What I learned about bears at the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota

Bears have soft, considerate mouths, softer than horses. Bears like eye contact. They have beautiful, expressive eyes. Just don't look at them with anger or meanness in your own eyes. Bears are affectionate. Bears will attack a human for only two reasons. One: if they feel cornered. Two: If they're hungry and you're trying to keep food away from them. Like sea otters, bears will use part of their bodies as a table for food. Lucky, the young black bear, used the back of his forearm to support the grapes he delicately picked at with his other paw/claw, then savored them with what looked like a bearish grin.

I also learned that those commonly portrayed images of ferocious, roaring bears are phonies. They're either doctored on a computer, or they're snapped when a bear has been enticed to stand on its hind legs and open its mouth with food being dangled at the end of a long pole out of camera vision. The fact is, according to Donna Rogers at the Center, bears never naturally make that facial gesture in the wild. It's all a dramatic human concoction.

Why do you suppose we do that to animals? To sell magazines to outdoorsmen and hunters, certainly. But how does that explain National Geographic, whose editors know better, using a "ferocious" bear on a recent cover? Well, I guess to sell magazines, too. It was restorative to spend close to three hours last week with the bears. I was keenly aware of how far their world, even at the Center, was from our own.

We live in a whirlwind of schedules and deadlines, of rushing about. In this culture, we hurry. That's the single word mantra we often run to—hurry hurry hurry. The poet Theodore Roethke expressed it so memorably in his lines, "I run, I run to the whistle of money/Money Money Money/Water water water/How cool the grass is…"

Our hurry is the antithesis of contemplation, reflection, self-awareness, meditation—and yes, the inner life of bears. Back in California now, I miss the bears. But soon I'll be spending three hours with three different fourth and fifth grade classes in Fairfax, and I know I'll meet among them the uninhibited, dancing energy of Roethke's bears. Before that, though, I must work diligently to inhabit my own primal, shaggy body shambling through the wild, big-breathing brush and woods of my untethered, on-this-blessed-earth plane of existence.