Encounter With a Fox
Image by Federico Di Dio.
First, I heard the scream. The eldritch sound reverberated from the trees all around me and across the narrow valley through which I was walking the path. A shiver ran the length of my spine. I had heard nothing like it before, it was both wild and ethereal. I was alone in the woods, at that liminal time when summer's greenery is turning over into the faded golden beauty of autumn. I could still hear the noise of motorway traffic, not far off, but even so the world of cars and people already felt as if it existed in some other, parallel dimension.
The scream was the sound of a veil being pierced. And then, quite abruptly and as if materialising from thin air, the fox was there, right in front of me. Maybe a mere three or four feet away. The fox froze in place. I froze in place. The fox looked at me with eyes of gold. The woodland may have paused in its breathing for a moment, too.
Scientific studies have shown that forests, the trees and plants, have their own forms of consciousness. That the woodland is bound together by a web of communication and mutual support, threads of mycorrhizal fungi beneath the surface helping to make the woodland a kind of collective consciousness that has been described as “the woodwide web”. In that space, for those few moments with the fox, it felt as if both she and I were also an integral part of that web, not separate but drawn together. My physical senses seemed sharper, somehow expanded.
Later, when I had come away from that place, I had to wonder if that expanded consciousness (fallen away, back to a normal state, by then) was something that the fox always knows as intrinsic to the nature of being a fox. Something that I could only hope to know in such liminal moments as I had experienced in my unexpected encounter with her.
Wildness is often used in our modern languages to suggest chaos, disorder. But I was granted insight in those few seconds, I think, into another kind of order that we supposedly civilised humans have lost, and that we struggle to recover.
Synchronicities such as my meeting with that fox in the woods can sometimes jolt us out of the mundane and, albeit briefly, into a space “between worlds”. The human problem of perception is that in general, the human eye creates an image of an apparent outer reality, but is unable to see deeper than that. And then the limitations of the human mind work to elaborate upon the limited visual impression.
“It is not as easy to see things as people believe. They are obfuscated by previous readings and 'images', filled with ready-made premises and accumulated usages. It is a struggle to free the word from these prior associations in order to be able to see it for the first time. We must read things (look at them) with the innocent eyes of a child, so that we can write them or represent them in their original pure state.” (FN1)
Adonis, the great Syrian poet, made the above observation in the process of relating Sufi mysticism to the Surrealists' objective search for “the Marvellous”, but it has a wider resonance. Our capacity to break through external appearances and experience the “reality beyond reality” comes in moments of revelation that are outside the capacity of our human languages, whether verbal or visual, to record and express them adequately. Thus the unceasing quest of the poet and artist, of course.
As practising Pagans, we lay out our Circles and our Compasses and build our Temples; we mark the turning of the great Wheel in its seasons and its rhythms, the ebb and flow of Light and Dark. But all this – the rituals, the mythic structures, the seeking of harmonisation with Land and Nature, even the sense of identity – are not sufficient in themselves. The real deep matter of Pagan spirituality is held in those moments of revelation that may come unexpectedly. They may come within the Circle, the Compass or the Temple. They may come in the heart of a ritual. Or they may come when we are alone in the woods, in an unexpected meeting with a fox.
FN1– Adonis, Sufism & Surrealism, 'Vision and Image: The Naked Eye and the Eye of the Heart', para.10.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).