Thoughts from Dr. Joe: Bear sighting can be an exciting experience

What’s been happening in La Cañada lately? Ursa Major is deluging our sensibilities here, in La Crescenta, Montrose, Glendale and beyond; everywhere you go people are talking and reading about this natural phenomenon. It’s as though there’s nothing else to discuss. No, I’m not talking about the constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere that points to Polaris, the North Star. I’m referring to the four-legged type. In Latin, Ursa Major means “greater she-bear.”

For crying out loud, from the amount of conversation around here you’d think it was ET, trying to find his way home.

Does the bear not captivate us? It’s symbolic of untold fictional characters in literature, film and television, animation, and comics. From Rudyard Kipling’s Baloo to Winnie-the-Pooh, the bear is a key figure throughout our literary and evolutionary history.

We are drawn to those aspects of life that are both exciting and terrifying. Bear folklore is widespread; subsequently, as far back as 50,000 years, this awesome beast was one of the first animals revered by our ancestors. Traditionally, the bear was seen as lord of the animals, a god, and even the ancestor of humans.

The Celts venerated the bear goddess because, like a mother bear, she was a fiercely protective influence. Viking warriors invoked the bear spirit to imbue them with superhuman strength and fury. In Greek myth, the constellations the Big Dipper and Little Dipper were originally humans turned into bears and hurled into the sky by Zeus. In Native American folklore, the bear is central to their spirituality. It’s the keeper of dreams and the keeper of medicine.

My thoughts are not an attempt to give you the do’s and don’ts of what to do in case of a bear sighting. (However, don’t do anything stupid!) Instead, they are to remind you of the magnificence of the bears of North America. In our inability to understand bears, we have given them names that seemingly mock their divine stature. Instead, we revert to benign references that demean their true essence. Boo Boo, Paddington, and Bobo; none of these names hardly describe the bear as one of the most powerful and potentially fierce creatures on earth.

As a high school student, I happened upon a documentary about Frank and John Craighead’s work studying the grizzly bear of North America. Their message was varied yet inspirational. I learned that adventure is not only outside us but also inside us. Their work taught deference to the natural order, which is the essence of Native American spirituality. It was a simplistic perspective.

For the next three decades, I followed the Craighead brothers’ work and was inspired to seek my own wilderness adventures and sojourn among the mythological and gargantuan creatures of North America. This inclination culminated in a solo backing adventure in Alaska communing among the grizzly bears on the frozen tundra. I was both exhilarated and terrified.

If you are fortunate enough to have a bear sighting, revel in it. You are touching ancestral gods, magnificent creatures who are similar to us and are the epitome of evolutionary adaptation. More than 50,000 years before us, the Ancients told us that the bear is our ancestor. Maybe they’re right.

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JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.