I Have Breakfast With A Fox And Come Home With Blackbirds

It was one of those perfect, rainy, Fall mornings -- chilly and with the kind of pouring, abundant, luxurious rain that makes the music on the roof that is Mama Gaia's way of saying, "I love you. Stay in bed. Make love and then doze again." Alas, my impatient mistress, the Bramble Bush, called, and I got up and wrapped a shawl over my bathrobe so that I could eat breakfast out on the porch. (We're just days away from the day when I'll have to give this practice up for five months or so, and I'm hanging on to every last day.) I was just warming my fingers one last time on my pottery coffee mug when I saw her: the fox. My fox. Vulpes vulpes. Sweet totem.

That's twice in just a few weeks, and I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that I'm paying better attention or if she and her babies are hungry. She came running down the hill to the South of The Ugly Neighbors' yard, stopped, looked at me, and decided, "Old, stationary, not a threat." Then she continued heading North until my fence hid her. I hoped she might slip beneath the fence (I built it with gaps between it and the ground to allow her free passage), but no such luck. Though I lingered, I didn't see her again. But I'm triangulating on her den and, soon, I'll be able to direct blessings directly there, rather than just generally in her direction.

Then, this evening, I drove home under scudding grey clouds, dramatic and full of seasonal shift. And, flowing like music, flying like magic, appearing like love, came a flock of blackbirds flying South and landing, all together, like laden gifts of carbon, on a still-green tree. Silhouettes of the end of Summer.

How do we go on living on this planet? How does the beauty and the joy and the connection not strike us all the way dead? I was reminded of that sculpture of St. Theresa and the fact that, it wasn't just sex with the god that pierced her. (Well and, of course, sex with the god is a metaphor for what it's like to be alive and in relationship with foxes and being in relationship with foxes is, in fact, sex with the god, and well, you know. It's all real. It's all metaphor. There's always more.) It was how amazingly luminescent it all is, how wonderful, joyous, and painfully pleasurable it is to be alive here, now, as the wheel turns.

May it be so for you. Or, not, no, yes, may it be so for you, even if, sometimes, the joy is, indeed, too much.

Picture found here.