Over the Past Year Pavi Meht

months and months of spending time with her, healing up her wound. Then she got back to health and started to teach in the programs again.
     Then a year and a half later, she started showing signs of being ill again. We took her to this fancy equine place where they have this huge X-ray machine for horses to walk in. We had her sit up and hold her hands up. She was a movie star, you see. So she knew all sorts of things. If I went like this [Steve uses hand gestures], she would sit up. If I go like this, she would stand up. Like this, and she would sit down and roll over. Like this, and she would wave. She was an amazing, beautiful being.
     We did an Earth Day celebration at the Concord Pavilion. It was a sold-out audience. Jane Goodall, David Brower and Baba Ram Dass were on the stage with Wavy Gravy, Chief Oren Lyons, the Onondaga Nations, and all these people. They had us come on with Susie Bear, the bald eagle and the wolf. At the end, I had this song by Cat Stevens, the one about merging with all of life, and I played it. Susie Bear stood up next to me, and we both waved to the audience.
     People were crying. It was a beautiful, beautiful program. She really knew how to play an audience. She loved an audience. And she loved camerawork. She would literally run out of the enclosure and sit where she was supposed to sit because she did it for so many years with all the lights. She would sit there right in front of the cameras. All the producers would look at me and say, “How did that bear know how to do that?” I said, “Training.” [Steve laughs] She was a star of Wilderness Family, Grizzly Adams and all sorts of different movies. 
     I have strangers come up to me and tell me that I let them meet Susie Bear and they still have the picture. They tell me how much she changed their life. Just allowing them to be close to an animal like that, to have an experience with a wonderful being like that shifted the way they see life, forever.
     So we had her in this X-ray machine and learned that the cancer was metastasizing and she didn’t have long to live. So I spent all day with her, and then the following weeks and weeks. Finally we made the decision that it was time to put her to sleep, because she looked like she was in pain and starting to suffer. I always ask the animal when it’s time. One night Michelle’s daughter [Michelle is the head animal caregiver at Wildlife Associates], who I believe was five or six years old, woke up Michelle in the middle of the night and said, “Susie said goodbye, Mom. Susie came to me and said goodbye.” And Michelle replied, “Susie’s not going anywhere.”
     “No, Susie said goodbye and she is leaving us tomorrow. She came to me and said goodbye.”
     And I had a dream that same night that Susie Bear was dying. It was like the dream I had with the coyote. I saw where it happened and how it happened. The next day, we came with the veterinarian and we gave Susie Bear a shot to relax her a bit. And I put the leash on her and she walked out and lay down. I was not telling her where to go. She led me to the exact same spot I had in this vision. [Steve is crying]
     With both of her paws, she grabbed my hand. She held onto it and looked me in the eyes and told me it was time to go. I tried to pull my hand away and she grabbed it, hard, and held it close to her. Then the doctor gave Susie Bear the shot, and she held on and looked me in the eyes until she left her body, and then her eyes closed. And she still held onto me for maybe twenty minutes, until it loosened up. I was so attached to her I didn’t know how to let her go at the time. That part of me tore away and went with her. I couldn’t talk about it for years and years. For months and months and months, I was a different person. Depressed. Something was missing; a hole was there.
     Then Angeles Arrien, the cultural anthropologist, educator and founder of Cross-Cultural Education and Research asked me to teach a class for her adult students on “being with the animals.” It was the first time I could talk about Susie Bear. Speaking of her, in terms of a teacher, and having her teach through me, became part of the healing process—being able to be, not the old Steve, but the Steve that evolved from that experience, so that I could move on. The animals were my primary focus. All of my love, all of my trust, all of my focus was on the animals. And the teaching is the way I express that to humanity.
     By being in front of the kids, imparting this knowledge and awareness, the consciousness, and the nurturing, I saw the kids understanding more.
     If kids don’t understand that these wild animals are living, breathing beings with awareness and consciousness, different from our own, but similar in many ways, that we share the earth with, how are they going to help each other?
     Humans come in many different clans, many different cultures, and people think, “If you don’t talk or think the way I do, then there is something wrong with you.” It’s such a basic thing that can be shifted from gaining the understanding that these animals are our relatives, genetically speaking; plants are our relatives, genetically speaking.
 
Teaching
My teaching became more focused on an intuitive approach. These are highly designed educational programs we bring to the schools. What makes them so different is that we form relationships with the audience, and that connection allows us to lead students on a journey through the interrelationships in all of life. These kids have a very powerful experience as they discover, explore and feel it. Teaching is a process of being silent and letting your inner being guide the instructional experience. This place inside that’s connected to the kids is what so effectively informs the learning process.
     There are all these studies going on about how animals sense the world around them. It’s almost like they make choices. All this stuff is going on; everything is alive. And here we are, in the middle of everything that’s alive. We rely on all those things around us, the biosphere, the Gaia, all this stuff keeping things going.
     What’s unusual with humans is we have the ability to have that conscious awareness of all that’s going on, and we have the ability to destroy it. So there’s this massive chasm, between being consciously aware of what’s going on and not being aware at all. It’s so easy to create stories in our head and to have any strange type of belief system. It’s so easy for this brain to do that, because the brain doesn’t understand. The brain tries to make sense of the world in any way it can.
     So I have been lucky enough to have teachers like Susie. Can a bear be a mentor? Yes. Can a bear be a teacher? Yes. Can a bear be the love of your life? Yes. Can it be the barometer of experience on this planet? Who knows? But she still resides in my heart.
     What are some of the lessons Susie passed on to me? Just to be who I am. That in my human relationships, I need to not expect anything, just to hook onto that internal experience of who a person is and communicate to that part of the person. When I was with Susie Bear, I wasn’t trying to be someone else, because if I was, I’d have been hurt. If I was ever fooling myself, she would do something to awaken me. The wolf would do something to awaken me.
     Last week I woke up. She was in my dream. I was talking to her in my dream and I talked so loud I woke myself up. I was literally talking out loud. I kept talking so I wouldn’t slip out of it, so I could remember the conversation. So we still have conversations in sleep. [a silent pause]
     I think she taught me how to be brave. It’s like when I teach these young women who come to us from the Juvenile Detention Center, or the foster kids from the emergency shelters, or the at-risk teens. Being brave is not walking in and saying, “This is what I am going to teach.” It’s a process. We have a theme for the day, and the process begins with sitting down with them and working with them as individuals, on an inner level, so the program moves the way it should move.
     It’s working with human processes, the process of awareness and understanding that’s in these kids. The whole point is to move them towards transformational experiences. You need to use your intuitive educational abilities to do this. You can’t do this unless you are as open and as vulnerable as you want them to be. What makes these programs different is that we go deep with them. Again, we’re not pushing them and prodding them, but orchestrating transformational experiences to occur. We bring them to the precipice, we bring them to the valley, to the place, and they walk across it.  They make the connection and do it themselves; that’s when learning happens; that’s when transformational experiences occur. I can’t do it for them, but I can lead them to it. They can watch me jump across the ravine, and they can do it too.
 
A Mission 
And yes, I tested Susie Bear’s love. Even at the time of her passing, after 13 years, I still did not believe it. I moved my hand away, and she grabbed it, pulled it back. So even then, I was thinking, our relationship can’t be that strong, loving me so much, she can’t be so conscious and aware that she is dying, she can’t be wanting to hold onto me until her last breath before leaving her body because I was so important to her. I pulled back, and said, “Oh my God,” and she pulled me into her embrace.
     She was a babe. A little hairy [Steve laughs]. This big bear with these tiny little eyes; it was so hard to read them. The hardest thing to do was to read Susie Bear, at first. Then I had to stop doing it the way I do with the other animals. With most animals, you can look in their eyes and you can tell who they are. I had to look more at her body, her head posture, her body posture and her movement. I had to yell at her at times. We had our arguments [laughs]. But she knew how to be gentle to strangers. She had a mission in this life. She had a mission.