Bones bared beneath the shifting skies

Shapeshifter fox, changing light

It is the light that holds me, still on the raised path in the woods. Beside me, a long ditch, once a boundary marker between counties, now a leaf filled, half forgotten dip beneath the trees. Overhead, the wind rustles the leaves, sways the branches. Every leaf dances. And the light - the light itself is changing. As the clouds scud by it falls dull, then the cotton wool thins and it is bright again, dazzling. The light moves and the branches move and the leaves along the branches move, and down here, at the foot of these tall old trees, at the top of the ditch, I stand and watch as light plays out over the twisted roots sticking up through the hard-baked earth.

The past few weeks have been sun and rain, cloud and drizzle, impossible heat and torrential downpours. Everything, all at once. Everything, all the time. It confuses us, this changeability, but isn’t this just the natural order of things? Why are we, as humans, so set on something being just as it is, fixable, predictable, certain? The only thing we can rely on is change.

I keep walking through the woods. I can hear only forest sounds - the wind as a great tree-top rush, the crackling of dried leaves, the sound of my footsteps on the dried out mud. I meet the occasional dog and walker. I find the ribs and spine of a fox, tail still attached and firey. I stand, transfixed for a time, by the knobbles of spine, by the push pull of disgust and delight, fear and fascination. This is a dead thing, but it also a thing that once lived. Look, how perfectly the bones fit together. Look, that delicate curve that once caged a beating heart. Look, still, the glow of that fur, discarded, left behind. Where is the line between beauty and nastiness? Death is all around us, and all of us are dying, yet we do not like to look at it. Too confronting.

Further on, another fox. Alive. Alive this time, running across my path, under the fence at the back of someone’s garden, across the path and into the undergrowth. One quick glance thrown my way - the white puff of fur on its chest, the nose tilted for scent, the bright eyes, the red fire. Always the red fire. One of you, I think after it has gone, one of you back there is ended. And here you are, squeezing through the smallest spaces, bristling with life.

Traditionally the fox has been thought of as the trickster. Cunning, clever. Wily. Hard to pin down, impossible to trust. Always shifty, always shifting. There is something of the otherworld about this one, a knowing. The dark glint of a briefly glimpsed eye. If I were to turn back, to look for the bones that tell, not only of death but of life lived, would those bones still be there? Not in a story, they would not. In a story I would return, retrace my footsteps, needing something from the bones. Looking for something, for some answer or reward, and the bones - they would be gone. Carried away? Or come back to life? Perhaps come back as the fox I just saw, curious, tricksy, so alive. The light would be shifting, those dancing leaves, those dancing trees, that dancing breeze, would play shadow and light over the bare earth where the bones once lay.

So I won’t go back, won’t look for the answers. It is better to keep the belief, sometimes, in the shape of stories. Instead, I will turn for home, thinking about light and about stories, and I will hope that, even while death is no ending, somehow those bones are gone. Somehow those bones got up on their own and wandered off to a find a whole new kind of life.

If you can support my work with a subscription, paid or not, it would mean the world. Or, if you liked this, why not sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi? It’s hard to earn a creative living and every little helps! And in other news, see below for a video of the magical shifting light below the trees…