fox in the wind

What a week it's been!

Took some junior spirit animal adventurers (my children) to Greenfield Lake on Friday to tailgate the Pink Floyd cover band and laser light show.  They hid a little bear.  I have no idea where, but I know it kept them busy for a good ten minutes.  Bears are starting to come out of their dens a little now.

Saturday night, Wildbeings attended the launch party for C'est La Guerre at the Goat and Compass. Somewhere between 10 and 15 little beasts left my nest.

So this is the thing: I enjoy beer.  I really do.  And on this night, I also enjoyed some sort of vodka-ginger-beer concoction.  I was wearing a creepy-cool fox mask and a REAL fox tail.  Everyone was wearing animal masks.  French pop music.  Four legs good, two legs bad.  Well, I hope you can understand how things are a little fuzzy.  Here's what I remember:

I gave a girl with an owl tattoo an owl before seeing the tattoo.  I gave an otter and a narwhal to people I've been looking for.  I gave a guy with a big beard a beet.  Yup, a beet.  (We're outsider art, man.)  And I hid a bunch of animals in hay and corners and pockets.  Gave some to the artists.  And then, who knows?  Apparently, I ventured across town, gave away my fox mask, and came home way too late, soaked in beer (presumably my own.)  It was a big night for those of us in the animal spirit business.

Wildbeings has some other big things going on in the next few weeks-- but for now, I'm thinking I might need to lay low-- or maybe start hanging out on the other side of town until that whole Fox on the Town Night blows over.

Spring! Always gets me.

The season of the fox

It's Wednesday!

This Spring season has taken off like a fireball phoenix.  Here at Wildbeings, we've been globetrotting, making friends, spreading our wings and growing our brains.  This is the time of year to let the string out a little on your kite.

We've been busy beavers, busy bees.  We've gifted a few hedgehogs, a mole, and a screaming weasel in the past few weeks-- plenty of folks out there who are just cracking open their wind-in-the-willow-style underground habitats and noticing the sunshine and fair weather. (Rain is fair, folks.  Just ask my cucumbers.)  Some of these animals might appear day-drunk in the next month or so.  Northerners are especially at risk.  Embrace it!  Spring drunk!  We love it!  Hibernating animals, this is your final wake-up call!      

If you follow us on facebook, you may have noticed that we've been a little fox-obsessed.  For one thing-- maybe I'm a fox.  Or a coyote.  This is what I was told during a spirit animal reading I had ages ago.  And it feels true.  I'm tricky, for sure.  And I once had a coyote approach me, wet and skinny, in Joshua Tree.  And this month I was lucky lucky lucky enough to have a fox den on my property.  In an urban area!  And as if that wasn't amazing enough, there were BABIES.  Fox kits-- 5 of them-- that got washed out of the drainpipe in a storm.  One little barking alpha bugger bit my finger!  Which made me fall in love, of course.  So Wildbeings is maybe a little fox-brained, as usual, this spring.  Bear with us.  (No pun intended, we love bears, but they're more summer animals.)

We just returned from Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival where we managed to get a little tiny ceramic house on stage for the Wood Brothers.  I know a house is not an animal-- but it kind of is!  They're the Brothers Wood, for crying out loud, they should get it.  And they were incredible by the way-- even in the mud and rain. 

We traded a shaman-style fox with our friends at Twisted Bliss Designs-- as we do every year-- for a couple of nice sparkly rocks.  And we traded a weird little hedgehog for a dashboard dancing sunflower.  And we slipped a whistling turtle into some whistling guy's beer.

But now the fun really begins!

This Saturday night Wildbeings will be doing our first ever PLANNED event.  We will be at the Goat and Compass supporting outsider art in Wilmington.  We love outsider art.  We ARE outsider art!  Come on down and find your spirit animal.   Or better, let your spirit animal find you!     

And as if that's not enough: watch out for us in an upcoming issue of Salt Magazine.  An amazing fan has nominated us as a "Port City Muse."  Which I might argue-- it's more like you folks are the muses, what with your weird animal selves.  But whatever, I'll take it!

So I'll be out and about today slipping the last of this batch in your pockets and purses and unattended hoodies-- while a new batch holds itself together in the kiln, warming up for the weekend.

If love and light has a season, friends, this is it!