THE OCHRE PAPERS is a space for readers to go deeper into the themes I explore here. As you read, questions may rise—curiosities, challenges, or echoes of your own experience. This column is where you can bring them. Think of it as a gathering place for deeper inquiry and dialogue. You can ask me anything, and I’ll choose some of your questions to explore publicly in these pages. Your questions have already been funny, moving, unexpected, and profound.

In my responses, I’ll draw on what I know and love: ancient knowledge, myth and story, symbolism, archetypal patterns, spirituality, and the teachings that have been gifted me and I can gift on.

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Hello, friends.

Some months ago I received an incredibly tender and pertinent question from a reader. I have been sitting with it for some time now, mulling it over as it is of a nature I’ve no doubt many readers here will find kinship with, as I have.

This Sunday, I’m sharing my response as the fourth instalment of The Ochre Papers.

Thank you for reading along, and especially, to those of you who have entrusted me with such weighty, thoughtful, and universally relevant questions. The deepest inquiries are rarely ours alone, but belong to something larger that we are all trying to understand.

THE OCHRE PAPERS ISSUE #4

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Hi Anna,

Thank you for putting such a tender thing into words. I’m really touched by the depth of your question, your trust, and also the universal nature of it.

First of all, what a lovely address. Though I’m not sure I can live up to that hefty title, it invokes the scent of damp limestone caves and an elemental presence old as bees, and makes me want to answer your question with a story.

If you, or any readers here, are not so familiar with myth, stories can prove to be great companions in times of distress and disorientation. They can help give meaning to our most tender feelings, and situate them in a greater field of human experience that can help us to not feel so alone. Stories can remind us that our private aches are, often, very old ones, and have been wrestled with countless times before us.

Folklorists have documented versions of the Bear Husband tale across Siberia, northern Europe, and the Indigenous cultures of North America. And this is the story that comes to mind when I hear that old yearning to be seen and heard in one’s true shape.

One version tells of a young woman who wandered too far into the forest. One day, while berry-picking in the forest, she mocked the bears, dismissing the warnings of her elders that bears were not merely animals, but beings with customs, kinships, and ways of seeing of their own.

As she neared an unripe shrub, a handsome young stranger appeared from behind it and offered to lead her to richer berry grounds. She followed him deeper into the forest. Only gradually did she realise that the stranger was a bear. Unable to find her way out of the forest, she lived with him in his cave. At first she longed desperately for home. Yet over time, she came to know the ways of the bears, learning their language, their foraging skills, and their strange intimacies with the seasons.

She came to love the bear, and they had a child together.

When she returned to the human village with her human cub to share her news, she returned changed. She couldn’t remember the language of her village. And her family did not speak bear.

***

I wonder, Anna, whether part of your loneliness is the loneliness of someone who has wandered a little way into the forest of the soul. And when you return, carrying the language of that forest, you find that the people you love don’t always know how to meet you there.

The ache you are describing sounds like the ache of loving people who do not always speak the language of the places where we feel most alive.

What I hear underneath your question is not simply a longing to be agreed with, or even fully understood, it sounds more like a longing for aliveness, connection, and being witnessed in more wholeness.

To struggle to bring the most alive parts of us into relationship is profoundly painful. When we’re set alight by a dream, an idea, a myth, a philosophy, or a way of seeing, we naturally long to turn towards those we love and share the warmth of the fire.

Perhaps one of life’s conditions is learning that no one person can meet us in every chamber of the soul. Particularly for sensitive or imaginative people, there can sometimes be an unspoken hope that the beloved will also become our intellectual companion, spiritual witness, artistic mirror, best friend, fellow initiate, and translator of every hidden language we carry inside ourselves. Yet perhaps this is asking one relationship to hold what once belonged to an entire village.

It may be worth reflecting on who in your life already speaks the language of the forest, and who perhaps does not, but loves you enough to listen? And who, though unfamiliar with its strange sounds, wishes to learn?

Perhaps part of the work is learning who we can speak bear with fluently, who we must translate for, and who may never really enter the forest at all.

There is a sadness in this, certainly, but it may also come with some relief, for perhaps the task is not finding one person who understands every language we carry (and sharing our berry harvest with every person we love), but instead slowly gathering the companions who know different regions of our inner map.

I wonder how many others reading this have had a dream, or an idea, and tried to share it with a loved one, and though it stirred in you the brightness of the cosmos, it seemed to land on deaf ears; and instead of roaring fires equal to the passion in your heart, there’s a flatness?

The loneliness that follows can be devastating, especially if we haven’t yet dressed ourselves in our habitual armour, and it’s heaped in a pile somewhere alongside the accumulated memories of similar disappointments that would usually stop us from speaking of such things at all.

Every time the soul speaks and is not heard, it seems to retreat a little more into the forest. When this happens enough times, something in us begins to harden, and we stop bringing our strange treasures to the village square. We become careful and protective; distrustful, even.

Armour can clothe the psyche in cynicism and jadedness; it saturates to the point of boredom. We begin to move through the world with swords for tongues and shields for hearts and wonder why our relationships feel like a battlefield.

When it hurts, we harden. And eventually, we can begin to feel we belong neither to the village, nor the forest.

There is something psychologically tender here that I think is worth naming. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott believed that when the deeper, more alive parts of ourselves are not sufficiently received or mirrored, we slowly begin to hide them. We adapt, and a false self emerges. This self knows how to function, perform, stay agreeable, and avoid disappointment; while all the while, the truer self, that strange and shining one that speaks bear and knows the deeper riches of the forest, retreats further into the woods.

This is perhaps why the inability to express our bear language, alongside the way it can fall on deaf ears when we do manage to get it out, hurts so much. Because what aches is that something profoundly alive in us has arrived at the threshold of right-relationship, and found no home there.

I wonder whether what you are grieving, Anna, is not simply conversation itself, but the longing to feel met in the places where you feel most alive.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote beautifully about the human longing not merely to be loved, but to be truly met. He believed there are relationships in which we encounter one another as whole beings rather than fragments. Instead of seeing the other as a collection of roles, functions, or projections, we can perceive them (and they us) in something closer to genuine presence. He described this as the difference between "I–It" relationships, in which we relate to others as objects, and "I–Thou" relationships, in which we have the opportunity to encounter another being in their fullness.1

Perhaps part of the problem is that we imagine companionship too narrowly. Some of the deepest conversations of a life may be held with books, landscapes, animals, dreams, poems, or the dead.

In his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.2

We are far less alone than modern life would have us believe.

But neither, Anna, do I think the answer is to retreat entirely into the forest.

The task, perhaps, is to keep speaking bear while remaining willing to return to the village. To find the people who know at least a little of that language. But also, to consider when the roles are reversed: when do we become the village for a loved one who has become a bear telling us of their forest? When do we become the deaf ears unable to receive the treasures they bring back from places we ourselves have never entered.

Genuine relationship requires more than finding people who can truly meet us. It also asks us to become people capable of meeting others; to cultivate the presence and curiosity that allow us to witness the lives of those around us in their wholeness.

Relational wisdom involves becoming what we ourselves long for, offering the kind of attention, openness, and hospitality we wish to receive; and consists not in finding the one person who can meet us everywhere, but in slowly gathering a community of companions—human and more-than-human—who, together, help us feel a little more at home in the world.

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