RED FOX
As the March sun begins to set each evening, I go for a run in a small park near my Providence home. And each evening, a red fox arrows across my path. My heart erupts when I see her, feline/canine in this little island of wild. She is messenger; untamed, silent, horizontal, moving across the landscape like a beacon or a spirit.
This song was born of an excavation: into fragmentation and the subsequent mending. The exiled within impels me to inflict harms upon myself or else to fling evidence like weapons at innocent bystanders. I request assistance. I ask to receive insight that I cannot possibly dismiss. Sound is a pathway through these emotional landscapes; images emerge and from these, words. I am a lens. I am a white-feathered bird. I am a Red Fox.
As dusk crawls in, she darts across my path. I follow her until she fades beneath curtains of falling dark, the skirts of trees. She leads me down into the loam, waking me from the poisoned sleep of Briar Rose, thawing the dutiful Handless Maiden, (these who in a polarized miasma have silenced or sold themselves out of necessity, desperation, or ignorance, forgetting the power of the imagined and unseen).
Red Fox is the story of the underground spirit who brings death. It describes a resurrection; the reclamation of the non-ordinary soul, roots sunk in mud and blood. Like the Selkie or Swan Maiden, (women stolen out of their elements, their power in the form of pelt or feathers, hijacked by the rational thinking that keeps them captive) I had lost my coat. I paraded feathers. I ducked low hoping no-one would recognize the imposter. When I abandon this animal body, I abandon myself.
I believe that if we feel, acknowledge and accept our experience, compassion grows in us like a healthy vine. We are penetrated by and nourished by it. We will know the other as ourself. To feel deeply, to be vulnerable and to provide space within ourselves – for all of the ravenous, frightened, wrathful beasts as well as the beauties and the lovers – is revolutionary. When we learn how to watch, how to wait, how to listen; wounds heal. This is the soul-retrieval of poetry, the art of song; to reconcile the schisms, to recognize their essence, their presence, their gift. The fox represents alignment, a horizontal plane. She waits at the crossroads, bisecting the vertical, an elixir to the soldiers of rationality that trample dreams.
My musicianship is slow and incremental; I plunk around on keys or strings until I land a motif, then I improvise, capturing it with a recorder. There is a simpler version of this piece, but collaboration is often an important ingredient in my process. Eric Davis, (producer/arrangement) has added layer and instrumental depth to my rudimentary piano work and vocals. We exchanged tracks over the threads of the internet, Providence to Nashville.
I offer this song as a story, in the hope that it will open a landscape in the mind, revealing secrets or perhaps simply confirming that they exist, ready to unfold in the moonlight.