Ursa Major and Ursa Minor

[asakiyume]

The plaque beside this painting says that it was created by students at Easthampton High School in 2019.

Nice job, students! Very evocative painting you've made.

The stars that were seen as bears in parts of Eurasia were also seen as bears among North American and Siberian peoples, and the brightest stars in the Great Bear have also been seen as a ladle (or dipper), a plough, a wagon, a rudder, a shrimp, and a crocodile, among other things. (These facts brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia.)

An earthly bear is gazing up at a spirit bear. The earthly bear made of fur flesh bones blood seems completely at ease near the spirit bear made of earth water sky, not abashed or frightened in the least. The spirit bear is looking up and away, maybe at the stars, but grows from the sunlit grass the earthly bear is sitting on. Maybe the earthly bear can teach the spirit bear something about daylight life that the spirit bear wouldn't otherwise know. Maybe the spirit bear is the earthly bear's dream.

Lots of possibilities. Meanwhile, close by, there's Corsello Butcheria--Italian Beef!--Every Day! and sunlight catching the ripple of the bricks.

Comments

[athenais]

Oh, it's such a great painting, I love it.

[asakiyume]

Me too! It's both clear and mysterious at the same time. Simple, but you want to keep looking.

[sovay]

An earthly bear is gazing up at a spirit bear. The earthly bear made of fur flesh bones blood seems completely at ease near the spirit bear made of earth water sky, not abashed or frightened in the least. The spirit bear is looking up and away, maybe at the stars, but grows from the sunlit grass the earthly bear is sitting on. Maybe the earthly bear can teach the spirit bear something about daylight life that the spirit bear wouldn't otherwise know. Maybe the spirit bear is the earthly bear's dream.

I love all of this, including how the river that stripes through the landscape of the earthly bear becomes the spirit bear's sky.

[asakiyume]

It's like the spirit bear mixes the pieces of our world in a new way.

[sovay]

It's like the spirit bear mixes the pieces of our world in a new way.

I think it is very appropriate to depict the spirit as a prism!

[asakiyume]

Yes--I love that phrasing!

[minoanmiss]

Thank you foor today's moment of beauty. :D

[asakiyume]

My pleasure!

[rebeccmeister]

The painting is lovely! Thank you for sharing it with us.

[asakiyume]

I'm happy that other people are getting a chance to see it! Easthampton has a lot of great outdoor art, if you ever happen to be biking or rowing by....

[light_of_summer]

Nice! Thanks for sharing the painting and your thoughts about it, and for pointing out the cool detail of the ripple in the bricks. 🙂

I wonder if the students who painted the artwork had a particular reason for including a waning crescent moon. Seems like it could have been intentionally symbolic of something, but it could also have been mainly decorative and to fill space, and waning rather than waxing just because our culture seems somewhat biased towards showing crescent moons with the horns "facing" to the right, without the artists necessarily knowing or thinking about what moon phase they're depicting.

The painting makes me think about the bears near Brooks River in Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska. Some years back, I watched them frequently via the webcams that explore.org runs during the parts of the year when there's enough local sunshine to power the cams.

The bears near Brooks River catch and eat lots of salmon, sometimes fight, sometimes mate, sometimes loaf around, sometimes play. Mother bears nurse and teach their cubs, and very occasionally adopt a cub that isn't theirs. Other creatures also show up on camera—lots of seagulls, some magpies, occasional bald eagles and moose, and very rare sightings of things like minks or foxes or wildcats or wolves.

It's not all comfortable watching—a bear eating a live salmon is something that I find a bit disconcerting, no matter how natural it is. And sometimes bears are badly injured, or even kill and eat each other. The people who staff the park don't interfere with natural processes, although they do sometimes intervene if a bear has been injured by human acts or artifacts—there have been a couple of bears who got trapline nooses stuck around their necks, and the humans trank-darted those bears and removed the human-made nooses.

On balance, I'm glad to have watched a good slice of Brooks River bear life. I still check the livecams occasionally, although I'm (mostly successfully!) trying to keep my video watching lower than it was during the months when I watched the bears frequently. 😏

Spirit bears seem like they'd be on a whole 'nother level. The closest I get to them is having read or heard some Gary Snyder poems about bears...

[asakiyume]

I love the second and third poems! (The first one I must read sitting down, but those last two I devoured standing up--I will sit down for the first later.) I knew the story of the woman who marries a bear (in the second poem), but I loved it in a new way in that poem, loved the alternation of narration and address, loved the humor of the end. And the third was a great companion for the second--a bear mother instead of a bear father.

I have never watched an animal webcam for long enough to see the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw-type moments you mention; it must be hard. But it must be wonderful to see the bears just playing and living, and all the other creatures who come along too.

[light_of_summer]

I'm glad you enjoyed a couple of the the bear poems! I like quite a bit of Snyder's work, both his poetry and his essays. He has a pretty nice singing voice, too—sometimes he sings part of a poem...I heard him do that live, once, and have also heard some recordings of him reading his poems either alone or in collaboration with musicians.

Quite a bit of bear playing seems to be play-fighting, but bear 602 (unofficially nicknamed "Floatato") can also have a good time by himself—here are two or three minutes of him lounging around luxuriously in Brooks River, no doubt having already eaten plenty of salmon for one sitting: https://youtu.be/Zr5NPAreJDE?si=sTjT7PY2_n2GgpTp

[asakiyume]

I liked that the video title called attention to his cute feet, because they sure are cute! So compact and small to support such a big guy! And yeah, he really does seem to be blissing out--while meanwhile in the section of river behind, the fish are JUMPING. Are those all salmon?

[light_of_summer]

I think Brooks River gets both salmon and trout, so I'm not sure which you saw jumping in that video. The salmon definitely jump at Brooks Falls, which is not very tall—the stereotypical Katmai photo shot is of a bear standing on the lip of the falls, about to catch a leaping salmon in his or her mouth.

This year, the salmon run was particularly plentiful. Here's a video clip of lots of salmon attempting to jump the falls, or waiting their turns to try. It's likely that several bears had already caught a bellyful of salmon on the day that this video was captured, and they were off napping and digesting, or you'd see more bears in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM_sydH47WA

Here's another short video clip, showing one bear successfully catching a salmon from the lip of the falls, at a time when when fewer salmon were jumping, while the next bear over has less luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xotz1OLKihE

I believe the bears mostly ignore trout, because they don't provide enough calories to justify the effort involved in catching and eating them.

[asakiyume]

Both those were great. Salmon are so determined, and sometimes that determination lands them ... in a waiting bear's mouth. Life, man!

[light_of_summer]

Indeed!

[f0rrest]

The earth bear is bearthromorphizing the stars, maybe. I also like how the spirit bear seems to be like made of the earth stuff or something, suggesting some sort of inextricable link between known and unknown, the spirit world and the quote-unquote "real" world, as if one cannot exist without the other or something.

[asakiyume]

Bearthromorphizing--I like that. Also, yeah, I 100 percent love the suggestion of an inextricable link between known and unknown. Like the phrase "feet of clay," but if we meant something **good** by that.

As if one cannot exist without the other or something. yeah: I think they *are* inextricably linked.