New meditation episode for you, you cunning, magic, wily vixen you. For the femme in you that bites, we offer anti-capitalist motivational audio. Use it to gather your loves and to channel your resistance.
You little vixen you
Wily as… Cunning as.
Hunted, trapped, biting back
Sexy, wicked, smart, magic
You are definitely vixen kin.
…
The dreams have changed.
Instead of swarming bees, May’s been dreaming of foxes, little three-year-old yelps in the night, she sits up and tells me they are peering over the edge of her bed, they are inside the house and outside too, they are sniffing and lifting their legs to pee. She insists she is not sleeping, this is real life.
This is real life, they are circling. They are calling us out. Follow scent and dreams and a feeling in your body back to this vixen kinship. Feel down the lines of dna deep time to where we are woven together in strands of sleeping relation. We are circling. We are calling each other out into the twilight.
No matter who you are descended from, there is a route back through the generations to those foxes circling in the night, peering over the edge of the bed.
If you are like me, descendants of settler-colonizers, vikings, freemasons, cunning women, the working girls sorority of north bay ontario, and also the Iroquois Larkin sisters 6 generations back who led my great great great grandfather across the great great lakes, and left a haunting underneath the skin, even if you are an unrooted mixed up little kit, you can still find your kinship with these red tails loping down alleyways.
You can listen to the yelps in the twilight. Build relationships with species carried around the world by colonizers to be hunted for sport, farmed for their fur. The fox hunt and fur farms fade out of fashion just like the tacky, pathetic hoarder billionaires whose world view we reject. The foxes smile. Research shows they can generally manage to keep their own populations in balance – we know when it’s safe to bring kids into these environments thank you very much and fuck you – and so British cities have abandoned attempts to control them and anyway, it turns out they are excellent garden companions keeping rats and mice at bay. In places where they are invasive – like feral cats – a danger to the indigenous population, attempts to scale both back have been repeatedly successful as science learns to work with indigenous experts within communities to find the right balance for each place. We insist, smiling but with our teeth out, a balance is possible.
We are learning to listen to the many ways of balance. Maybe for us invaders it starts – as Dr Zoe Todd told us – by building kinship with invasive species. Or we start at the places where invasive, farmed, hunted and wild concatenate. And listen there for vixen medicine.
In Carol Gigliotti’s graphic novel Trump And The Animals, A Fable for the Present, the animals gather in terror at the mounting devastation of the world, and in a desperate attempt to reach us they decide to use our dreams.
They are peering over the edge of the bed. They are inside and outside.
They speak with scent, and colour, with the smallest movements of their ears and tails,
With a whimper for their parents, or a bark to gather their children home. They speak. FOxes make at least 28 different types of call in the wild, at least according to our domesticated ears.
When domesticated, foxes keep their childhood whimper into adulthood. But in the wild their voices grow stronger, louder, they leave the whimper fawn behind and snarl and snap and bark.
I have been domesticated, have you my vixen kin? Curtailing my true voice, apologizing, gathering favour and safety with my curled tail and gentle pleading.
But I see the foxes out here in the evening, serious jaws, laughing eyes just on the edges of the shadows. I smell them in the place in the woods where glaciers tumbled enormous ancient stones and made hundred of wild nooks, moss-covered. The smell is talking.
I feel them quicken me, sharpen me.
Call me out to the glacier memory, the stone stories.
They are peering over the edges of our dreams.
They are drawing out our real voices.
A gathering of foxes is called an Earth.
An Earth of foxes.
The smell is ripe like coffee, once you know the smell you recognize it immediately, here though we can’t see them, fox kin are everywhere.
You are here
In the edges, in between,
In the earth, in the hollows
You are everywhere.
If you have been in touch with your dangerous femme self, your Mmmm Foxy Lady, you share their name.
You flirt with the edges of possibility
You have a dangerous attractive power that is yours alone
You are defiant, you are cunning
You are smirking, you are knowing
You are multiple and of the Earth
You are vixen kin.
And vixen kin are calling out to our collective messy, troubled liberation.
Farmed for what makes us beautiful,
Hunted for fun.
Slurred for our sex. We are vixen kin.
We are an Earth of vixens.
Vixen laughing in the twilight, in the hollows of the Earth.
Switching our tails, smiling through our sharp teeth and golden eyes.
You are slipping down alleyways, you are tumbled together sharing your love, feasting in the dark, you are vixen kin.
In Initiated, Amanda Yates Garcia writes,
How do we learn to listen right? Maybe we begin by following the dreams of our children. Our own childhood dreams. Animals hit us like electricity when we’re kids. They shudder us, we hear them.
Foxes speak with scent, saying this space or even this other fox is known and claimed and not alone. I whisper to May that the foxes are making circles of protection around her. I like to think they are circling and marking her as one of theirs, known, protected.
She yells, in that three-year-old way that is apropos of nothing and total nonsense and also nail-on-head correct: “they aren’t gods they’re real!” and I agree.
In Japanese folklore the word for foxes is also the word for fox spirits who gather magicks as they age, kitsune are shapeshifters, tricksters, guardians. Holy in Shinto time, Witch animals during the Edo period — when women also lost legal rights to own property and a man could kill his wife for being lazy. Foxes have fought fascism before.
Tituba calls out in Maryse Condes’ channeled telling of her life: “Do you Know What A Witch Really Is?”
Holy? Witch? Shapeshifter. Wild.
Pam Grossman wrote: “show me your witches, and I’ll show you your feelings about women.”
Show us your feelings about women and we’ll show you your feelings about the very Earth.
An Earth of foxes writhing with pleasure and family and sharp teeth. Wicked and magic. Lazy and wild. Call us what you like, our spirit remains the same.
“Other powers attributed to kitsune include possession, the ability to start a fire with the tail, or to breathe fire. The power to enter dreams. The ability to create complex illusions that are almost indistinguishable from reality.”
You are sparking fires
You are entering dreams and calling forth a new reality.
Your real voice is breaking free.
We are not a dream, we are real.
Not gods, but guides
Not gods, real.
No masters, only tricksters.
We are vixen kin.
The non-binary Kami, one of the infinite holy-powers of Shintoism, Inari Ōkami is a young fertility goddess, and also an old man with a bag of grain, and also an androgynous seeker and holy person, and also a fox. They are the non-binary spirit of both rice and saki, of that change of states, that phase transition, that shapeshift. Fermentation, and transubstantiation.
They are beautiful and biting teeth and tricks. Patriarchs might discourage the association of kitsune with Inari – foxes bite and steal and smell of soil and sex – but we are holy kinship nonetheless.
Fox fathers and mothers share care, love their children, and when resources are abundant they multiply their love and pleasure. Maybe they remember a different shape of family. Shapes that abundance makes possible after the capitalist terrorizing lie of scarcity. Maybe they can help us remember how to lean on each other, to ease into the unboundedness of fertility and shared prosperity. An Earth that has enough when resources are shared.
This fox blessing in May sends you:
An earth full of love
An abundance of resources
Shapes of pleasure and family that amplify your joyful tumble
Your moonlit ease.
You are fox kin
Run your tongue over your sharp teeth and smile
Roll your fur
Stretch like a wild thing
You are vixen kin.
We are vixen kin, we are coming to you in dreams.
We are shifting our shapes, and remembering.
Widening our circles and definitions of family, pleasure, love, interspecies companionship.
Moving our collectives into the Earth.
We are vixen, dangerous women, fertile goddesses, men with ancient grain, androgynous ancestors holding sacred queer lineage. We are fox-faced, loving and living beyond imaginary boundaries, finding new balances, making our cities wild.
We are vixen kin.
We are an Earth.
Watch for us down dark alleys, at the corners of this world
another world is coming.
Listen for us whispering in your dreams
You are vixen kin.
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https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/amanda-yates-garcia/initiated/9781538763070/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/28/the-best-witch-novel-is-one-nobody-talks-about/
https://time.com/5597693/real-women-witches/
https://graphicnovels.carolgigliotti.com/
https://magickalspot.com/deities-associated-with-foxes/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26907095
“An overview of attempts to control species – Carnivore eradication—especially of feral housecats and foxes —has been frequently attempted with a recent success rate over 90%.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune
https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/animals/article/red-fox-behaviour-communication
https://www.bbcwildlife.org.uk/urban-fox
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