Foxy

This morning I got to look three little foxy kits in the eye. They were crossing from one blackberry thicket to another. The goats & I all paused for their passage.

There’s something viscerally satisfying about being in the unexpected company of the wild –these spontaneous meetings are as close to church as I ever get, a communal experience of God with my local neighbors, the foxes.

And there’s something to being awake so early that everybody is making the rounds without the expectation of an encounter. The goats, my awkward babies, often stay behind me, tentative but alert when we cross a wildling (or three).

Unlike dogs (blesséd predator kin), the goats all get very quiet & never advance toward the surprise guest. This affords me a graciously long session to revel in the energetics & slow grace of whoever we come upon. It is often (although not always) the goats whose energetic changes first.

I felt their hesitation on the path & looked up from my phone where I was researching musical scales (I started uke lessons yesterday with the wasband & couldn’t hardly wait to look up a graphic of the circle of fifths).

There was one, then two (the second fox is pictured) kits cautiously capering onward. A third spooked at the sight of my entourage & retreated back into the blackberries until we had gone on. These littles (or perhaps another fox family?) have been leaving “presents” for me on the homestead.

A larger fox waltzed right by my tiny home & we locked eyes for several precious moments earlier in the week. I know fox medicine has to do with family & I have been really sitting with who I am & who I want to share my life with lately.

I have been reading about attachment theory for years & lately I have given myself over to Relationship Anarchy –the concept that I am free to relate with the world in the most authentic ways without all the labels & prescriptive need to fit my connections into boxes.

As a single woman, my primary partner has been this land & I have a lot of deeply meaningful connections with the animals, plants, bugs, and ecosystems that coexist here. I do not take these intimacies for granted.

I am in awe that the land is recovered enough to support life, that I am recovered enough to return to my lifelong studies of music, and that the goat walks, simple pleasure of my homesteading career, still provide fertility & silly scampers for this place that I adore so.