Dov & The Bear

Feeding the Story

I kicked this year off by publishing a story on January 1st called Wild Within, Wild Without (Dov & The Bear). Every writer has their own favorite story they’ve written and for me, it’s this one. Writing has been a wild experience for me where it feels more like discovery than it does creating or inventing. This story was like that.

It’s one that serves as a blueprint or a landscape for growth and coming-of-age. Its meaning isn’t spoon-fed like a fable. It takes time. You have to seek and you have to wrestle with it. It feels very alive to me, in that way.

If you haven’t read it, here’s a link to the story

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Dov’s Hands

When I think about Dov’s hands— notably large; like baskets hanging from his wrists—what comes to mind is talents. Especially ones we are born with. A universal meaning of talents are something like the potential or capacity of what we can do with our hands. Given that his are larger, he has a kind of God-given ability to hold more potential than the average person in his village. His grandmother further confirms this in her introduction plus later in the story too. It’s her sage advice that leads Dov to accept his natural shape for potential that sets his life on the up and up.

Talents and certain God-given stamps are a two-way street though.

For example, the firstborn of a family is naturally stamped with leadership whether they like it or not. They didn’t choose it but it’s a shape they are forced to reckon with. They set the pattern not only for themselves but also for their parent’s style of child-rearing as well as how their younger siblings will be raised within the household.

A firstborn may not like the extra capacity placed in their basket. It may prompt rejection at times as they feel the need to wrestle for say-so regarding their individuality. This seems like the viable path to take only when they are unable to recognize that they hold the most say-so of all the siblings, as the pattern-setting firstborn.

Similarly, the most talented athlete on a team is often the hardest to coach because the usual skills being practiced come naturally to them. The naturally high-talented athlete can fail to recognize the need to work as hard as others. This is usually due to a downward aim comparing themselves to the talent below them instead of aiming toward the goal above them or optimizing the future ahead of them. Athletes who do hold maximum talent as well as maximum humility rise quickly in their field and usually achieve greatness.

Imagine the difficulty of convincing an MVP of a league that they still have work to improve upon if they want to become a champion. A suggestion like that is easily rebutted with, “I think you are talking to the wrong person. I am the best in the league.”

The arrogant athlete will be blind to the concept. They will point fingers at the shortcomings of other players. Little do they know that the other players have done the work required to max-out their potential. Their shortcomings are from inability not complacency, lack of competence, or laziness. Should this be the case, the only person left to sow into their untapped potential is the arrogant athlete with the most talent on the team. Their trophy becomes a curse to the team and brings dishonor to the one who holds it from their teammates.

The humble greats like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, and Jerry Rice will continue farming their potential which requires developing as a leader in order to achieve shared greatness. In return, the individual accolades become undeniable and inevitable. At first glance, these athletes may not appear as humble but it’s these types of people that demonstrate how confidence and humility are not counterbalances of each other but can belong on the same pan of a scale.

It’s a form of humility that exists in Michael Jordan (multi MVP of the NBA) to accept he still wasn’t good enough to win a championship, at one point in his career. By allowing that humility to set in, he added strength to his body and found deeper talent within himself along with adding durability to take on extra punishment he was receiving which stymied his success in his first 7 years. A hindrance that was far from obvious but only discovered when he allowed humility to enhance what he saw in his own reflection once he, like every person asks themselves, “What does it take?” and “Do I have what it takes?”

The end result was becoming a 6-time NBA champion, breaking the season record for wins as a team, 10-time scoring champion and being crowned the greatest basketball player of all time.

In a similar vein, a genius can’t tell you how they are a genius. They just are. They are born with more capacity for knowledge than 95% of the population. The struggle for them becomes resisting narcissism. Something as simple as thanking their Maker for their extra capacity would allow humility to enter in which would influence how they engage with other people.

It may sound foolish but it’s the foolish things of the world that confound the wise as someone once said. In doing so, their ideas would be met with less resistance. Instead, their intelligence would see the obvious benefits in valuing the talents of others rather than demeaning them, even if the skills and talents of others aren’t of the same quality as the genius’s.

Like the firstborn sibling and the highly talented athlete, humility is the door to true leadership that not only increases the genius’s life but also those around them. By assuming the lowest position others will arrange for them to take the highest seat, not with jealousy but with celebration; the only way true honor is achieved.

Moving back into the story, the mystery that hides within Dov’s hands contains a journey that awaits him once he accepts his God-given shape. His two hands are able to hold two worlds like pans of a scale. First, it’s his individual self vs the village or the family. Next, it’s the village vs the wilderness or the unknown outside world of potential. From there, it’s the physical world vs the spiritual world. It’s true for all of our lives. Once Dov masters the lateral scales ⚖️ of left and right, it’s now time for him to scale in magnitude— from lower to higher.

If you want to know the shape you were made to be, get to know your Maker.

It’s only when Dov is on a rock gazing up at the stars (an image of prayer) is he open to the deeper spiritual knowledge that finds him. His grandmother takes on the poet by telling him what his hands are; a kind of claiming and naming that brings forth purpose. Then she speaks the purpose to him that lands on him like spiritual knowledge tends to land. Like remembering something you never knew. The kind of paradox only the Ineffable can make sense of and we can only make sense of when the Ineffable is within us.

Christians accept this kind of paradox in spirituality. Christian images of the Most High God contain The Lion & The Lamb, The Beginning & The End, and the Son of Man as well as Son of God.

In the beginning was the Word and the word became flesh…

Dov’s relationship with his grandmother goes from a physical fleshly relationship to a spiritual one of words that are everlasting. She provides him with a path and passage of what to do with his hands. It’s no longer the physical presence of our parents and ancestors that sustains us in Coming-of-Age but their words that we chew on. A rite of passage from milk to spiritual meat-eating.

As Dov ventures on this spiritually guided path, his relationship with the village and the wilderness bring healing and trust instead of the riffs and feuds they once did in his immaturity.

In society, what we end up doing with our hands dictates our status within a community and our status impacts who we are capable to attract as partners in marriage. This becomes another lateral scale (⚖️), the seeds of work/life balance.

It’s only when we obtain deeper spiritual knowledge do we begin to appreciate the feuds that took place in our immaturity, the lover that got away, the hard lessons from our parent’s and the fruit that grew in the shade from other so-called “failures.”

Dov begins to discover the two worlds that exist within his two hands. This is to say that he is realizing the nature of discipline as he becomes disciplined himself. Each hand serves a purpose for feeding his one body— one hand feeding the present, the other feeding the future in a balanced act of sustainability.

He has now placed confidence and humility in the same pan of the scale. What comes next in the story is the weight of leadership being dropped in the other pan to balance him out, lest he become narcissistic. It’s no coincidence Dov finds himself leading younger, less talented peers into their Rite of Passage and not letting his Bear demean or devour someone else’s identity like when the beaver was devoured by his grizzly.

Deeper into the symbolism of Dov’s hands that now hold spiritual weight, we find Dov transcending competition, practicing leadership and graduating from leadership to providing for those beneath him. The highest universal stamp of a man is one who doesn’t need fed by others, or his meat cut by someone else or to be told to put away his dishes, but someone who can venture into the wild and bring back something helpful, nourishing, and living to feed his family and his village.

And so, as Dov matures into his predestined shape, his growth is leading him toward trading places with the elders that successfully guided him. It’s now his turn to return the selfless favor in order for the village to continue living in eternal harmony.

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I’d love to hear your ideas on what comes to mind from the image of Dov’s hands in the story. Feel free to share how it interacts with you in the comments .