" A time will come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands." That prophecy of the ice melting and dissolving is from Seneca over 2000 years ago. How could he have known? The mad scramble now underway for oil and other resources at the top of the world and its impact on the polar bear will determine how we as a species survive the XXI century. Marie and I and Lysander, our not quite four year old have been to the great mystic silence above the Arctic circle. We have seen seen titanic floes of ice splitting off as miniature continents and recombining like the language of a secret pact with existence. But Thule, the great kingdom of ice in the Hyperborean north, may lose its ice within a few years and with it the great monarch of the snows. For the Inuit have a special relationship with the ice. Indeed the word Sila, means both consciousness and weather! To the Inuit the polar bear was an allied spirit whose soul was a way to commune with the divine in self induced trances. Spirits such as those embodied by the polar bear were helpers on those journeys to the moon and beneath the water; the polar bear assisted shamans on their ecstatic rites of " flying". As opposed to the greed and arrogance of European explorers who killed the "other" for trophies, the Inuit, as all native people understood their totems, the polar bear, the walrus, the caribou and the whale are extensions of their psyches. We can only hope and pray the cannibalizing ways of industrial society will change in time to salvage what remains of the snows at the top of the world. We can only pray and try to ensure that the great white bear will endure the XXI century and beyond.
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