By Anita Holland
The desire to write a one woman piece, based on my life as written in myth, has been percolating in me for some time. I’d been walking around with a notebook of ideas but no roadmap. After the empowering work I did with Applied Mechanics in We Are Bandits I found a collaborator who understood my vision, Maura Krause! The process began with several brainstorms and writing assignments as we pared down the notebook to a list of themes. “What resonates with you in the now?” I found the connection between humans & nature, and was pouring through a book titled Women Who Run With the Wolves. 
Using the story of the Handless Maiden I wrote the story from three viewpoints. The friend (a bird), self (a bear), lineage (twin girls). After writing these pieces I combed them for three common threads: a wake up call, a shedding of skin, the mirror/shadow. The following is the journey of the self and my spirit animal, a great brown bear.
Once upon a time there was a brown bear and a black bear who fell in love in the forest and because they were different colors the other bears would have nothing to with them so they ran away, the black bear became pregnant. The time came for the baby bear to be born it was a long birth and afterwards the whole family slept. They awoke to the feeling the ground giving way. They had been taken in by a travelling circus and were rolling away from the forest. Papa bear roared and baby bear cried and mama bear was very frightened for she had been in a cage before and it had taken years to escape. 
Papa bear roared and roared until they sold him to a zoo and mama bear became very ill and was released into wild to fend for herself. Baby bear remained to grow up in the traveling circus. She was called Miss Marble because her fur looked like marbled coffee cake. Miss marble learned to walk, dance, and please the crowd. Once on a rare occasion Marble would think about her family or ask what the wild was like but she was quickly silenced by the other animals. So marble saved her questions for her dreams and in the winter ventured in hibernation to far off places. She dreamed of being reunited with her family under the great big top for the whole world to see. As she slept the circus train derailed she rolled over and over and and fell out of her cage onto the ground. Free! Marble got up shook the dust off and went to gather the other animals for the adventure in the wild. They did not want to come and so she went out on her own. It wasn’t long before Marble found a group of brown bears who laughed at her peculiar color and then a group of black bears who laughed at her roar which to be honest sounded more like the purr of a very big cat. All the other animals were afraid of her so miss Marble wandered back to the circus where she thought she felt comfortable. This also turned out to be a trial though because she had to be ostracized for a time for running away. Marble enjoyed about being in the wild.
In the day she felt like she was always being watched and at night she dreamed of long fields, trees, the nightime sky, the smells, the fish and wild honey. things slowly went back to normal though Marble began unconsciously to eat less and sleep more. She walked and danced, and played the game until she became so frail that she was given to a wildlife preserve. The people and the animals their nursed her back to health. 
She found a group of former circus bears of all colors, shapes and sizes. They showed each other their circus dances and made a new one up all their own. It was silly it made Marble laugh. She laughed and laughed and roared with laughter until tears ran down her fur and she felt like the ground would give way again but it didn’t and so she roared again and all the bears danced and roared until the earth shook.
And that is where earthquakes come from.