I bookmarked it.

Has nowt to do with spiritual. And just call it food rather than the silly ephemeral term “energy”.

“these souls met fed off each”

Yeah, presupposing something not in evidence. There’s pheromones. There’s also the possibility that neither “fed off the other”. Bears HAVE been known to kill people. They’re wild. Duh.

How can you mock something that doesn’t exist? What’s being mocked is the idea of such a ridiculous thing and how dumb it is to do so.

When you complain about ISIS’s abhorrent actions, are you “God hating”? It’s their god who they say told them to do all this, so if you hate that, you hate god.

Perhaps from all these ruminations, we learn more about humans—our fears, idealism, and dreads–than we do about the Grizzlies. Last night I watched the film for the first time. What struck me most was that Timothy, for all his manic antics, had not provoked the Grizzlies for 13 summers. I conclude as many of you did, that they were well fed. I know from wildlife rescue that the basic animal instincts and reactivity– fight, flight or fright– are always there, but the tummy is full and no threats are apparent, animals appear to “rise above” (or to the side at least), from those basic instincts. Depending on the nature of the (well fed and unthreatened) animal, there can then emerge what certainly looks like affection, play, and yes, even a bond.

Posthumously, I want to show Tim enough respect to acknowledge that—despite his beliefs about the “bond”– he certainly was intellectually clear MANY TIMES that he knew full well how dangerous the Grizzlies were. I am guessing it was his manic nature that caused him, despite this awareness, to walk that line of great risk and to invite his girlfriend to do the same.

But either way, for me the fascination is the degree to which our sense of reality hinges so much on whether it was a “friend” bear or a “rogue” bear that killed Timothy Treadwell. This goes beyond all that stuff about how one theory causes people to act inappropriately with wild animals, and the other, less so. The real story is about us with other humans. Because when we read about someone’s untimely death, we can’t help but identify. Do we want to identify with Timothy as betrayed by a friend or murdered by a crazy stranger? A stranger that would have killed anyone? If the latter, it’s not personal. You’re just as dead of course but it wasn’t personal. If the former, it WAS personal. Maybe we flee quickly to the avalanche of uncharitable judgments (how stupid! How arrogant! How horrible to not protect his girlfriend!) as a solid and convincing distraction from our own deep fears or recollections of friendship betrayed. We want to think we won’t be as stupid with our next friend as we were with the last one. Somehow, loudly yelling “stupid!” at someone else helps us pretend this will be the case, because we are projectile vomiting this very shortcoming out of ourselves and onto him. Whew.

Personally, I wasn’t inclined to write or yell “stupid” in relation to Timothy Treadwell. Because again, I’m learning more about us humans from all this than from either Timothy or his beloved Grizzlies. But I did notice a lifting of my mood when I read the entry in which someone recounted the EVIDENCE provided by the rangers regarding Bear #141.

A rogue. A hungry, desperate, impersonal rogue. Not a friend. At least, I told myself again, it wasn’t a friend.

Otherwise it looks like you die if you mock god and die if you don’t mock god. Exactly what you’d expect if there was no god.