Tag: Doodles

Foxes, Archetypes, and Escape

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Lately I’ve been thinking about foxes. While walking my dog Red through the neighborhood, we saw (or smelled from Red’s point of view) a fox sunning itself in the middle of the street with a carefree attitude. It lifted its hind leg to scratch an ear as we approached. The mail carrier driving by said he sees that fox and others regularly in different parts of the neighborhood.

A large tract of farmland adjacent to our suburban street was sold a few years ago. A sizable woodland was plowed over and turned into another subdivision, so many of the animals that used to live there have had to migrate. In the last week or so I’ve encountered, wild turkeys, coyotes, Canada geese, mallard ducks, and now, this fox.

My good friend, probably the one friend who has helped me the most to get through this pandemic in a creative and soulful way, taught a few of us how to draw a fox, and as usual, I combined my drawing with words and images inspired from archetype decks.

Fox as shapeshifter, shaman, an elusive, cunning, trickster
A more traditional fox combined with the archetype “Myth”

In western folktales, the fox is often depicted as the villain who violates the hen house, or else the concept is applied to women as “foxy ladies” in songs.

I’ve read a bit about the Japanese tales of the kitsune, and a while back I wrote this poem below that incorporates one of kitsune stories. It doesn’t feel like a finished piece to me, and I’ve since poached lines from it to include in other poems, but it does speak to a certain desire I’ve always had to journey on my own, to enter the wilderness of the world as a solo entity without protection from the structures of society.

The Fox Wife Leaves Her Husband a Note On the Kitchen Table

How to explain this need to flee our home.
She might have entered the half-moons of my fingernails
Or could it be that, when I unzipped my human sheath
To find her in my body, she had always lived here.
When the dog bared its teeth and growled
You laughed it off, but she, the one inside me,
Stopped eating. Sleepless, she stares
At the silhouette of pine branches under the moonlight, 
blue-black fan of needles on the hard snow. 
I've asked her not to leave, this fox inside me, 
but once a dog bites, it doesn’t forget the taste of blood. I’ve left milk and rice for you and the boy. 
Remember to make a paste of his meat before you feed him.
One night, I might return, if the vixen in me desires.

Joy Harjo

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I had the good fortune to attend both a reading and a workshop given by poet, musician, and writer Joy Harjo.

She came to the 41st annual Agnes Scott Writers Festival as a poetry judge, and she chose my work as the winning poem.

In the Agnes Scott theater, Harjo enchanted the audience with her poems, her children’s story, excerpts from her newly launched memoir, and Polynesian songs she sang and played on a ukelele.

Although the reading was joyous and celebratory, there was an undercurrent of mourning, because Joy Harjo had dedicated the night to her poet mentor and friend, Adrienne Rich.

The next day the poetry finalists met with Ms. Harjo to talk about our poems. She asked us to share what we thought were areas where we could strengthen our work, and she offered suggestions for revisions.

She admitted to the group that she was very much saddened by the passing of Adrienne Rich, and that the previous night’s dedication to her beloved mentor had taken a good deal of emotional energy.

She encouraged us to accept that death is real and that young poets should not succumb to the allure of suicide, as many poets and artists have done in decades past.

Of course, I am not a younger poet. I am a newly public writer who is not young. But some of the other finalists were in undergraduate writing programs, and a few of their poems were quite melancholy. It was good for all of us to hear Harjo’s wise words.

Adah Menken

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This doodle is the first in a series I’m starting titled “poets across the decades.” Just today I learned of Adah Menken from a friend who is writing her dissertation about this poet and actress.

Adah Menken’s poem “Infelix” can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

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Although her life ended during her Jesus year, she wrote an autobiography and a collection of poems, acted on Broadway and in Europe, and married four times.

Napkin Art

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My new nickname for Philosopher is Sadhu, Sanskrit for “spiritual seeker.” I think the word might be similar to the Buddhist “bodhisattva.”

My younger son Freeboarder is leaving for art school in a few days. His nickname remains the same. As I write this post he’s somewhere in the city doing ollies with his new board.

Sadhu came over to stain the deck for us, and he left some napkin art in his wake.

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Do you notice the resemblance between his doodle and the 18th century headstone I saw recently in the Berkshires? When he was a very young child, we went to this cemetery while we were walking up Cone Hill.

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