letters to the foxes
our lives are ours to live
Once I saw a fox, in an acre of cranberries, leaping and pouncing, leaping and pouncing, leaping and falling back, its forelegs merrily slapping the air as it tried to tap a yellow butterfly with its thin black forefeet, the butterfly fluttering just out of reach all across the deep green gloss and plush of the sweet-smelling bog. - Mary Oliver, Staying Alive
In Mary Oliver’s essay, Staying Alive, she explores what it means to live a life of our own creation, told from the lens of her love of foxes. I’ll be including many of her passages, but if you want to read the full essay for free, an online version can be found here.
finding escapes ourselves in art and nature
My childhood was both painful and beautiful. I grew up mainly in a small CDP, which stands for census-designated population. It wasn’t big enough to be considered a town or even a village, but enough people lived there that they let us name it. It was rural and filled with ranchers, miners, and farmers.
There were so many good parts of this experience: the safety of everyone knowing everyone and watching out for everyone, the helpful spirit of a small community, the southern chivalry, and the waves that everyone gives each other from their cars as they pass each other, and the slowness. I might technically be Gen Z, but I grew up ten years in the past in a K-12 school, so in many ways, I don’t feel like I’m a part of my generation. Yes, I grew up when the iPhone was invented, but no one had one, because there was no cell service. Trends didn’t swoop in, the exposure to media was limited, and we were too poor of a school to afford the advanced technology that other schools had. There were high rates of teenage drinking and drug use, but not in the same way that was present in your typical high schools. And it was beautiful.
And it also was negative in many ways, as well. I started school there in first grade, and despite staying there until graduation, I remained an outsider. Kids were both nicer there and also meaner. Because the school was so small, there were no cliques. Just one main clique and people who didn’t fit in. I was in the latter category. It felt like I had been placed somewhere where I didn’t speak the language. We knew the same words, but I never said them in the right order or at the right time. Despite trying so desperately to fit in and understand their language, I never could.
Home life was even worse. Arguing parents, an abusive mother, and total isolation.
My blessings that took me out of my circumstances were similar to Mary Oliver’s: adventure.
My father would let me wander the property we lived on, go visit the cows at the perimeter (we lived next to a ranch), walk down to the creek just past our property, and go visit the horses at the barn. I would sit on the corral panels and talk to Shotgun, my father’s horse.
Side story: when I was young, my father wanted to find a horse that I could ride with him, and because Shotgun was named for his easily spooked and aggressive attitude, he wouldn’t let me ride him. One day, I watched Felicity, then snuck down to the barn. My father looked out the window a while later, and saw me on Shotgun’s bare back, riding leisurely around the corral. He rushed down, scared that I would get hurt, and quickly saw that Shotgun treated me with tenderness and gentleness, a side of the horse he had never even once seen. From then on, he was my horse. I would ride him in the neighboring ranch, I would sit on him bareback and just talk to him, and I would spend hours standing by his side and swatting away flies for him in the summer. Shotgun was steady, loving, and sweet with me.
Nature and animals (when I was young, we had three dogs) were my friends. We had a barn cat named Frida, and I would refer to her as my sister in my mind. We were always together, always chit-chatting. When I wasn’t with animals, or, actually, even when I was, I was reading stories of adventures. Or I was writing short stories about adventures. Or, I was writing them in my mind. My two favorite fantasies were:
I was a hobbit on a quest in Middle Earth, traipsing around arroyos and the creek and through long grass.
A green fairy found me and invited me to go up the stairs and led me to her palace in the clouds. Yes, I now like new adult Faerie romance.
And, of course, the floor is lava. If you’re wondering if I enjoyed learning the nonsensical rules of True American when I got older, the drinking game from New Girl, then you would be so right.
These things, and my silly sense of humor that I have never parted with, were my blessings.
hibernation but also the sweetness of play
I have been feeling the sweetness of solitude in winter, especially since the first week of winter is usually the time of connection, celebration, and warmth in the cold around the hearth, literal or symbolic. The holidays passed, and so too did my energy or motivation to be in groups or loud places. I want to be quiet, cozy, mostly alone but sometimes with one other person I know very well. And always with my dogs, of course. I just want to drink tea instead of my beloved oat milk vanilla lattes, and I really don’t want to have plans after dark, unless those plans are reading in my bed.
The fox can teach us that it’s okay to be alone in winter, especially at this time. The days might have started getting longer, but we aren’t noticing yet. The air is the coldest it will be all year (global warming permitting). Our bodies are tired after a busy holiday season (and year) (and life). Colds and flus and COVID and stomach bugs are making us sick and forcing us to slow down. We are (probably, except for the athletic amongst us) switching our movement routines to something inside.
And that’s okay.
We are communal creatures, and we need connection to live. But playing outside together can wait until the time before spring blooms: the time of year when the world is still slow and still, but the sun feels a little warmer, the days finally feel longer, and maybe even the buds or whispers of new life are popping up around us. The time where, hopefully, we feel rested and rejuvenated, and craving jovial celebration once again.
the mask of fitting in art of being and belonging
Foxes are not concerned with how they are being perceived, if they are good enough, or if they’re successfully earning their love or not. They are concerned with the now, the present, with the natural state that is just being. They don’t use their limited energy to scan the room and see how everyone else is behaving and then contort themselves until they are more palatable for those around them. They are animals, not school children seeing how they can appeal to the most popular kid in their class or how to stop being labeled as the weird one. (Or was that just me?)
They are not like little girls, talked out of their power and their hunger and their desires and their strength and their silly, free joy.
your heart was meant to be wild, babe, not tamed
This passage, which got cut off in the photo, is about a childhood memory of Mary that describes a fox at her cousin’s house that was collared and chained outside. Foxes are not meant for chains or the life of a domestic pet (although I don’t agree with having a pet chained outside either, but you catch my point, I hope). They are meant for the cranberry patches. They are meant to use their legs and roam and run and reach and race.
And what about us? How many of us are living lives in chains? How many of us wish to leap and pounce, and follow a butterfly into the trees?
Dear reader, dear fox heart, when was the last time you lept and pounced?
Can you even remember?
Foxes are not happy being collared and leashed.
Neither are people.
(Unless it’s a kink thing, in which case, get it, but I mean it metaphorically.)
Foxes are happy when they’re wild.
And so are people.
you have the power to write your life like a spell book and act it out like it’s a screenplay
Many times, I write what I know, I write what I’m feeling, I write what I already believe, what I’ve already perceived.
But how many times do I write what I hope, what I wish, what I aim to believe? How many times do I write just for the thrill of it, for the silliness, for the dreams I don’t acknowledge or terrify me with their raw beauty and audacity?
How often do you open your journal, and instead of recounting your day, your sorrows, your to-do list, you write down your dreams like they are spells with the possibility of creating the life you want to be in?
No one has the same reality as someone else, so why don’t you make yours one that you like? Not in a toxic positivity way. Not in a creepy scammy Instagram spirituality/finance coach way that will charge you $5,555 to teach you how to be rich based on your vibes way. Not in an ignore your problems or the world’s problems spiritual bypassing way.
But in a, you’re the author of the story of your life and you control how you (the main character) reacts to things that happen in the plot, kind of way. In a, you get to describe the setting and include or omit details based on your purpose, kind of way.
In a, you’re literally a sorcerer kind of way.
don’t wait for life to invite you to live - choose to live every moment
When we become the fox, we become wild, free, uninhibited, and things that most humans don’t easily embody, but were born with. We are born with whimsy and curiosity and neutrality.
Society uses its chains and collars and tells us to change (and not in a sexy way).
But, no matter the inputs or advice or rules or expectations from other people, your life is your life.
treat your heart like it’s your home, because it is
I have been pondering how to come back home to myself these days. To curl my feet under my lap by the fire of my heart and let my weary muscles relax as I drink hot chocolate, marshmallows and whipped cream and all.
What does it mean to decorate your home with paintings and art?
What does it mean to re-stock your pantry with the foods it needs?
What does it mean to pick wildflowers on a walk and put them in a vase in the living room?
Your body is the only constant home you will have when you’re on this earth.
Your body, your home, doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be muscular and toned, perfectly plucked and smooth, or match any body you see on your phone screen.
Speaking of phones, my inner home doesn’t have cell service, does yours?
The tender fox in my heart doesn’t know how to scroll Instagram, does yours?
My form is muscles that can move and build and climb and walk and lift. My form is my heart that feels tenderness and care and love. My form is my mind and all the ways it makes sense and nonsense of the world and my unique way of seeing my own reality. My form is limbs that can hold and reach. My form is my hands that can touch and grasp and comfort and explore. My form is my flesh that can feel and be tended to and is not so different from the flesh of my animal community. My form is my eyes that see and take in beauty and devastation and disasters and miracles.
What is your form?
we don’t visit nature, we are nature (we just forget)
When will we humans remember that we are not separate from nature, but that we are nature? The blood in my veins is not so different from the blood of a fox, or a kitten, or the web of rivers, or the tendrils of the mushrooms under the tree roots. The air I breathe is the air that sustains lions, coyotes, trees, and grass. The sunshine that hits my face is the same sunshine that feeds flowers, warms the skins of snakes, and my dog basks in.
So, my dearest fox heart, live your life with these rules:
just be, don’t perform.
you and you alone decide your actions, your beliefs, and your words.
your body, your mind, your spirit, are your home. tend to your home.
live a life that feels right to you, and you only.
let your animal body connect with nature and learn how your rhythms mirror the rhythms of the earth.
don’t take yourself too seriously.
laugh more.
your intuition is loud, if only you listen.
And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine, I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. - Mary Oliver, Staying Alive
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I just love this so much 💖