In the early days of the pandemic I had a wild encounter with Martin Shaw’s telling of the fox woman, who left the lonely hunter—who she very much loved—in the dead of night. Yes, the two were in love. But every night she’d come in and hang her pelt on the door. And its strong scent progressively bugged him.
In the early days of love we tend to minimize stenches. As poet Mikael Jibril has written, “falling in love…can be magical, everything is new; but over time we encounter each other’s wounds, flaws of character, sabotaging habits, limitations…and we don’t always know what to do with that, because it conflicts with the perfect image in our mind.1”
As Shaw tells it, one night over dinner the hunter says to fox woman, “When I met you I thought the moon herself had fallen out of the sky into a bed of wildflowers, and was singing an old tune I had waited my whole life to hear. But there’s just this one thing…”
The disappointment she feels when he confronts her about her pelt is tremendous. It’s just how I felt when an ex once told me—a writer by trade and by calling—that he hated the sound of typing. Because the pelt is a part of her, this moment marks her entry into a sort of crucible. Will she hold on to herself, or become lost?
In a 1987 lecture called “What is the creative act?” philosopher Gilles Deleuze says, “beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dreams you are done for!2” Maybe fox woman was at that lecture, because she seems to know right away that she’s caught in the hunter’s dream of who he hoped she might be. And since she can see this, she has choices.
She refuses to change. She continues to hang the pelt on the door. As time goes on, the smell of the pelt bothers him more and more and more and more. Until one night, he can’t take it anymore. He slams his fist on the table and demands she get rid of it. They go to sleep that night hiding. Burning, ashamed, backs turned.
By daybreak, fox woman is gone. And as Martin Shaw tells it, “the pelt was gone, the scent was gone, and they say—and say truly—to this day, the hunter stands lonely in his whole body at the entrance of the hut for the scent of the fox woman.”
Leaving like that over something like that is not easy. But we all have limits, don’t we? Non-negotiables, things we can’t change, and things we probably could, but don’t want to. In my experience it takes time to know them. And once we do, we can be like fox woman. Not about to get stuck in the other’s dream, drowning.
Around the Capricorn new moon I pulled two cards from Kim Krans’ Archetypes deck, which a friend gave me in Berkeley last spring. I pulled Mother and Crone, but could not entertain them. They sat for days on my desk unengaged. When the new moon was exact I put them back in the deck, reshuffled, and pulled: The Mother, The Crone.
Some light digging on the crone yielded some useful things. It seems common to imagine her as having to do with trust in oneself, relinquishing deference, and knowing how to let go. The crone seems often associated with endings and death, and I learned that in the Motherpeace Tarot she replaces the hermit. That detail was helpful for me, since the ninth letter in Meditations on the Tarot is one of my favorites.