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| At the cricket concert |
Calling Spirit Fox
My grandson Wesley is three, and he is so curious! Where is the fox family, he wants to know. We are walking past the culvert that the mother, father, and three kits occupied in June on our way to look at a snake skin I found earlier in the vineyard.
They are have grown up, I answer, and they moved on. Now they live in other places.
I want to see them! he exclaims in that three year old way.
Let’s call them, I say. Close your eyes, picture them. Ask if they might visit us.
This isn’t what Wesley had in mind! I want to see them now! he pushes. But after a few seconds he adds, Maybe we will see them on the way back up!
And as we drive the mule ATV back to the house, imagination kicks in, a most important tool! (Remember what Einstein said: Imagination is more important than knowledge.) There’s the fox, Gramma! He’s running after us! And there’s another!
Ah! Spirit Fox!
Later after supper he calls me outside. Gramma, come listen to the crickets! and as we sit in the still warm, early November evening, we are immersed in a cricket concert and then—a great horned owl hoots!
Staring into the blackness of the meadow, we catch everything, our attention, sharpened. Sound reveals the magnitude of the unseen. Venus fluoresces in the southwest and occasionally Wind has a say or so. Imagination is our vehicle.
We need to project ourselves into the things around us, C. G. Jung said. My self is not confined to my body. It extends into … all the things around me. Without these things, I would not be myself; I would not be a human being (Jung Speaking, pp 202-3).
Tonight, humbled by the vault of heaven, the deep richnesses of oncoming night, and by the warm body of my grandson snuggled on my lap, I feel my humanness. Together we track sound into the meadow and the forest, riding the wind. Time is relative. In this space together, we catch a glimpse of what can be, what is to be, under the guidance of Spirit Fox.