The Return of Thunder

Meditation on All Things Wild

"It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not." — Thich Nhat Hanh

Piney Creek, Wyoming a few years back

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

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Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

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Waning Sininen Kuu (Blue Moon) - Spring 2026

On the night of the full Blue Moon I dream of family, a tribe, of black bears. They are all sizes and shapes, some with long snouts, some with a white stripes near their eyes.

The dream comes after the small male bear, a yearling, hops to the railing on the deck outside the bedroom doors, knocking over the Happy Buddha who sits at the corner. The whump wakes me.

Yuki gets up and gives a short series of barks, then whines excitedly. She wants to go see the bear. I rise and push her back from the door, then step out. I worry that she wants to play instead of protect. The bear clings to the ponderosa just off the deck.

“Go!” I say, clapping my hands and he stares.

“Go!” I say again, pounding the rail just six feet from the treed bear.

Finally, he scrambles down and runs off into the forest. I love the bears but I am wary of the destruction one might cause were she to get into the house. Already a bear has torn down some wire fencing that circles the wood storage area.

Still the bear returns.

Each night since the full blue moon, bear climbs the deck. Greg and I now are careful to brush away any of the day’s leftover sunflower seed and Greg has been busy bagging up any extra seed in the yard. Still, last night the bear walked up the steps and opened the gate to the deck not once but twice. Each time, Yuki jumped from bed, whining, like there was a dog outside and she wanted to play.

I’ve counted as many as four bears at a time in our yard this year. I’m blaming it on the new game cam that makes it feel as if we’re flush with bears, but who knows? It is remarkable to know they are moving around nearby while I sleep. I imagine them circling my dreams. And they do.

Into these days, thunder arrives. Not the teasing thunder that sometimes happens with snow in February but the thunder of summer. Thunder that is long and rolling, filling the air. It comes before a short and hard rain, on the day after the bear dream and after the night of the bear knocking the Buddha from the deck. Thunder is a presence, rippling across the wide bowl of a mountain valley, as if carving the landscape with its voice.

The next day, I walk Yuki and we find more bear scat on one of our favorite paths. I am thinking about bear and thunder as the sky darkens, bruising the skyline to the east.

This past weekend I heard several Bear origin stories from a Finnish Folk witch. In one, Bear is born of the moon beside the sun on the shoulders of Otava, Ursa Major, which is said to be his cradle. In another, fire flashes in the sky and Bear is shaped by this moment of air and fire. In that tradition, the bear’s name cannot be spoken at certain times of the year because to do so is the call Karhu to you. Unlike others in the workshop, I am not afraid of bears. I do not worry about finding them in the woods or them finding me.

I have neither in my life been afraid of lightning. I once drew lightning with charcoal on the soft inner side of a rabbit skin as a promise that I would not be afraid, that I would refuse fear and terror. I was thinking of my fear of the dark at the time, but there are always other fears, other terrors.

I had just put the rabbit skin on the wall one early spring with the return of lightning, when my cabin burned down and I lost half a lifetime of things, including much of my writing.

Lightning is featured in The Tower, a tarot card of the unseating of structures. In a moment of prescience, the card appeared in a reading just before the cabin fire. But I have come to see the destruction of my house not as loss, but as symbolic for the necessary destruction of the way I had been living—as if I could do it all alone. Fire revealed to me the lie of that deeply held truth and I at last understood the necessity of connection and community.

While lightning is a symbol of shock and dramatic change, it also carries an erotic charge. I once heard a story about lighting as the visible union of sky and earth, a sexual union that heals the earth wherever the lightning touches. Sexual intercourse is, of course, electric and both creative and destructive. We make love but while doing so efface our illusion of separateness.

Thunder, the sound made when ions and atoms crash back together, returns as I write this; I open the window to listen to the sizzle and crackle of its voice. A simultaneous flash and crack splits the sky. A booming follows.

On the mountain, summer is circling like bear, like thunder. I see it in clouds of chickweed—field mouse’s ear—beneath a newly greened aspen grove. In the emergence of bright gold orange wallflower and yellow golden banner. In the garden, the wild rose tips race to open. I pull dandelions and wild strawberry that threaten to choke columbine and pansies in the aspen garden and think about the two-edged sword of growth: something must die away for something else to be born.

I am mulling over the connection between thunder and bear, listening to the storm when I hear a sizzle and my computer screen goes dark. I spend two hopeless hours on recovery and switch to my phone to finish this Substack on time. The answer to the question I still do not know is in the audible zht-zht of the computer’s demise.

Later in the night, a bear opens the door to my car, leaving a singe and perfect print between the seats.

Something is stalking me. Sometimes a new way of being—even one that serves us, even one that changes our lives for the better—feels exactly like the mystery of bear returning in the night or the sudden crack of lightning.

Instead of freezing, I breathe. I’ve always said it’s our resistance that kills us. What will come will come. The only thing I can change is how I welcome it.

I make a little offering for this moment of mystery, for the thing I cannot yet see.

I will not afraid.

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Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

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Writing Wild: Writing the Language of the Land

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