Mab of Dream

'She had found a tiny fox kit that had somehow wandered too far from mother and den and had frozen to death in the night. Its small cries must have been too weak for the vixen to hear - or perhaps the proximity of humans had frightened her away.

Now, Maeve held the tiny body in her two hands, cradling it against her breast as if to give it back some of its vanished warmth. And she was crying...'

'On Ravens's Wing' by Morgan Llywelyn

I remember last summer, when Georgia entered my room for the first time. She had a quick glance into the room, then I saw her gaze drawn to the fish tank and, around it, the foxes. She looked up at me, with that fondly quizzical look I've come to know and love in her, and just said, 'Foxes?' I nodded and replied, 'Yes'. I could have explained more, but I didn't know where to start, and it wasn't needful. She just nodded and that was that. I felt as though she knew something instinctively that she hadn't known before and it saved me the words. A little part of me had never loved Georgia more than at that moment. I've never asked her on it. She might have just been distracted then; or she might have 'got' it.

So I'll start there and I have no idea where this blog is going or if it's even worth the reading. But I'll start there, with a passage from a book about the Morrighan where she, in her aspect as Maeve (Mab), shows that she too is capable of human emotion and caring; and with Georgia spotting the foxes and knowing enough to both ask and not ask. Of course, I was already a priestess of Morrighan when I first read 'On Raven's Wing', and the thing with the foxes had already been going on for years.

There once was a time when what happened to the fox happened to me too. Friends would distract me away from kills on the road, so that I wouldn't see them and freak out over my own mortality. But I'd forgotten my own name then. Before that still, at school, I was writing to government to try and get fox-hunting banned. It was always the fox above all other. Back in the early 90s, things got mixed up in my head - I thought it was me the hunters were after. A woman once told me that I'm not human to the soul, I'm half-fox, half-fey, and when people look in my eyes it's the fox they see, but don't get it. They expect human; the witchy types half-expect fey; but they see the fox and that's why I get so many comments. I still don't know precisely what she meant, or if it was the drugs, or real, or madness, or a dream. Mab'd know. She does dreams.

I have a story. Once upon a time, when the Celts were invading what is known now as Britain, the greatest of the Temenachs got together to oversee a Great Rite. It was supposed to produce a child to save the fey from the Celts, but mid-rite a vixen appeared and her essense got mixed into the energy too. The child was born, raised as priestess and warrior, but was killed too young. Too young to have actually stopped the occupation of the Celtic tribes and so the fey went underground and much was lost. Pulled from the ether instead of from the higher soul as ordinary people are, still this soul went on and on, from one incarnation to the next. And I'm it.

That's the short version anyway. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I've known that story for a decade now and it was told to me at just about precisely the wrong time in my life. I'm not sure I believe it. I'm not sure I don't. But there it is. I mainly don't even think about it. If it is true, then it's not a very good story - I didn't get to save the world whatever the fuss and palaver of my creation; plus it's a terrible idea. There's no-one more cursed that those who believe they are unlike all the rest.

So there's the madness, the activism and the mysticism covered. The collection? I can't remember how old I was when I bought the first one, but I was a child. There's not actually that many foxes here... I can see 18 from here, without moving to count them properly... but looking around the shops it's quite uncommon to come across a fox in anything. You tend to get cats, dragons, pigs and the such like, but only occasionally a fox. I seem to have been collecting them all my life. Oh! And my nickname at school was Foxy, because one of the teachers reckoned I look like Foxy from the 'Topper' comic. Thing is that was a complete coincidence, because he didn't know about all the foxes and I hadn't started with the fox-hunting petitions then.

Then there's the something else. Very, very occasionally you'll see a fox out on the streets here. VERY occasionally. If it happens once every two or three years, you're lucky, but they have always turned up at moments when I should be paying attention. There were was a fox one night in the grounds of the Vicarage; there was that time over in Kiddie, when the foxes in the Wyre Forest all suddenly starting calling, a ghostly, eerie sound filling the night and having the four of us just rooted to the ground staring at the forest and listening; there are the handful of times when one has run out over the road and I've emergency stopped.

But most of all there was the time that the vixen trusted me with her kit. The weirdest summer of my life and me up a tree, reading. I looked up to see how far the sun had got with its setting, when a shape darted out of the grass. It was a kit, with the fox right behind it. I watched, absolutely spellbound, as they played there for ages, then the vixen appeared. All three came towards me, still up my tree. The kit and fox running, the vixen just trotting along, and they all stopped, right below me. The vixen came to the foot of the tree, with her family totally oblivious to my presense, and she stared up at me. For the longest time, we were just there, looking into each other's eyes, with about ten foot separating us, and me willing the message with everything I'd got that her kit was safe from me. I wouldn't hurt any of them and I'd protect them. All the time the sun setting beyond us. It was magical, a time between the times. After a few minutes or a year, she turned and walked the other side of the clearing, the other side of her family, and for about five or ten minutes, they all carried on playing. Then she barked, looked up at me, and led her family into the trees.

A couple of days ago, I was trying to find the Goddess and cursing the world for being the scientific cardboard that some folk had always said it was, devoid of the Mysteries. I was driving down Streets Lane, when a vixen ran out in front of my car. I slammed the brakes on and missed her completely. She waited for a few seconds at the side of the road, staring at my car, but it was dark and by the time I'd turned around to see her properly, instead of through my mirror, she'd fled into the estate. Until then, the only thing connecting me with the Mysteries, Wicca, any of it was the list I was doing for the Witch Lessons - things which make me feel witchy. I was coming to the conclusion that I ought to hand my athame in, in exchange for a white coat and bunsen burner, but that vixen gave me pause. I went to Witchgrove instead. A couple of blogs back, you'll see that I couldn't find the priestess or the hope I was after. Last night, I did.

But that night after the vixen, scouring the Grove for any sign that the Goddess still existed, I whispered my, perhaps (in the circumstances), final question to the Goddess. It wouldn't make any sense if I repeated the question, for it needs all the things I can't tell, because I haven't the words to. But in a nutshell, is there any hope for the fox now?

I thought she'd responded. The Grove came through for me last night, and I woke this morning feeling like the world was back in its place.

Then tonight, Tarna posted that she has a new dog called Foxxie Seren. Foxxie Star... Foxxie Hope. Foxy hope.

I hope I got enough in here for those who need to know what I'm saying to have heard it. It's not something I've really tried to tell before and it sounds like madness or illusion at best; arrogance or hyperbole at worst. I'm just trying to tell things that I don't totally understand myself. But it's deep inside me, very deep.

yours
mab
xxxxx