Encountering the most profound belonging

Twelve days ago we left Vancouver for a couple of weeks of guided travel in the central coast of British Columbia. This is the region of the coast that is north of Vancouver Island and south of Kitimat. Specifically we were visiting the homelands of the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at and Kitasoo/Xai xais Nations. For decades these Nations (along with others) have worked to protect this coast from harmful logging, hunting, and fishing practices. As long as I have lived in BC the campaign and the work to protect what is now known as the Great Bear Rainforest has been ongoing. The land and sea In this region is the largest tract of temperate rainforest in the world. When you read the history of the place you encounter a story of collaboration, advocacy and recognition that is profound in its implications for how Canada can be. And when you visit the place, you can be touched by the profound impact that such places have in reminding us of our place in the world.

We were chartering with a guiding company called Mothership Adventures, started by my old friends the Campbell family 20 years ago. They own the Columbia III, a beautiful custom built mission ship. You should read Ross’s blog to get a sense of the incredible care and affection they have for the Columbia III, and for some of the stories about what it takes to keep the ship in order. Mothership provides a crew of a captain, a cook, two guides and ten guests, all of us connected to one another through work, life, or kids. This is our second trip with them and these crew are like family to each other and to us. They are incredible human beings, and we bonded together very quickly, as you do with 14 good people on a small ship together.

W spent 10 days of travelling essentially around Princess Royal Island, poking in and out of coastal fjords, salmon streams, and out to the west coast of Campania Island and its white sand beaches. We spent several hours a day gently paddling pristine waters, with exceptionally great weather, including the two days of Pineapple Express rain which we enjoyed from protected bays around Milbanke Sound. We saw grizzly bears in Khutze Inlet, dozens of humpback whales and Dall’s porpoises and we spent a half an hour in Wright Sound surrounded by 15 fin whales who were surfacing all around us. This trip was full of life changing experiences.

The most profound one happened last Tuesday. We spent a day on a bear platform sitting mostly in silence with Marvin Robinson, a Gitga’at guide who stewards his hereditary chief’s territory on Grebbell Island along a salmon stream. We sat and watch pinks running up the stream, dippers fishing for their food and were rewarded with a profound encounter with the spirit bear pictured above, Tlaiya, named for the red stripe along his back. This bear, fixated on the salmon at his feet wandered up the creek slowly, sniffing the air, loping at one point about 4 meters away from me. He had a calm demeanour, a slow cadence and a wary awareness of our presence. We stood silently on the riverbank watching, barely breathing, overwhelmed with the encounter. As the bear approached, I was flooded with feelings of humility, profound gratitude, of a deep awareness of my small nature as a creature on a planet with myriad other creatures, just being here.

The bear walked on, up the stream and around the corner, half-heartedly swiping at salmon, sniffing the air. After a period of deep silence, tears and floods of emotions, even from Marvin himself who loves these bears like no one else, we decided to stay in the forest for another hour or so. During that time five wolves appeared on the river and walked down towards us through the water, eating salmon heads (they avoid the bodies becasue of parasites). Even Marvin stood riveted filming on his phone. We watched them circle around behind us, and Marvin checked his watch and said he had to leave, inviting us to stay longer if we wished. Then he made a series of howls, and the wolves all through the little river valley starting howling. We were completely wrapped in sound, the plaintive rises and falls of the wolves sharing the story of their territory at that moment. And as that chorus was happening, a mother black bear and her cub walked up the stream, also pawing at the pinks.

It seemed impossible to leave. None of us could believe what we had experienced. When you sit in silence for hours in the forest, you become part of the place, you become absorbed in it. You become slowly aware of your place in the scheme of things. And when the animals especially get a sense of where you are, they flow around you. The FEELING of that, especially around these large animals, is so deeply profound that it feels like it comes from a deep part of our human essence, the part that never transcended our identity as animals, as parts of the world instead of something that lifts itself up and out of its surroundings as if we could somehow exercise a dominion over the uiniverse of which we are a flimsily dependant part.

Belonging is not a choice one makes. It is a status granted upon you by the people and places and creatures that you share the planet with. Even though I live in a beautiful place, surrounded by forest and sea, I am rarely aware of this feeling. It takes silence, stillness and a lowering of the mental, physical and spiritual rpms to find this feeling of openness which, if the environment consents, leads to belonging, becasue you become a part of something, of everything.

This morning I walked to Tell Your Friends, my local coffee shop to write and reflect in the late summer sunlight. I wanted to capture that feeling that was seeded in me last week in the Great Bear Rainforest so I first sat by the lagoon, watching some chickadees flit in the alder trees, watching the crows pulling mussels from the rocks and a flock of short-bill gulls resting on the tidal flats. Nothing profound, no spirit bear or whales or charismatic mega-flora. But that feeling. It’s there. To sit and rest and be remembered by the land that chooses you because you have decided not to move over it so quickly. That you have sat and opened your eyes to see what is always there and have the world reveal itself to you as kin, not as performance. You are related. You belong to everything. Human life, so abstract and far above the rhythms of the tide and sunlight and season and epoch, fall away. Rather than observing and processing, you become observed and processed by everything.

I know this. We all know this. But I think most of the humans I know, including, and maybe especially, me, need to remember this, in the animal bodies that we have, in the landscapes that sustain us, on a planet which produces life in a myriad of uncounted forms, playfully exploring how a universe might populate itlself with creatures and plants that reproduce themselves from within, and fill every available niche life can find.