By Tom Swift
November 1, 2025
You're heading home during a midnight stroll when you see a silhouette on the sidewalk. The diminutive figure is half a block away. You're walking west, the figure east. You wonder if it's a cat. But then there is something about the sight of a fox — even a fox you don't yet know is a fox — that tells you this isn't a creature you see on your city block every day.
You are separated from the outline in the shadow by an intersection. You live on the street in between. You pick up the pace to close the distance. The fox that you don't yet know is a fox but that definitely isn't a cat does the same — it runs straight toward you. You are excited and you are nervous. You want to see but you don't want to provoke. Just then a pair of headlights appear behind the fox on the street parallel to the sidewalk. For sure, yes, this is a fox and you feel the fox at the same moment also IDs you. The fox stops but only enough to pivot; immediately, the fox dashes in front of the approaching car — the headlights a camera flash that fully captures this gorgeous creature — across the street and into an alley.
You went on this late walk because you needed to move; you had stayed up to watch a West Coast game and, given your pair of matching hernias (one for each side of your body), not yet repaired but making themselves known, you do well to move and not so well when you don't for prolonged periods, like the length of a basketball game. Circulation is a decidedly good thing. You probably otherwise wouldn't have gone out at that hour, which is past your bedtime (even on a Friday night).
Yet — even before the fox's appearance — you are grateful that you did. Along the loop through the neighborhood, you wished goodnight to a cook as she left the backdoor of a neighborhood restaurant after close and cleanup; you observed through glass doors the last worker close down the old movie theater after the last show for the night; saw a black cat on its hindquarters on a front lawn, a sphinx surveying its kingdom; a pair of well-fed rabbits roaming a backyard; the memory, thanks to an empty yard, of a dog that always gets excited when she's out and you are near.
These scenes were extraordinary in their ordinariness — life alive, life as cinema. A healer friend told you the other day that before surgery a person sometimes experiences heightened consciousness. Maybe for that reason your senses infuse a keener response to this scene and especially to the sight of this unexpected and thrilling visitor. It is, anyway, an encounter worth contemplating.
Since you love symbols — and because, of course, all of life is about you — you look up meanings attributed to the fox from various cultural traditions and spiritual perspectives.
Common meanings include adaptability and cunning; and hidden knowledge or secrets. The nighttime setting amplifies the fox's association with mystery and the unseen. A fox, in your experience, this one included, always seems to be singular; nearly always seems to be alone. The way this scene unfolded, you alone, the fox alone, could suggest that a hidden truth is coming to light.
In many traditions, foxes are trickster figures. A fox approaching might warn you to be cautious of deception (from others or yourself) or remind you not to take things at face value.
In Japanese folklore, fox spirits (kitsune) can be benevolent guardians or mischievous shapeshifters. Celtic traditions often view foxes as guides through the spirit world. Native American perspectives vary by tribe, of course, but some emphasize the fox's wisdom and capacity for camouflage.
All of these are useful. However, three other meanings especially resonate at present:
- Feminine energy and sensuality — In some traditions, foxes represent feminine power. (When you and your boyhood friends first noticed girls you called them foxes.) Your dreams, both nocturnal and those in waking life, suggest a feminine energy may be drawing near. Possibly you're becoming more acquainted with aspects of your own feminine energy. You did seek out a female surgeon who then confirmed your intuition that she possesses the kind energy you want to be in the room when your body is opened.
- Transformation — The fox moving toward you, rather than away, could symbolize that change or new awareness is entering your life, not something you need to chase. That is the phrase that strikes: It's coming; you don't need to grasp for it. What's "it"? You don't know. Yet.
- Guide or messenger — Many spiritual traditions see animals approaching as messengers or spirit guides offering guidance during uncertain times. How romantic.
Of course, like a great novel or those dreams, there is more than one meaning that might be gleaned. Key isn't just the nouns but also the verbs — not just the What but the How. Both the fox and you emerged from shadow and uncertainty, moving toward each other on parallel paths. Neither of you fully recognized what the other was at first. Then came sudden illumination, a moment of clarity, and the fox's decisive and rapid action.
This response to sudden clarity might be instructive. When the light arrived and revealed the situation clearly, the fox didn't freeze in confusion or second-guess itself. It assessed quickly and moved decisively, trusting its instincts. This feels significant given the strange, ambiguous sensations hernias arouse. They mess with your self-trust and make you question what's really happening in your body. And if you doubt your own body it's not hard doubt, well, anything.
You went on that walk specifically because movement helps, because staying still with those sensations feels worse. The fox was also in motion through the night. Most may not have reason to think this way but this visit could be seen as an affirmation: an encounter with another creature also moving through the darkness rather than hiding from it.
That moment when the headlights revealed everything might mirror moments when you get clear information (like knowing definitively that, yep, this burn is the hernias) versus the murkier times when symptoms create doubt — doubt that spreads not just to other parts of the body but to the entire decision-making apparatus.
As you navigate a situation in which your body triggers discomfort and concern, it's not easy to trust yourself. Yet you did: you took a walk even when you wouldn't otherwise. When this all began, your instinct, when symptoms arose, was to rest whereas now it's to move. You don't always feel this way and it isn't, in fact, always this way but this could be seen as proof that your instincts are working even when doubt is present. When you honor your instincts, even as you walk in the shadows, clarity sometimes appears in a flash. The question is whether you will trust it. This is easier said than done.
What isn't in doubt is that such an encounter is a gift. Whether or not this is what the creature had in mind when it ran toward you, that fox delivered a message.
