I am receiving such an interesting stream of stories of encounters with the fox in dreams, in the natural world and in folklore, movies and literature that I see I shall need to write more on this theme.
For now, I just want to add one personal incident to my previous discussion of brushes with the red fox. On the night of a fire ceremony during my most recent workshop in France, we noticed that a Trickster energy was richly in play, the energy personified for the French by M. Renard, Mr Fox. No one was surprised when a red fox turned up, right outside our meeting room, and lingered in the vicinity for some 90 minutes.
When my host took me back to her home at the end of the workshop, her husband asked me how things had gone. “We had a wonderful time,” I reported. “But M. Renard was very active.”
“Mr. Renard?” Laurent echoed. “But he was here just five minutes ago.”
He rushed to fetch a business card.
MR. RENARD, it announced in bold upper case letters. This Mr Fox was a landscaper, who had come offering his services. But we had no doubt that the Mr Fox was also announcing his presence.
Postscript: TRACKING MR FOX
Mr Fox moves fast. At the exact moment I posted the little article above, I received a most intriguing story about the red fox in a Facebook message from a man named Dave in Kentucky who was previously unknown to me. Dave reported that he used to think of the red fox as a harbinger of bad things, because it turned up on the three worst days of his life. A skilled hunter, he set out to kill “Mr Red”, hoping to change his luck. But he could never catch the fox.
At last a friend suggested to him that the fox might actually be his “totem”. When he opened to the notion that the fox could be an ally and a messenger rather than a curse, Dave found himself using fox sightings as helpful alerts. “When I see a fox now, I just smile and know my life is headed in a new direction.” He adds this road-tested insight: “I couldn’t catch the fox because the hardest animal to find is yourself.”
Savoring this tale, I went to the family room and turned on TV to check the news headlines. Inexplicably, the normal settings had been changed, and I had to push buttons to get it back into TV mode. What now came on was a channel we simply never watch. Guess which one? FOX News, of course….
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