfriendly; oddly comical and inquisitive. I stayed rooted to the stone while I considered my options. The strange greeting, reverberating in the absence of response, revealed multitudes. She was both archetypal bear and her own unique personality. This wasn’t the dumb grunt of some pre-programmed, mechanical beast. Far from it. Her greeting, or rather her request for information, was a complex web of tones; intelligent, demanding and inquisitive, turning our dark communion into something more explicit.

LH: She stepped into a downdraft. Didn’t think about that. All of a sudden she can smell me, and she can smell the food. What did she mean with the snort?

RH: All kinds of things, hard to reduce to words. It was an expression of surprise, perhaps that we smell so funky and suddenly there’s delicious food just a few steps away. It was also a greeting, acknowledging our presence. It was an inquisitive sound too, asking who we are. She’s still in open attention mode, still keeping her head down and still not making eye contact.

LH: I don’t want to make a sound because that will telegraph I am far less powerful. I don’t want to make a move because that could trigger an unexpected response. I’ll remain still. A few more seconds and she’ll be on her way down the other side of the mountain.

The steady updraft that had accompanied us all afternoon was shunted downward by the cliff wall beside us. As she stepped into the flow she smelled everything all at once. Her deep, rich snort started off as one thing, became several more things, and then ended as something else again. First came a surprised greeting. Quickly it became, “Uggghhh, thaaat’s disgusting,” clearly a reaction to my offensive funk. The sound morphed into, “Oh what iiiiiiis that lovely smell?” I remembered my sandwiches, delicious and healthy even by human standards. She ended on a high note, a sound which in a human we would call inquisitive. “Who are you?” her twisty trombone of a question finally landed on.

The conversational signaling between my attention modes sped up, as time, already glacial, somehow slowed down still more. I had an instant to decide my response and this seemed all the time in the world. The stillness within and without somehow became even quieter. I reaffirmed my earlier decision not to use my voice. Though I felt sharp and responsive, my voice was thin and my body exhausted. Best to withhold this information.

RH: One yard past. Shit. She cut her pace and is slowly turning her head toward us. She’s concentrating her attention. She did not like our non-response, and now she’s considering whether to keep escalating. We feel it percolating in her like a question, her bearness gathering presence to express it. Her movement was very subtle, very graceful, very measured. She’s looking at the food to the left of us, challenging us for it, still avoiding eye contact but barely. “Are you bluffing? Will you defend your food? Is there anything stopping me from walking right up and taking it?” There is a shift in our ground, and our shared focus is on the food now as much as each other. We’re beginning to grapple for it in the ethereal space. Our body is telling her body that the food is ours.

She geared right down, not quite fully stopping. She extended her right paw outward and left it hanging, in that way I later learned that bears do when they haven’t decided which way to go. In the gathering silence her attention narrowed on the food, and she pulled my focus briskly along with hers. I had ignored her attempt to communicate with sound, but she wasn’t having it and immediately switched to body language. Hiding weakness is a sign of weakness, this wily predator knew. If I refused this second call she would continue to escalate. Her unanswered initiatives hung in the air, reverberating in silent echo: subtle as an old friend’s warning; graceful as a diplomat turning up the pressure; measured as a poker player unsure of her hand.

I felt my silence had offended her, which might sound anthropomorphic but which I would say is the opposite. In my sense and meaning, she would feel similarly if she acknowledged any creature holding food who remained still, as if not sure what to do, possibly frozen and easily bested. I still didn’t feel aggression in her, mostly inquisition. When you’re a grizzly bear sometimes you get a free meal just by asking. I could translate her bodily expression and my sense of her gathering bearness as: I asked you a question; yuck-smell stick-figure with the wonderful food.

LH: Yes, she’s demanding a response. I’ll match the escalation. With an embodied conveyance intended to be equally subtle, graceful and measured, I’ll sweep out my right foot half a step, putting the lower body into fighting stance. This puts me right behind the rock in the optimal defence position. I’ll drag her attention back to me as an obstacle she’ll have to go through. Avoiding eye contact, but also just barely. Bear spray is at the ready but is not raised or pointed at her – that’ll be the next escalation if she keeps turning her head or stops moving. The next split second could decide how this is going to go.

Momma insisted I declare: Fight? Or Flight? My body answered by mirroring her escalation, my right foot to her right paw. I would like to say my body acted on its own, but if it did there was still a moment when permittivity had to be granted. There was a microsecond validation check (wordless yet clear): Are we sure we want to commit? I drilled into myself and flooded her concentrated bearness with my humanness, pulling her attention back to me. I stood between her and what she wanted, and now it was her turn to declare.

Later I would reflect that I was right to conceal my vocal weakness. All she knew for sure was that I intended to stand my ground and wasn’t bluffing. I could translate my response to her body language as: I am in awe of this whole experience and I really don’t want to, but if you stop moving or if you look at me directly I’m going to raise this spray and point it at you, and then if you so much as twitch in my direction I’m going to let you have it in your hairy face. I mentally projected the secret weapon, drilling down focus on my right hand holding it, willing her to fathom I was three steps ahead of her.

RH: Two yards past. She liked the move. We earned her respect. She’s turning her head away and resuming her pace. She let out a loud sniff, not at all like the snort. I interpret it as a bunch of things including: You anticipate me [A smile]. I feel you [A connection]. It’s rude not to acknowledge a greeting [An admonishment]. OK then, I was just checking about the food [A shrug]. Also: Hurry along [my cub], you’re falling behind. This creature isn’t going to hurt you, nothing to be frightened of.

A flood of clarity as she released her focus. She was pleased. Her respect for me was validated. When she sniffed the sound was relaxed, unhurried, nonthreatening, communicative. She bid me farewell while telling her cub to step it up. I was not a threat, her sonorous tone made clear. She sniffed again as she passed out of sight more than ten yards away, heading down the steepest, stoniest part of the west face trail. Later I would reflect that she left me alone with her cub, and how confident of her intuition she must be. I like to think she experienced the encounter much as I did, as mutually respectful and resonant.

My attention modes kept flashing signals back and forth, though less hurried. The stretchiness of time began to release. Momma Bear’s second sniff to her cub reminded me I still hadn’t seen it. Then, as if flushed out of hiding by my sudden laser focus on where I knew it was, the cub bolted out, scurrying around me as far away as it could get, 75 feet perhaps. It just watched its mother give me a pass and it wanted nothing to do with me. I snapped a couple photos as it passed.

Look at that fat bear belly. Momma takes good care of her cub.

LH: It’s over. I’ll tie the other shoe and pack the bag. I want to get a quarter mile of scree below me before it gets dark, in case it decides to come back. This was a decent tactical spot for a brief encounter, but it’s steep, lacks withdrawal options, and is no place to camp.

RH: Momma and cub are heading toward a ridge. Moving fast. 75 yards.

LH: That doesn’t mean they won’t be back.

Time resumed as I released my grip. Echoes rolled in waves, flooding my mind like high tide on a sand castle. My ancestors and their nature gods were pleased. Bear sightings are common but this was something else: an intimate entanglement of formlessness, followed by a firm handshake with respect that had been tested. With tone and embodied language older than all of us, Momma created her share of the moment and demanded I participate. And then she smiled at me, audibly and harmonically. I stood thanking her silently and wholeheartedly, from the ringing depths of an unfathomable unknowing.

~~~

I resumed the climb, aching all over but refreshed and highly motivated. The stargazing I had come for promised to be otherworldly, and so it was. First came a sunset that seemed to hold still for hours, painting the last of the departing clouds with the most vibrant hues. Venus appeared and kissed the horizon goodnight then Jupiter and Saturn rose in the East, three heavenly bodies that will never know that for one brief cosmic moment they were named for long dead Roman gods. Stars from horizon to horizon, and the Milky Way lighting up the dome, was more than I could take in with my starry eyes. It was cold but manageable as I’d dressed for it. I didn’t take the optimal route up the scree I later learned, but that turned out to be a blessing because it gave me needed wind shelter.

The stone block tower under a perfect stargazing sky. I'll spend the night somewhere between here and there.

At first light I rose and carried on, close enough now that my muscles complained in vain. The stone block at the summit is said to be the steepest part of the mountain, but I think the beginning of the unmapped south face is steeper. Improbably, near the base of the tower I discovered a small weather station, with an unlocked door and sleeping bags.

It was mid morning when I found the shelter, and soon after I fell into the deepest four hour sleep I ever knew. Then I ate the most delicious sandwich I ever had, savouring it with the animal pleasure of one who defended it from a grizzly bear. I reflected that had I yielded, then my trip would have been over and my premature descent would have been hungry and miserable. The failure to summit yet again, likely my last ever chance, would have pained me ever after. As I prepared for the final push to the top, a starry inner glow lit my unseen face.

I made the summit and spent an hour there with a fellow hiker. From this peak you can see over all the others. Does it make sense to say that beauty is endless? The beauty was endless. On most days of the year it would be cold and windy up here, but on this day it was warm and pleasant. I signed my name in the summit book with a satisfied Not bad for an old guy.

Back down at the weather station I found an accessible snowpack and decided to stay another night. The crosswinds whipped fiercely at this spot, funneled by the adjacent peaks and valleys. I had hoped to spend the first night here, but fortunately it had gotten too dark to climb. Being outside here would have been brutal in the wind chill, and finding shelter I’d have missed all the stars.

While gathering snow I was treated to a search and rescue training operation. A gorgeous helicopter with growling easy power made a dozen or so brief landings in the crosswinds. After each glancing touchdown it took off, circled, and came back again. I assume it was training but the winds were so wild and unpredictable it might have been more precarious than it looked. I waved goodbye when the crew checked on me before leaving, delighted once again for an unexpected sighting of mountain denizens.

An hour from the trailhead, after stopping to chat a few times with hikers on their way up, the mountain gave me a parting gift. I came upon a massive, male black bear, bigger even than the grizzly. We were in a treed area with low visibility and I alerted it to my presence, tapping my ski poles on the stony path for bear awareness. As we locked eyes with mild surprise on both our parts, mine quickly hardened into daggers and my face began to grimace. Fantastical as it sounds, the grizzly essence was looking through my eyes, as if I would swat that four hundred pound bear like a horsefly. The bear felt it too. I’ve met black bears before and seen them run away, but I’ve never seen one bolt in a blaze of terror as fast as this one, the biggest I ever encountered. My original question upon seeing the grizzlies, wondering how fast bears can run uphill, was answered. The mountain’s parting gift was showing me in that brief encounter I was not the same person I was two days earlier, I was a made man of the mountain. As I’ve done many times since then, I considered my acquaintance with Momma in a new frame.

~~~

Had I never heard of Dr. McGilchrist and his hemisphere theory I expect the encounter would have gone much the same. I’m pretty sure I would still have experienced the dual focus, but lacking understanding I wouldn’t have paid attention to it. I would have missed a participatory master class on our embodied, holistic, divided attention modes.

Knowledge of the hemispheres enabled performance enhancement. Early on, when I was wondering how in the world was I going to climb faster when every step was agony, I realized I could tell my left hemisphere, detached from body sense and the flow of time, to take the lead. Later, during the moment when the encounter was most intense, I was bodily and intuitively aware that Momma Bear was sliding from open into narrow attention. I understood my aim was to halt the zooming in process, because that’s when things get unpredictable. Knowledge of the workings of both mine and the bear’s hemisphere modes deepened my sense of agency and, I am certain, increased my odds of a good outcome.

~~~

You may note a literary device where the RH speaks of “we” and the LH speaks only of an “I.” This is how the impressions came to me but as previously noted I am unable to conclude whether my open attention held the bifurcation in its capacity, or whether some third aspect held the dual focus. I can say that it felt like a third thing, perhaps the nervous system, or some deeper part of the brain, because it seemed like my open attention was being observed by something else, something even more aware. But this could also be a trick of perception, a means by which the RH is able to observe itself and its context.

However this trifurcated, concurrent awareness of my body sense, open focus and spotlight attention worked, I could add a word about just how perfectly natural it was. In spite of this encounter being so very extraordinary, it was also very much in tune with my humanness.

Another concept Dr. McGilchrist brings forth is the idea that relations precede the things that are related. Momma Bear demonstrated. By insisting I engage with her, our interaction heightened my felt sense of self, just as I perceived in her when she initiated the challenge. At the moment I felt her narrowing in on the sandwiches, I felt an intensifying thisness of her that collapsed our proximity. She showed me the part of her that has teeth, without committing to actually showing her teeth. Her feeling more bearness induced me to feel more humanness in response. I mirrored her gesture by showing the part of me that was prepared with foresight and a weapon, without committing to actually showing the weapon. She wasn’t surprised I held firm, she just wasn’t going to pass without taking a swing at the free lunch gambit. Our relationship called forth something essential from each other, because that’s what life does, and we both became more from the encounter.

I’ve often reflected how this experience was custom-made for me, and how similarly unique it would have been for anyone else. It’s easy to imagine various scenarios: one person too consumed by fear to reach out and feel what Momma was feeling; a seasoned park ranger doing a job; a modernist mind rejecting a priori the imaginal, intuitive, and sensing beyond, thereby having a diminished experience. There are more possible experiences than there are people. The point here is that my experience was created as much by what I brought to it as it was something that just ‘happened.’

~~~

In everyday circumstances the LH has no true sense of where its information comes from. There are times when the RH registers an awareness, but the LH will conclude that its verbalization of that awareness is the source, even though it comes a beat later, sometimes a few beats. For example, my LH thinks it defended the food from the bear when really what it did, it seems to me, was execute how to express the intent that already existed.

Long before I heard of Dr. McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory I experienced what I call ‘delayed cognition’ numerous times. During a particularly stressed time around 2017/2018, which involved a family member and about which I’ll say no more as it was resolved long ago, I began to notice a recurring phenomenon. I would have a flash of awareness of something, which could be internal or external, pleasant or unpleasant, intense or casual, and then moments later a verbalization of that experience would float like a ghost into my awareness. The verbalized delayed cognition seemed to think it was primary, and it had a way of eclipsing the original awareness. The uncanny ghost echo is rare now, but at its peak it occurred many times per day.

The morning before the climb, I read about a North American indigenous man who lived centuries ago named Kondiaronk³. Since then I discovered his story is known in learned circles but is virtually unknown in the popular imagination. Reading through the lens of the hemisphere theory, it seems the French aristocrats and intellectuals were at first knocked into their right hemispheres by the unexpected encounter with Kondiaronk’s clear-sighted wisdom. But, with time and gnawing discomfort at the logical conclusion that maybe Europeans were the unsophisticated ones, the subsequent reaction was to deny the difficult reality confronting them and return to the mental maps of their institutions. It was either that or admit to themselves and the world that someone who’d never heard of Aristotle, built an aqueduct, or prayed to a God described in books could have something to teach them about philosophy, social organization, and a sense of the sacred. Enlightenment intellectuals then deconstructed Kondiaronk’s ideas anyway, albeit stripped from their source and the context that gave rise to them, certain that their thoughts were their own. This pattern seems to describe a collective delayed cognition, a slippage into preference for mental constructs over perceptual experience. One difference between this and my own experience of delayed cognition is that I was always able to hold the perception and the echo in tension together. It seems plausible however that social pressures might force a collapse into either/or, which will then tend toward the simplified, verbalized, graspable echo.

Months afterward I happened upon a podcast⁴ about the roots of shamanism, a word that hadn’t crossed my mind until then. I realized with delight that that’s what I experienced, a shamanic union of being. I remembered how to be in such a situation and trusted to it, just as a bird who’s never seen a nest somehow still knows how to build one. Rituals were developed over millennia around bear encounters such as this. Once perhaps, in an adolescent coming of age tradition, I would have returned to my community in glorious triumph, wearing the bear’s skin as my own. On this day though it would have been far too easy to put a bullet in her head, hardly even sport. I took more pleasure from earning her respect without harming her.

Should I tell you that the working title for this story was My Grizzly Bear Teacher? Though it piggybacks on someone else’s idea⁵, it’s perfect in a way. Momma and I explored the values of respect, communication, and most importantly, trusting your deepest embodied intuitions. Pretty impressive for a hirsute professor of forests and quietude; it took the mountain’s emissary all of half a minute to wring home these eternal and enchanting lessons in a way I will never forget.

~~~

¹  Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things [Perspectiva Press, 2021]

² Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight,

³ David’s Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything [Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2021] (Interpretation and application of their account of Kondiaronk is my own. What I was thinking as I read it.)

⁴  John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Introduction, https://johnvervaeke.com/series/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/

⁵ My Octopus Teacher, https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81045007

^UNREFERENCED  An early reviewer wondered if these words of the poet Mary Oliver would make a fitting coda. Yes, thank you, and I couldn’t agree more.

Sometimes (Stanza #4), 2014.

Instructions for living a life:
   Pay attention.
   Be astonished.
   Tell about it.