Looking into the Eyes of Bear: Embracing Wild Joy with Author and Wilderness Guide, Larry Glover

In this episode, we shed layers of self and society to embrace joy and wholeness in nature with author and wilderness guide, Larry Glover. 

Larry Glover is the author of Wild Joy: Ecospiritual Encounters with Nature as Teacher, Healer, and Lover; winner of two Gold Medals in the 2025 Global Book Awards. He aspires to discover what being human truly is, particularly in a paradoxical world woven of mystery and consciousness and fire and water and air and earth and spirit and soul too. He struggled from an early age with a madness that would destroy himself, which he came to recognize as a cultural story of separation and unworthiness for life. Larry now leans into our shared love of nature to inspire and deepen what it is to truly love the self, through his writing, speaking, coaching, workshops and wilderness retreats held in conjunction with the Cheryl Slover-Linett and the non-profit leadfeather.org. He is author of Wild Joy, Ecospiritual Encounters with Nature as Teacher, Healer, and Lover. 

Discover more of Larry’s writing and how to engage with him at larryglover.com and download a free gift: Healing the Jehovah Wound: A Path to Wholeness and Wild Joy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What does it mean to live with fire in my belly? To live life with passion, change and transformation as givers and takers of life? What is it to make an ally of the unknowns of the descending chaos that will burn away social constructions of identity? What is it to know fire as a living presence, an energy, a dynamic, sacred process that redefines boundaries, deepens diversity, and from which new life and identity can come? What if I play with the idea of my hatred and anger and righteous judgmentalism as expressions of fire? And of love too. Is not the fire of the sun the same fire that digests the food in my belly? Food that itself also once digested sun's fire and now passes that energy on to me. And so the sun actually lives in every cell of my body through the biological flows of metabolism. Surely it is an ailment within my civilized self that does not know, respect, and honor the God of fire living within, as much as without. And life and death are no more opposites than our creation and destruction, than male and female, light and dark. They are all expressions of a deeper oneness, out of which these polarities arise and manifest the material world. And I, I contain them all.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for reading from your book, Wild Joy: Equal Spiritual Encounters with Nature as Teacher, Healer, and Lover. It's great to have you here, Larry. Thank you so much for joining me on the Heartpath podcast. I would love to know what inspired what you just read to us.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Wow. Well, thank you, Yvonne, so much. I'm deeply honored to be here with you and deeply appreciate, again, this energy you carry in the world and our sharing here on the podcast. It's so beautiful and vital and so needed.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

And thanks for that question. It really is, I guess, what inspires the book for me, which is essentially my own exploration of human identity. And it's a very deeply intimate, and I often hear from people who've read it, they describe it as raw. It's this exploration of my early experiences of separation and isolation. The book explores that journey out of energy of a religious suppression and us oppression and domination and authoritarianism. And so I try to track those roots because it was really nature that saved my life in so many ways. And I think of it often as a loss of reference when I cannot see the fire in my own belly and in my own self and soul's physical self as part of the sun and the stars, and cannot track this very physical origin or self that stands here speaking with you. If it's not part of the cosmos and does not innately belong and arise out of it, and if that is not home for me, then I am not at home in my body. And so wild joy is this story of coming home to myself and points, I think, in a timely way for our times of what it is to rediscover and restory the wholeness of what it is to be human.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Oof. Wow. I would love to know how you went about rediscovering what it was to be human in your own life and how you found nature as source in your life.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Again, great question and uh and a big one. That's the whole book in one question. Um to condense that down. There's a story in the book that was really transformational for me in my mid-twenties of my life of encountering a bear in the forest who comes up to the door of my tent and sticks her head in. And I'm I'd seen her and heard her outside the tent at some distance away at the fire pit, knocking pans around. And food was hung up in a tree. So, you know, I figured and knew that was what the bear was looking for. But I was not a really experienced camper, though I, in a very masculine way, wanted and loved to see myself that way. But I was innately drawn to time outdoors. It's the one place where I could really feel myself at home and unjudged. There was a lot of suicide that ran in my family. And yep, upon hearing the bear, I sat up, looked out the door of the tent, and saw the bear, of course, and then whispered to my tent mate, the young woman I was with, it's a bear, it's a bear. And soon we're both quietly looking out the door of the tent, and then the bear starts coming towards us. This is a black bear up in Canada. And I'm sitting back into the door of the tent. The night before I'd been reading Black Elk Speaks, where he speaks about the wholeness of life and nature. And it was a very inspiring moment as I sat on the edge of the lake, as the sunset and the loons were calling. And I felt so at home and belonging. And that spirit came with me as I met the bear when she walked up to the bright side of the tent, sniffing loudly, inhaling, and then blowing out uh strongly. And she slowly sniffed at the top of the tent, down to the bottom, and worked her way around the tent, doing that to the back of the tent, and then back up the left side of the tent, came to the front door and pushed her head inside. And I was sitting there breathing in all this time trying to communicate with the bear, going, We mean you no harm. Uh, there's no food in here. And the bear and I were breathing each other's breath.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Looking into each other's eyeballs. And at some point within this, you know, who knows how long, but it was surely short. But I found myself trancing into the bear, and I became bear. Switched out wandering through the forest looking for food. This is what I do, you know, kind of thing. It was like a teasing apart of consciousness, like a pulling apart of a cotton ball, so to speak, as I realized I was inside the bear and I needed to pull back out. And then I found myself again staring into the eyes of the bear and breathing her breath. And she pulled out of the tent and walked off through these morning shafts of light coming through the old growth trees through the sun and shade. And it was so profound and beautiful. I knew that something magical and mysterious and wonderful had occurred for me, of course. And it's taken decades. That bear is still with me and informs my living. The bear also saved my life. That's the title of the chapter Is Saved by a Bear. But part of what was happening at that time in my life also, I was working in a runaway house in the interstate of Detroit as a social worker, clinical director, having graduated and got my master's in social work. And I was still suicidal at times and doing a lot of drugs. It was the early 70s. And I'd work 10 hours a day or whatever it was, and sending kids home to trying to get them back home into environments where I often thought they shouldn't be in abusive homes. And I'd go home and think about killing myself. And I'd remember looking into the eyes of Bear. And I'd remember her breathing. And I would again be touched by awe and wonder. I would choose to live. And then I realized in that journey at that time in my life that the more I hated my father, and the more I hated the Jehovah God who had taught me to hate myself and my body, lest it send me to hell, the more I took on those characteristics of righteousness and judgmentalism and constrictions of my own thinking. And that's another story in the book.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Oh wow. So, Larry, can we go into it a little bit more? I get the gist of why that suicidal tendency was there, but I would like to hear a little bit more about this. And what triggered this tendency for several years in your life? Was it generational? Was it based on triggers through family? What was it that kept that coming back up in your life?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Thanks for that question, Yvonne. He's fundamentalist evangelical Christian, where we considered the Southern Baptists to be liberal and uh sinful and going to hell because they didn't have the full truth. And only we, it was a branch of the Church of Christ, were had the truth. And um the Baptists used instrumental music in church, for example. And according to our literal scriptural interpretation, the Bible did not authorize instruments in church. And so it was that kind of a piece. We didn't allow dancing, there was suspicion of music, rock music at the time was considered evil. You know, from here, in this perspective in life, I have a lot of compassion for that kind of faith and belief system. But for me, as a young man growing up, my father was abusive in the name of God and in the name of his beliefs, uh, believing in corporal punishment and whipping. I vividly remember when my shorts would stick to my skin at night when I went to bed from the blood oozing and scabbing. In those early days, I felt like I got whipped daily, sometimes twice with a belt. And there was a ritual to that, which is described in the book, which always included this hurts me more than you. But then my dad being a father, a preacher, we'd go to church three times a week where he would stand up and preach, and I would sit in the hard wooden pew with my butt stinging and on fire from the whippings. So there was that that created an anger in me and a rebelliousness. But my father was acting on in what he thought was good and righteous. And I think most quote-unquote evil that is done in the world comes under the name of God and country. So that's pretty much where we are today as well. But I also had a real intellectual curiosity for the world, and I started reading early and C. S. Lewis, and then I began to discover Narnia. Narnia tales. Yeah, those were great. I came across a book called The True Believer, which presented Jesus more as one from a human character kind of position, but a man of love, and love that was so radical that it embraced all colors. It embraced Mary Magdalene as a teacher. So there was a difference between his attitude and that book, which to me mirrored more of the scriptures as I read them and learned to read them, and then as I discovered the Gnostic Gospels and so on. This equality between man and woman and this partnership that I then began to see reflected in nature everywhere. And rather than a story of separation through nature, then particularly, and then reading, of course, too. But nature is where I begin to see the oneness and the wholeness, and found myself unable to separate the raindrop from the river or the creek or the snow or the ocean. And there's a great line: millions can see the raindrop in the ocean, but only one in a million can see the ocean in a raindrop. You know, and it's the same as seeing the sun or the stars inside of my own system. It's learning to see the world through the eyes of wholeness rather than this story of separation where the divine is out there living in some heaven up in the skies in some other dimension, as which Joseph Keimball points out, if Jesus were traveling at the speed of light, he still would not be there, ascending into heaven, because the universe is so big and so magnificent. And you know this to be out under the stars in the middle of nowhere and how small we are. And then to recognize that the religions and all of that are a way to block out the fear, and also then to acculturate us into a domesticated version that is subservient to the culture we live in. And in service of that, rather than in service to the spirit of life within and the life force that wants to express itself and be who we are and embrace the sensuality of living and the wholeness, the life force that craves freedom and sovereignty. I began to journal. Some women friends introduced me to Anias Nin back in the early 70s, and other feminist thinkers, which helped intellectually flip my worldview. And it helped me begin to see the world as a story and that I was constructing a story. And of course, I was deeply interested in psychology and worldviews. I went to two Bible colleges and got a degree from one before going to the University of Oklahoma for a master's degree. But I once had one of the Bible teachers call me into his office and asked me to stop asking questions because I was causing him to question his faith. So, you know, there was a gift in that. But I guess I'm pointing towards an intellectual curiosity in quest in part. But I also began around the time of the Bear and Nice Nan in the early 70s working in Detroit, I began to journal. And that was in part driven again by women, who had been often such a beautiful part and vital part of my own learning and growth. But Carl Jung has been a real inspiration in my life and his read book and material. And so I've journaled all these years, and that writing and reflective process is so vital. But it also took me into various kinds of shadow work and explorations of my own shadow, and just awareness of that is so vital. And psychedelic deogens have played a vital role in this journey of freedom for me, which I've come to call in the book wild joy. Which for me, it's beyond just the joy or pleasure in a moment, it's this knowing and this innate sense of belonging that can live inside of us when we come home to our bodies, stop shaming them, stop shaming ourselves. When I can bring love to the wholeness of who I am, to the pieces and parts that are broken and wounded that I don't like, but I can still learn to love them. Wild joy for me also captures grief and sorrow and the wild grief and the wild sorrow that is transformational. You know, when I look upon the planet and I witness the times that we're in, I mean, we just talk climate and environment and nature without even referencing the proclivities we have for war out of greed and power hungeriness. I mean, it's hard, challenging times to be alive. But there are great gifts in these times. And I would just say the power structures that are right now, the spiritual gift that I see in them is a great invitation for awakening and recognizing that the structures we have are not working.

unknown 17:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

And they're making it very visible. And it's this loss of reference to identity and nature and who we truly are. And the aspens for me became a great piece of that. I was hanging out in the aspens, whom I have a great affection for, and the ecology of them. And what many people don't know is that if you walk inside an aspen grove, you're walking inside the body of a living organism. You know, and the Pando Grove in Utah is the largest known aspen individual, single DNA for a grove of aspens that has been dated to 80,000 years old and could be as old as a million.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

They evolved initially in cold climates, Arctic kind of climates, and so on. And so the white bark is an adaptation to that because it's a sun reflector, and you can wipe your hand on the bark and it'll come off with white powder on it, and that's a sun screen for the tree, and you can put it on your face for sunscreen, too. But just under that is a green thin layer of skin, if you will. If you just gently cut off a piece of the white, you'll see this green layer. So the aspens can carry on photosynthesis in the winter time, the cold. They also, in addition to dropping leaves in the fall that no longer serve, they will drop branches that no longer serve. So they can teach us about letting go as well. Because so much of reconfiguring our identity, my identity, has been stories of rebirth and death, death and rebirth, and this cycle of that and letting go of who I thought I was, time and time again. So the skill also of being lost, and what is it to be lost, I think, is vital to navigating our times and the willingness to not know. It's a kind of spiritual humility, if you will. But on this journey with the aspens and sitting with this ecological peace, they're the first tree to come back after fires in the West, as you likely know it. And so the secret to that is they've invested this life force in the root system. And so they sprout off the roots. And each tree is what botanists would call a ramatin. And culturally, I wasn't trained to see each one of those trees like a distinct human individual, a distinct being. When in truth, like the aspens, we humans, in my experience, arise off the same tree of life, same root system. As a youth, there was great madness in my life and real struggles around loneliness and depression. But nature began to help me see my belonging and not just see it intellectually, but then to experience it. And the entheogens took me deeper into that experience, and I became the aspen trees. And I became the one rude. When I ran away from home and suicidal at 15 and promised myself, if I ever live life to a place I could celebrate it, I would write about that journey. And so this book is a keeping of that promise to the young adolescent. But I began to think, well, God, I'll do anything you want me to, but there's one thing I won't do is have kids, because that would be evil to bring life onto the planet. Aspen's so brought home to me, this thing that it's not Christ coming down out of the sky and saving the planet or coming back, that this Christ spirit is a vibration, it's a frequency of love that lives in the heart. And that's where the divine lives, if you will, is inside of us. It's an incarnation, and that's what it is to become as He is or was, you know, rather than looking outside ourselves for some truth from some outside authority and power. So, you know, the writing, the intellectual curiosities and reading, the deep shadow work, deep time in nature that comes with a particular kind of spirit and attitude. Many people can spend a lot of time in nature and they can be in their four wheel drives and out hunting or hiking or whatever, and they'll never have. This experience of oneness. But as a wilderness guide for 40 plus years, I know that it's the spirit that one carries into the encounter that makes a difference. And if you walk in the world with respect and love, you'll find more of it. If you see the world as an object, you embody what I call the Jehovah wound, which is this wound that arises to us when we separate ourselves from the innate belonging and worthiness and spirit of wholeness that lives within.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

Wow. So much came up for me while I was listening to you, Larry. So many memories popped up for me of my own life and my experiences with humanity and with nature. And I know exactly what you mean when you feel that connection with nature, because there's definitely been times where I've been out and I've been going through a hard time. And I just I go out by myself and then I spend a little time at the beach, and I'll just be standing there and I'll realize that I'm held. I'm completely held by nature. And nature is not judging me or saying, Yvonne, you should do it this way, it needs to be that way. Nature just shows me how it's done. So thank you so much for sharing this. And I would love to hear about your work with Leadfeather and how that came to be.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Thank you, Leadfeather and my work with the founder Cheryl Sloverlinette is one of the great joys of my life. And actually, the store of our meeting is one of synchronicity, but which in my life has come, I've recognized more and more is guided by synchronicities, by living in the wholeness that becomes more and more alive within. So Cheryl and I actually met at a locked door at an REI building where they were holding a wilderness first aid course. She had recently moved to Santa Fe, where we both live, and was looking for some partnership for doing outdoor companionship, guiding work, leading programs. And she kept hearing my name, and I was running my own company at the time, Wild Resiliency. And so we began to partner more and do programs together more. But part of the beauty of that was we met at a locked door. So, you know, guiding is an easy word to use, but companionship feels closer to me. We don't see ourselves as something above or outside. It's not a therapeutic model so much as it is a model of being with people and holding the space for people to have their experience and setting a container. So this idea of the container is really, I think, important. And part of the question is what's the container of the self I will create? And so, you know, it's holding the space so that people can re-experience themselves in a container of belonging with nature. One of the programs we do yearly is in Canyon Desche. And uh last year we had a man come on to under pressure from his wife who had been on a journey previously and was like, You gotta go. And we do a 24-hour will learn a solo on that, and there's a lot of preparation that goes around that. But there was an invitation to find the tree and talk with it or sit with it and be with it and just see what comes up for you. And when he came back from his solo, he was like, OMG, I learned so much from that tree. And he says, I've not been the kind of boss I want to be, running his own company. It changed his life. Yeah, so that's the work of Lead Feather in part. We do various and it's the spirit of wholeness that we bring and see in them already. I think that helps bring that out. Helps create the space.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

I was actually wondering about what creates the space for them to feel like they belong. Can we go into that just a little bit more about how you create that space?

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Yeah. I think you know, a sense of physical safety is vital within a group to do that. And and yet people are also operating and being there in part because they're drawn to the risk or something new, or they want to re-experience something. We have many people that come back time and time again. There's a container of emotional safety. They know they're not going to be judged for who they are or for their experience or their religious belief or whatever. They don't need to believe like I do. And it's vital that we really hold and educate people around what's safe and what's not safe. So there's time around that if there are poisonous snakes or insects and those kinds of things. People's fears commonly outstrip the realities of the danger. And yet have a good mentor, friend, colleague who years back had a saying, I was fond of, is never underestimate the ability of a client to fuck up. And that has served me well through the years. So there's this educational piece, but then there's the invitation to really let go of what you thought you needed. We encourage people to come in with an intention and then to let it go. So there's the creation of a sacred space for not knowing and for also inquiring into nature and having a conversation maybe you've never had before with a rock or whatever. But nature does the speaking and nature does the work. We just hold that container. It's very much like an Entheodon journey. If one is guiding or tripsetting or whatever for that, or one is doing it oneself. Yeah, the groups always bond in a sense of real community. And it is so profoundly beautiful to hold space for that and such an honor, and then to witness what happens for people.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Thank you for the work you do. Thank you so much for creating community and for creating a container of safety for others to find whatever they need to find out there. And I would love to hear your poem.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Okay. Well, there's a lot of poetry in the book. Let me see what wants to come up. This is called What More Theology. Tell me, please, dear soul, when you walk upon the earth, do the soles of your feet touch your mother with your heart. And when you walk with this lover, do you not find pleasure and joy in caressing her with your every step? Do you not walk deliberately like the tortoise, offering prayers of gratitude for the gifts of air and water and soil, for food and the companionship of kinship, with the rooted ones, four-legged and winged and swimmers, and crawling ones too? Do you not nourish your life, your very spirit, with this loving embrace of soul and soil and soul? Does not this embrace bring alive within eyes and mind and heart, innately drawn to mystery, curiosity, beauty, and belonging? Tell me please, dear one, does this not make you a practitioner of the world's oldest religion? The original religion of love, of awe and wonder too. The mother religion of all religions. Now please tell me too. What more theology might anyone ever need?

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Oh, I love it. I I caught the uh in there and I was just thinking about all the different ways that uh can grace our days, you know, especially if we're paying attention to what's around us. And the other day I was just walking down the street and I saw a heart engraved in the sidewalk that I had never noticed before. And it was a street that I walked down several times. And then the next couple days, I walked down the same sidewalk, saw the heart, and there was a heart sticker right by it. I just I love noticing these things. So thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your new book. Thank you for sharing your time and your beautiful words with me today.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm so honored and delighted to meet you and to be able to do this podcast with you. And thank you for this work you're doing, sharing this love of nature and our interbeing and interdependence, interbreathing with all of life.