Here is chapter one of The Bears A book for America,
enjoy,
Chapter 1
“Grandpa, tell me the story of the bears again, please.” The little girl turned over in her small bed and looked directly at me with her strange animal like gaze. Her eyes were very big very dark and round and she made small growling noises under and behind her breath. “I am not sleepy at all and I won’t go to sleep unless you tell me our story again.” I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her, and then I looked more deeply as I usually do. She was beautiful in her own way, my grand daughter, with her big dark eyes, her nose open, her dark complexion, darker than either of her parents, and more than that her unbridled open bear spirit. I had seen that the moment they showed her to me after her birth. When I looked at her I did not see a newborn baby, I saw a newborn bear and then an older bear, and then a huge female bear, standing on her toes, looking at me and…
“Ok my beautiful little growling bear girl, I will tell you the story of the bear again. You know my little one, it is actually your own special story, the story of how you came to be, the story of your life. as I told my my sweet, you don’t have to understand it or figure it out, you need only to listen, and when you listen, you close your eyes and you dream and see the story in your imagination and you can even fall asleep and see it in your dreams. So , my precious one, here we go… “
“It was the beginning before time and space even existed. There was nothing at all, but the nothing was something and the something nothing.” “Stop grandpa, why do you always start the my story like that with the nothing? I don’t like that, I like something grandpa, not nothing.” “I know my little pumpkin, but that is just the way it starts you know, it always starts like that. But don’t worry my beauty, for you the nothing is something you love. The nothing is the place you go when you growl. When you close your round big eyes and growl, are are the nothing, so you see, it’s not something to be afraid of, it’s something you already know and remember.
After the nothing, the place inside the growl that came before the growl, became the two, sky and earth. You see my granddaughter, when you look up with your little bear eyes you see the sky and when you walk with your paws on the ground you feel the earth. But the earth was lonely, so the sky and earth made love and gave birth together to the spirits and then to the animals and then only much later to the people like us. One spirit was the first, Great Spirit and he needed a wife. So. He looked around at all the animals, at all the people, at all the plants and saw you. He saw bear. She was beautiful beyond his dreams, beyond his spirit imagination, far beyond anything he had ever dreamed.
Great Spirit took this bear for his wife, she was a bear woman like you are and like you will be when you grow up and become a woman, my little love. And she turned into a woman then, but still was a bear so she was a bear woman woman bear turning changing one minute a beautiful woman one minute a strong bear and she could change so fast that a person looking at there could not tell if she were a bear or a woman, and in fact she was neither, she was a bear woman.
And she make love with Great Spirit and gave birth to all the bear people, all the bear clan families, all the bears and all the clan. She was your grandmother from the beginning before there were people and before there were bears my baby.”
But now, she was asleep, her round eyes were closed, her breathing was slow and deep, and her growls slowly turned to songs of love and looking at her, he could see her vibrating back and forth between little girl and baby bear so fast that he knew who she was, what she was to do and honored her deeply and gave thanks to his ancestors, spirit animals, guides, elders, and to his bear clan grandmothers and grandfather of the four directions, and to Great Spirit and Mother Earth.
