When I think about my animal medicine, which isn’t that often, I think mostly about the East, which guides your spiritual challenges & your path to illumination – where I have Lynx – or I think about my Left, where I have the first of them that I came to know, who is Wolf. I hadn’t really thought about Fox. If you’d asked me a week ago whether I had Fox and if so where, I wouldn’t have known. I would have had to look it up.
I have looked it up. Because it became relevant.
I am the first to admit that we create our own relevance. When they say seek and ye shalt find, it is entirely possible that what they mean is that we find what we look to find, rather than what is really there. I also think that it doesn’t matter what we choose to believe about what is (or is not) beyond the human comprehension, to the extent that it doesn’t impinge on ultimate reality. What is real, is real whether we believe in it or not. What we choose to believe however does alter our personal reality.
And for the record, I do think that belief is a choice, which may be why one of my teachers tells me he doesn’t want me to believe, he wants me to know. The difference matters and I am a long way from knowing. I am still at the boundary between cynicism and belief. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything.
A few things happened this week. The first was a crisis of confidence. I had a day of sad-news contacts which shattered my energy, brought me low, made me sad. Not for myself, but for the people involved and for the fact that circumstances (personal more than global) meant that there was nothing I could do to bring comfort or solace. The week continued in a similar vein. Conversations that might have been cheerful veered towards the bleak. The negative was outweighing the positive, depressing. It’s not that positive feedback wasn’t coming in, it was just being drowned out. The impact of this was to leave me wondering what on earth I was doing here. Literally, what am I doing on earth. What, as one of my friends puts it, is the point of me?
That’s a bit heavy for me…not least because I am absolutely certain that I am where I am meant to be. Logically, it should follow that I know what I am here to do. If I know I’m meant to be here, how can I possibly not know why?
The second thing was that someone told me I was still being watched over. I don’t believe in after-lives, so that idea resonated with all the clarity of dumped sack of spuds. Still, if I am opening up, if I am going to trust the listening path and all this other beyond the boundary stuff, there’s no harm in asking, right?
So, yeah…I’ve been talking to dead people and listening to what they have to say. My best guess is that this is simply somewhere between wishful thinking, knowing how they thought & extrapolating, telepathic reception from someone living who might be hearing me, and/or just my own higher self guiding my conscious mind.
As I say, we choose our beliefs.
Then…I found it.
A tuft of hair on the hall floor: a small root-clumped tuft of hair too red to be any of mine. Fox.
I walk the woods. It’s entirely possibly that I would track in fox hair. Even so, I connect it with Clive and with the “conversation” we’d had. If I want confirmation of presence, or even just of accuracy, all I have to believe in is synchronicity. I don’t have to admit ghosts or spirit guides or anything esoteric… maybe.
I don’t know what Clive’s animal medicine was. I doubt that it was something he investigated. But I do know that if it did not show up anywhere in the animals that chose him, he would have chosen Fox to walk at his right or his left. His left, I’m thinking. His joy in the foxes in his garden was all in the vixen and the cubs.
So fox, found in that specific corner… I’ll take that!
It was only later that it occurred to me to wonder whether I also had Fox and if so where. I find her Above. Fox, it would seem, is my gateway to honouring the Great Star Nation, to honouring the ancestors in whatever spirit-world or simple earthly gratitude fashion you might want to interpret that. I might call it soul purpose.
Like the Lynx, Fox is secretive, observant, a shadow creature.
I am being told again… Listen, Observe, Keep. It is that simple.
That is what I am here for…to listen, to observe, to write it down, to keep the mysteries as possibilities. I am not here to convince, merely to wander and to wonder. Sometimes, I think, we may be where we are to offer up answers but mostly, I know, we are here ~ or at least I am here ~ to simply keep asking the questions.
One of my teachers wants me to know. I’m not sure that I need to. Maybe I am here precisely not to know, because it is in my not knowing that I can do my best work.
