Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25121
Put as much distance as possib between yourself and the bear. did everything I'd read that a person should do in the event of a bear encounter, but as the grizzly began following me, all my thoughts and strategies began to melt away into a kind of white heat. I still had the residue of a mind, enough to keep legs moving and my lungs filled with air, but for the first time in my life I was all body. Just a sack of blood and bones. A moveable feast. I knew that although black bears could climb trees, grizzlies couldn't. But Denali was tundra-it had no trees. There was nowhere to escape to, nowhere to hide. I was absolutely naked. With the grizzly on my tail, I spotted a dirt road in the distance. Turning at a degree angle away from the bear so as to maximize the separation between the two of us, I anxiously made my way toward the road. The grizzly followed me. My heart was beating so fast that it felt like it was about to burst. Though I only saw it indirectly-too - afraid to look at it face to face-that bear had more raw presence than my own soul. Lifting my feet felt like lifting manhole covers. Every step was gravid. When I finally reached the road, I discovered two cameramen and a jeep. The three of us jumped inside the vehicle just as the grizzly closed in. Something inside me snapped. Or was freed. I'm safe. Alive. As the bear watched us silently from a hillside, exhilaration and gratitude even a vague, objectless feeling of love-began to replace fear and trembling. In the Bible, God is sometimes referred to as a "devouring fire." Some kabbalists, or Jewish mystics, interpret this to mean that in order for the human soul to reach its highest level of development-in order for it to experience the ecstasy of mystical union-it must first be "swallowed" by God. Like a single flame vanishing into a raging inferno, the absorption of our finitude into the infinity of God can be terrifying. Yet despite the trauma that comes with it, the surrender of the human ego-the sacrifice of our very sense of self to a higher power-seems to be the prerequisite for real psychic transformation. I experienced that for myself in Denali. My next trip to Alaska, after a year as an ordained .... _ ..... ...,..--... rabbi, took me to Fairbanks. My destination was the Brooks Range, a beautiful wedge of mountains that cuts across the northern half of the state. It took me over ten hours just to drive to my trail's starting point: an active gold mining camp about a hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, on the outskirts of Nolan. As deafening as the dogs were when my friend Dave and I first loaded them into the truck back in Fairbanks, that's how still and silent they were by the time we reached the camp. Our journey began at sunrise, after a couple of hours of restless sleep inside the truck. The dogs were fresh, strong and excited. After thirty minutes of mushing we ran into our first challenge: overflow. Overflow occurs when, due to rising temperatures, water seeps up from a lake or river and settles between the ice and the top layer of snow. It --�:::::� .... II����;:,���'" 1201l!ll"��"".