By Deanie LaChance
Above left: Forest Spirit mask Above right: Bear Mother mask
Can we, as humans, really know what it is to be a
Mother Bear or a Forest Spirit?
After reading Rita’s final blog posting about her
experience of telling ‘The Boy Who Lived with Bears’ in the Mother Bear mask
and the Forest Spirit mask, this is the question that comes to mind for me. And
her answer, of course, is a resounding “Yes”.
Rita describes how the experience “… obliterated the
cognitive function of my mind” and how she experienced “… a real tangible
presence, inside my body, of the spirit reality of nature” and that “… once I
accepted the power of the bear into me it swept over my body like a wave of
strength”. But how? How can a human, any
human, know what it is to be a creature other than herself? We are often taught
about empathy by being asked to walk a mile in another’s shoes; to see what
they see and to feel what they feel.
But can a human empathize with an animal or even more
obscure, a forest spirit?
I would like to draw on three schools of thought that believe that we
are all connected. First, the Hindu tradition of the Jewel Net of Indra in
which an infinite fishing net envelopes the world and, where each line of the
net is knotted, a jewel is placed such that it reflects back every other reflection
from every other jewel. In this way, everything we see and experience can be
seen and experienced by another.
Second, the Zen Buddhists in Japan talk about
“nothingness” in the sense that everything begins as an energetic formlessness
that takes form in the world then returns to formlessness at the end of its
time. Each and everything: people, bears and forests are created from this
formless “stuff” that then returns to the formless nothingness to be formed
again. In this way, we are all connected by being made from the same “stuff of
creation”.
And finally, Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective
unconscious” in which, beneath our unconscious, there exists a pool of
archetypes, pre-existent forms that can potentially be accessed by everyone and,
in this way, connects us all to each other.
Rita has spent decades relating to her characters through her use of
storytelling in mask. It seems to me at this telling, she was able to suspend
her intellectual filter and to access, for a prolonged length of time, her deep
self where we are all connected. She let fall away her ego-self, and let rise to
the surface “…overwhelming feelings of different forms of identity…”
If the connectedness of all things really means “all
things”, including a Mother Bear and a Forest Spirit, then I have no difficulty
understanding how an artist like Rita, after years of practice and discipline,
could experience the emergence of these archetypes from her collective
unconscious. I can understand that her form accessed the deep formlessness of
the creation of all things, and that she was able to reflect to herself and through
her art, the experiences of others.
And finally, I can understand that she experienced
them as reality and was able to integrate characteristics of them into herself
long after the telling was over.
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