The White Bear

Photo: (c) Creative Commons (modified)

I had few stuffed animals as a child. One was

a soft white bear. I loved him. He comforted.

He was given to me when I was in the hospital,

when people thought I was dying.

I outlived that bear.

~

It was a hot summer’s day, when I saw one at the zoo,

in a concrete cage with an algaed-concrete pool that

he paced the edges of, swinging his big head

back and forth as if he was saying “No” and

again, “No”, continuously, “No”, to his circumstances.

Our eyes never met. If they had, I don’t think

I could have found his soul in there.

I was a young girl then. I think his soul found mine,

and haunts me still. He paces at the edge of my dreams.

~

We are all built for something.

The white bear: mastery of the desolate, of

intimacy with place, of the interface of stark

beauty and harsh realities.

Me, a woman now: telling stories about the

silences that must be heard, by many.

~

I don’t know where our relationship is going,

the white bear and me. Increasingly, our lives are

about fragments:

Melting, fracturing ice flows and stories that don’t

fit together as well as they used to. Reconstruction

isn’t always possible. What happens when we

can no longer trek long, formidable landscapes

under paw or in the imagination?

Do we die?

~

I want to say “No!” to these circumstances.

We have to keep a place in this world for

things that find no comfort in our company,

but remind us that we long to know of them.

I want.

I want the white bear to outlive me.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

Presented at the Arctic Biodiversity Congress
Rovaniemi, Finland, Oct 2018

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