‘The closing moment of the year, and something happened…’
A midwinter guest post from Nina MacLaughlin
Hello,
The winter solstice begins today, with the sun setting - disconcertingly early - on the longest night. To mark this liminal moment we have a guest post from Nina MacLaughlin, full of wild hibernal beauty. Nina is the author of Hammer Head: the making of a carpenter, Wake, Siren: Ovid resung, Summer Solstice and, most recently, Winter Solstice.
Bright-dim afternoon, the light was gauzy-grey, sky the color of a shiver. A mild, quiet December day and I was away from home. In an afternoon lull, I took a run to move the blood, miles on farm roads. Stone walls, silos, barns, a wide flat field to the west, and wide fields sloping to the tidal river to the east. An ocean close, sensed in the lungs, and in the magnetic way the body knows where ocean is.
A mild, quiet December day, the closing moments of the year, and something happened.
A mile or so from the house, some movement ahead on the road and a fox came into focus. There it was, ahead, 20 yards. It stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me. I stopped on the side of the road and looked at it. Then it turned and ran, right down the yellow lines. I followed.
Thirty seconds, a minute, two, who knows. It stopped, looked back at me, and then kept running. An easy loping pace, this sleek orange flame against the yellow lines. Skeleton, muscle, fur, yes, and also: a ripple of heat. This low-down animal, its tail tipped white with grey, candleflame on the wick, fire-fleet, and moving. Then it stopped again, there on the yellow lines, it looked at me. Come, it seemed to say, come, keep coming.
I did.
Here we were on the road, farms every evidence of human's control over nature; we were not in glen or forest dense and dim. A driveway there, a fat shiny car, chimney smoke, little lights on a wreath, even the stone walls showed the hand of human work and our arbitrary, imbecilic idea of boundary.
As we ran, these delineations started to dissolve.
It was a fox, a fox, a fox, a fact as true as the slugs I sometimes see on the sidewalk on summer morning walks in Cambridge where I live. Pure animal. And it was more, this flame, this guide, keep coming, animal and energy. Force and substance both. A flesh-blood creature and a loping potency taking its place at the center of things, defying the boundary and uniting two sides. The stone walls didn't matter, the road, the yellow lines, the driveways didn't matter. Our human movement of time didn't matter. The world was getting wilder.
And then a third time it stopped, turned, faced me. This animal, this flame in the street and I, I cheek-flushed and breathing fast. We looked at each other, and for seconds, an epoch, eternity, who knows how long, it was only the two of us in all existence. A shared heat, an awareness — only, total — of each other. Not the sky, not the hawk, not the rabbits, squirrel, or deer. Not the silent tractor in the field nor the wooden fence nor the greenhouse or road sign or mailbox. And inside this moment, for an even smaller mote of time, immense and nothing, we were not two, the fox and I, but one. Time dissolves, the regular flow deregulates, and the boundaries slip away. “Out of time, out of space, before the fire, our being is no longer chained to a being-there,” writes Gaston Bachelard. So it was. I was before the fire and the chains gave way.
Time returned and the fox veered left off the road. I caught up enough to see its tail slip behind a silo, woods making a darkening wall behind it. The question moved across my mind: keep following?
But no. It had showed me what it needed to, had set the pace and way, and I was not meant to tail it into the forest.
It was fox and more than fox. Beyond that, I can't explain what happened on that December day. I only know that this dark moment of the year, this long-nighted solstice-close time of charge and mystery, offers these encounters. A candle flickers on the windowsill. The stars burn pinprick holes through the blanket of these nights. Our private fires smolder inside ourselves, here near the longest night of the year. These fires melt the boundaries and light the dark. In the presence of these flames, feel the chains give way. Let them. Then, for moments, tiny magnificent frightening joyful moments, being there becomes being everywhere.
You can buy Winter Solstice at all good bookstores, including online here in the US, or preorder here in the UK for 4th January.
Take care,
Katherine
Coming up at The Clearing
Events for paid subscribers
January’s True Stories Book Club with Sharon Salzberg talking about Finding Your Way
I’ll be chatting with the always-wise Sharon Salzberg about her book of meditations to find gentler suggestions for New Year reform than all those punitive resolutions.
11th January 2024, 7pm UK
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This reminds me of an encounter I also had with a fox about 3 weeks ago, on an icy Saturday night. Such wonderful spirit animals, I'm still trying to work out what it meant!
So very lovely--