Crazy like a fox

I got interested today in an article in a National Geographic about domesticating animals, especially the part about breeding foxes to produce tame, loving foxlets.  It works.  Some people have them as pets.  But here was the interesting thing to me: in one experiment, a cub's mother for some reason couldn't raise him, so he was raised by a tame fox.  But he didn't learn any of the tameness - he just stayed a wild fox, true to his DNA. 

You hear about wild foxes in Zen, and if you are interested, there is a long, erudite article on Wikipedia about a famous koan, Pai-chang's Fox.  This is beside the point, but it is clear that it being a fox is not considered a desirable reincarnation.  There is reference to "the deeply embedded Asian folklore stereotype that 'there is something occultly nasty about an oriental fox,' as Robert Aitken notes."

But that's not my concern, except to marvel quietly at all the textual exegesis Zen has gotten itself into over the years since its patriarchs burned the scriptures and the wooden buddhas and said, Just this. I don't mind at all if people want to involve themselves in this instead of molecular cooking and visiting all 48 states, I mean 50 states (they changed it when I was little); I don't mind except when some ardent student of Zen corrects my understanding.  That riles me, I can't help it. It seems to be in my DNA.  Here is my general understanding of all religion and good manners:  It's not nice to make other people feel stupid. 

My concern is about the fox breeding experiment, and the practical application of its findings into my own small life, and yours, and the lives of all the friends I have seen quit meditating and go on trying to be tame.  In particular, I care about my life, which has been devoted for a long time to not suffering so much.  To some degree, I have learned to accept the suffering that is not optional but built into the bipolar temperament, the depression that is about nothing, caused by nothing, just karmic, but still heavy, sometimes brutal.

And after all these years of practice, and the years of preliminary practices, from literary studies to yoga to tarot to dream study to therapy, am I a tame fox?  Not at all.  In fact, I detect within myself today that 11-year-old, in a sense, pre-conscious, an idle dreamy child with no ambition and the sense that most work - such as dusting the rungs of the dining room chairs - didn't make sense.  Warped undoubtedly by an insane father, yet unsure that his insanity was entirely caused by The War (the big one), because all his siblings were awful, too, and they weren't soldiers. So maybe it goes back and back in the DNA, back in karma, the drunken Irish Poet temperament, call it, the poetic suffering replicated generation after generation in the DNA.

It's been a long journey back to that little wild fox.  But I live in a nicer house now, and I have a steady boyfriend, okay, husband, some nice friends, a good cat, rather more equanimity about it all.  Still all my own teeth.  And I think life is not about being good and tame, not even about being the best little wild fox you possibly can.  No no no.  It's just, okay, be yourself.  An aimless little wild fox. 

Encounters with foxes

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

One September when we were at Grailville on retreat, there was a young fox wandering the grounds. It was clearly orphaned, and was relatively comfortable with people at a distance, though they couldn't lure it into a carrier to take it to the vet and get shots. One sunny afternoon, it was fooling around in the big yard in front of the meditation hall when we came out. I sat down on the grass about 20 feet from it and slowly did my yoga, feeling very companionable, thinking affectionately about the fox who is tamed in The Little Prince. The fox didn't mind me at all. Yoga was probably the most natural thing it ever saw a human do.

This morning I was reading Robert Aitken's commentary on a Zen koan called "Pai-chang's Fox," and came to a charming anecdote of an encounter he had with a fox. Since we also have foxes in the ravine now, and have seen one standing beside the road, I can't resist posting this.

When I was living in LaCrescenta, California . . . on weekends I used to walk up a dirt road into the national forest. One day I came upon a fox - or a fox came upon me - where the road bent around a little ridge. She had come trotting down from above, and I appeared from below. We both stopped and looked at each other. At that moment the wind came up and blew a large piece of newspaper around and around on the road in a miniature cyclone. The fox jumped on this piece of paper and looked at me with a merry look in her eye. Then she stepped off the newspaper and it began to blow around again. She jumped on the paper again and looked at me, just as though she were inviting me to laugh at her great game. Suddenly conditions changed, and she ran back up the road. This encounter was truly an experience of grace.