Fox Woman: Wild Beauty, Symbolic Living, and the Mythic Life

In this special solo episode, Maria tells the European folktale of Fox Woman and explores some of its central symbols: the soul self, the archetype of beauty, and the home as an image of the psyche. She also shares why myths and fairy tales have become such an essential part of her own life, and introduces Anima Mythica, her new year-long journey into myths, fairy tales, and traditional stories of the feminine.

If you have ever longed to deepen your relationship with stories, this episode is an invitation.

Learn more about Anima Mythica:
https://womenandmythology.com/animamythica

✨ Women & Mythology Podcast is a soulful exploration of myth as a living force in our contemporary lives.

Hosted by Maria Souza — Comparative Mythologist, Poet, and Educator.

📖 Learn more: www.womenandmythology.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, Myth Lover, I'm Maria. Welcome to the Woman and Mythology podcast. Hello, Myth Lovers. Welcome back. It's Maria here, comparative mythologist, teacher of myth, and your host at Woman and Mythology. Today's episode is a little different. It reminds me of the very first season of this podcast because today I simply want to tell you a story. There is a tale that stayed with me ever since I first heard it from one of my own myth teachers many years ago. It's a simple story, both familiar and wild in the ways it unfolds. And it has never stopped accompanying me. Over the years, I have returned to it again and again, each time discovering something I couldn't see before. As many of you already know, my work has become dedicated to tracking, preserving, and sharing stories of the feminine that help restore sovereignty, belonging, imagination, and meaning to our lives. I believe stories are one of the most profound ways of entering these conversations. Not because they tell us what to think or offer ready-made answers, but because stories offer us images. And sometimes a single image can rearrange something within us more deeply than an entire rational argument. Stories invite us into a different way of knowing. Rather than speaking only to the analytical mind, they speak to the imagination, they awaken memory, they cultivate possibilities and allow us to feel truths that cannot always be explained. This is why myths, fairy tales, and traditional stories have endured across centuries. They were never simply entertainment. They were ways of carrying wisdom from one generation to the next. They gave people images for grief, for love, for exile, for desire, for aging, for loss, for becoming. And I feel we need these images again. We need to unbury and restore them in our collective imagination, especially as women. The myths and stories I work with remind us there are many ways of being a woman, many ways of belonging to the world, and many ways of becoming ourselves. And one of the things I love most about working with these stories is that they never ask us to agree with them. They simply ask us to stay with it, to listen, to observe what moves, what they stir within us, to notice which characters we resist, which landscapes feel familiar, which animals keep returning, which images refuse to leave us days after the story has ended. Because very often, this is where the conversation and transformation truly begins. So today, before we speak about symbols or motifs or commentary on the tales, I simply want to show you what I mean. I want to invite you into a story that has transformed the lives of many women, including my own, and hopefully that you find in it a reminder or a medicine for your own life. Come with me to meet the European folk tale of Foxwoman. Once there was and once there was not, a man living alone in a small cottage in the middle of the woods. He was a hunter. Each morning he would leave before sunrise and spend the day wandering the forest, hunting game, chopping wood, and doing the hard work that kept him alive. Now, because he lived alone, his cottage looked much like the homes of many solitary men. The sheets were rarely washed, there were no flowers on the table, there was little attention given to beauty or to the small gestures that make a house feel alive. A few clothes were scattered across the floor, he would wear the same socks for longer than he should before thinking to wash them. It was, in every sense, a hunter's cottage. One evening, as he returned from the forest, something caught his attention. There was smoke rising from the chimney. He knew he had put out the fire before leaving that morning, so he slowed his pace. As he opened the door, he immediately sensed a presence. Yet, there was no one inside. The cottage had changed though. The floor had been swept, fresh flowers rested on the table, a loaf of warm bread set beside the stove. There was soup gently simmering in a pot. The scent of herbs filled the kitchen. Everything felt beautiful and so inviting. He sat down, broke the bread, poured himself a bowl of soup, and ate with immense gratitude. Whoever had come had cared for him, and somehow he knew it had been a woman. He could not explain how he knew, he simply did. That night, even the sheets felt softer than they had ever felt before, and he slept more deeply than he had in years. The next morning he returned to the forest, and when evening came, it happened again. Smoke curled from the chimney, the cottage was immaculate, another beautiful meal was waiting for him. Again he knew she had return. This continued for several days, until one evening, on a Friday, he decided to come home a little earlier than usual, before the sun had fully disappeared behind the trees. As he stepped inside, she was there. She stood with her back turned toward him. The first thing he noticed was her hair falling all the way to her hips. Sometimes it seemed golden like the afternoon sun, sometimes black as the deepest night, sometimes it shimmered with the firing orange of the autumn leaves. Even before she turned around, he knew she was part fox, part woman, and part spirit. When she finally faced him, he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She looked directly into his eyes and said, I will be the woman of this hut. His heart almost stopped. He felt as though life itself had blessed him. Yes, he answered immediately, yes, please. But she raised one finger and said, There is only one condition. She pointed behind the front door. There, hanging from a wooden peg, was a foxbelt. It was unlike any pelt he had ever seen. Its fur shimmered as though tiny stars had become woven into it. Wherever the light caught it, it seemed almost alive. My fox belt, she said, must always remain hanging behind this door. He looked at the pelt, then back at her. Of course, he replied. It felt like not even a request. If that is your only condition, then gladly, yes. Well, that evening they sat together long into the night. She told him stories of places she had wandered. He told her about his hunts and all the ways he had managed to survive alone in the forest. It turned out she knew a few songs. He made her laugh with stories and foolish jokes. She sang, and something inside him that had long been asleep began to awake. It was one of those rare nights that perhaps if you've been fortunate enough, you've known it yourself. The kind of night when time disappears, when suddenly dawn is arriving, and yet you don't feel an ounce of tiredness in your bone. And so their life together began. Each morning he would leave for the forest. Perhaps she would wander the woods herself in her own mysterious fox ways. He never knew, but every evening she was home before him. There was always food waiting, always warmth, always stories, always another song, and the days passed gently one into another, until one evening, as they sat together for dinner, he finally spoke. He said, My beautiful woman, woman of this hut, sunshine of my days, moonlight of my nights, you know I love you with every bone in my body. She smiled. And he continues. I was wondering if we could speak about your fox belt. It has a very strong scent. Would you consider moving it outside? Perhaps you could hang it from the branch of a tree, or hide it beneath a great stone. I don't know, but would it be possible to keep it somewhere in the forest instead of here inside the house? Foxwoman looked at him, and she remembered very clearly the day they had met. She had told him there was only one condition, only one, that her fox belt would remain hanging behind the door. She stirred the soup. She thought to herself, that was an amateur move. How could he ask me that? What poor thinking, how naive of him. But she said nothing, she thought. Maybe he will come to his senses. The evening passed in silence, they went to bed, and a few more days went by, and by now the scent of the pelt had reached every corner of the cottage. Before he even stepped onto the porch, he could already smell it. It surrounded him, it clung to him, it filled his clothes, his hands, and even his dreams. It was becoming impossible to ignore it. Either he would surrender to it, or it would consume him. One evening, after having had a little more to drink than usual, they sat down once again for dinner. Without warning, he slipped his fist upon the table. Woman, he shouted, I have already told you. I want that pelt out of the house. I cannot bear its scent any longer. She looked at him, she stood up, without a word, she walked into the bedroom. That night they slept. Or maybe neither of them truly slept. And when morning came, he awoke. The scent was gone. He rose from his bed and walked through the cottage. There was no breakfast waiting, no porridge on the stove, no bread. The fire had gone cold. The flowers had disappeared from the table. He called for her, but she did not answer. He searched every corner of the house, every little room, nothing. Only then did he notice that the fox belt was no longer hanging behind the door either. Foxwoman was gone, the belt was gone, there was no trace of her, not even her scent remained. And it is said that to this very day, the hunter still stands on the porch of that little cottage in the woods, longing and aching for the return of Foxwoman. So this is the story of Foxwoman. From my heart in my own words, you might have heard the story before in other ways, but I hope you enjoyed my way of telling it. And before we begin any kind of intellectual understanding or making sense of this tale, I want to invite you to do something else first. Simply notice what the story feels like, what it can do. Where does it land in your body? What emotion does it evoke? Where do you see yourself in this story? Are you at the beginning of the tale, somewhere in the middle, or perhaps standing at the end alongside the hunter? Is there a particular image that keeps returning to you? Perhaps it is the fox belt, or the loaf of bread resting on the stove. Sometimes it's a little detail, the flowers on the table, or the scent that slowly fills the house. Sometimes it is a single image, a seemingly insignificant detail that becomes the medicine we most need. So before you take anything I'm about to say, I invite you to carry your own experience of the story with you. Let your own imagination remain part of this conversation. And with that being said, I would love to share a few reflections on some of the archetypes, motifs, and symbols that appear in this tale, and one of the possible ways of approaching it. It is a very simple story, but it carries an extraordinary depth. One of the first things we notice, and I feel it remains very clearly, is the fox pelt itself, the great symbol of this story. I often think of the pelt as the soul self, that essential part of us that connect us to what is most alive, most authentic, most wild, and most deeply our own. It's what makes us who we are. The pelt is beautiful, it glistens with stars, it is made of all kinds of fur. It is unlike any other. And I think that matters because every woman has her own pelt. No two are the same. But the story also tells us something else. The pelt has a scent. It carries a smell that may not be pleasing to everyone. And I think this is an important image. Sometimes being close to our soul self means we become less available to everyone around us. It means allowing parts of ourselves that are unusual, untamed, or difficult to remain exactly as they are, rather than making them more acceptable for others. It is also about nourishing what we love and what makes us whole, even though sometimes this means saying no to others, being unable to explain this way of being to others. And the message of the story is very clear. Foxwoman can never place her pelt outside the house. She can never exile it. She can never hide it beneath a rock or hang it from the branch of a tree. To do so would be to abandon it, to abandon the pelt, to abandon the soul self. If the pelt were left outside, it could be forgotten, it could be stolen, an animal could carry it away, someone else could claim it. Our own pelt, our own soul self, needs to remain close to us. It must be protected, nourished, cultivated. It must also remain within reach. I love imagining that while the hunter was away in the forest, Foxwoman would put on her pelt and disappear into the woods for adventures of her own. Or maybe even crawl into bed in her belt. We don't need to be always out and about in our soul self, but we can actually be in a place of restoration, of rest. And then at the end of the day, she would return home, she would remove the belt and inhabit another part of her life, an important one as well. There is something profoundly human in that image, in the dual nature of her human form and her foxbelt form. There are seasons when we must enter the world. There are moments that ask something of us. We work, we care for others, we create, we build, we respond to life's demand. But we cannot lose sight of where we left our pelt. Many times, especially in the early phases of our life or while pursuing certain paths, we take it off. We do so because we think we must, because others ask of us, that, because we were never told we had a pelt to begin with, because it seems easier that way. But the story reminds us that we cannot lose track of it. Foxwomen certainly doesn't. When the hunter first asks politely, she doesn't even negotiate. She had already told him from the beginning that was the condition. To me, she is a woman who has already been initiated into her own soul life. She knows that is essential. She knows what cannot be compromised. We can even imagine that perhaps earlier in Foxwoman's life, she had been in another cottage, and they asked her to remove her pelt and put it outside in the woods. And she did so. And things probably did not turn out the way she wanted. So she retrieved it. And now, in this story of Foxwoman, when we meet her initiated, she knows she can never let go of the pelt. Later in the story, the hunter doesn't just ask her to put the pelt outside. He now demands. He is violent in some ways. There is rage, there is anger. He says there is enough. And that leads her to leave the house. I don't imagine that to be an easy decision for her. She now returns to the forest. We don't know where she sleeps, we don't know whether she has enough food, whether she is cold, whether she is safe. Leaving also comes with loss. Yet sometimes we must leave. Sometimes we have to change something in our lives in order to remain close to our pelt. To enter the forest as Foxwoman does at the end of the story, this going into the unknown is such a symbol for us women as well. We find ourselves so many times in life entering a phase of the unknown that could look like having children, choosing a relationship, entering a job or a change of career, moving countries, even searching for a new artistic practice. It could also be an internal journey into the forest, visiting parts of our own childhood, facing our wounds, acknowledging our grief. All of this can look like entering the forest. We are walking pathless paths, meaning paths that haven't been walked before. We are forging the path as we walk it. There are dangers, but there are certainly treasures waiting for us there. Another image that touches me deeply is that they genuinely love one another. They laugh together, they sing together, they tell stories together, the hunter and foxwoman. This is not a story about villains or heroes conquering one another. And this brings me to something I always emphasize when working with myths and fairy tales. The hunter does not necessarily represent a man in your life. Of course, it could. It could be a father, a partner, a boss, a friend, but it doesn't have to be. One of the ways I work with stories is by imagining that every character is also a part of ourselves. If we approach the story in this way, then the hunter becomes an aspect of our own psyche, of our own self. He is the part of us that knows how to survive. He provides, he goes into the world, he chops wood, he returns, he has a shelter, he brings nourishment back home. And this part of us is incredibly important. Yet, when we first meet him, something is still missing. His house is functional, but it is not beautiful. It doesn't cultivate or nourish any form of soul. The hut, in many symbolic traditions, can be understood as the psyche itself, our inner home. The hunter knows how to gather wood and bring home food. But Foxwoman transforms what he brings. She turns ingredients into a meal. She turns a house into a home. She softens the bed. She places flowers upon the table. She brings beauty, care, warmth, and soul into the very same place where the hunter already knew how to survive. In some ways, she transforms the house. It's a whole new, different house because of her. Together, they form a remarkable pair. The hunter gathers nourishment. Foxwoman transforms it into nourishment for body and soul. And we hold both the hunter and foxwoman inside of us. We hold this force that is capable of nourishing soul in our life. And we also hold this other side of ourselves that goes out and about in the world and conquers and gathers what we need to survive. But sometimes within us, the hunter begins speaking exactly as he does in the story. He tells Foxwoman that her scent is too much, that her wildness is inconvenient, that her eccentricities or her wounds or her beauty, everything that makes up her pelt, her creativity, should be pushed further away. How many times have we done exactly that to ourselves? How many times have we exiled our own pelt, placed it somewhere out in the backyard of our lives, lost sight of it completely, and instead spent all of our energy serving only the hunter within us? Working, producing, providing, doing, until one day we wake up exhausted, without meaning, without purpose, without feeling at home within ourselves. We ask, what is all of this for? You know, we look around and we can't really consider how did we find ourselves in this place? And I feel the medicine offered by this shure is surprisingly simple and it responds to this. It remembers Foxwomen. It says, remember where you left your pelt, bring it back to the house. And if the house you were living in no longer allows your belt to remain close, perhaps it's time to build another one. And here, of course, I'm using the word house also in a symbolic form, as to build a handmade life. There are many other beautiful symbols in this tale. The meal she prepares, the softened bed, the clean sheets, the swept floor, the flowers she places upon the table. These are not simply images of homemaking. The last thing I am doing with this story is inviting you into the domestic realm only. These are asking deeper questions. How do you nourish yourself? How do you cultivate rest? What truly restores you? Rest, maybe sleep, but sometimes rest is walking through a forest or a beach. Sometimes rest is making art or reading poetry. Sometimes it is about sitting beside a dear friend. There are many forms of rest as there are women in this world. The flowers also invite another question. Foxwoman brings beauty into the house. But what does beauty mean to you? And how are you cultivating beauty in your own life? Beauty is an archetypal force that moves through this story. And beauty itself is very difficult to define. Social media tries to define it, magazines have tried to define it, and probably one of the issues we have with beauty right now is that it's related to a standard of beauty. But what I'm talking about here is archetypal beauty. Entire industries have tried to tell us what beauty is, but archetypes can never really be defined. They can only be encountered. We catch glimpses of them in the curve of a shell resting at the beach. It's in the vase filled with wildflowers for another woman. Or it's in the hands of a grandmother. I find beauty when I braid my daughter's hair. Someone else may find it in music, in old books, in mountains, or in the light entering through a window at the end of an afternoon. Beauty will never look the same for everyone. It is shaped by our memories, our experience, our longings, and by what awakens something inside us. So I wonder, what does beauty look like for you? And how can you invite more glimpses of it into your own life? I can assure you, it looks nothing like a curated Instagram or the kind of picture that belongs on a Pinterest board. We're talking about a wild beauty, the one that nourishes your soul. That is, after all, what Foxwoman brings into the house. She brings life, she transforms the hut from a merely functional place into a place of belonging. A place where stories are told, where laughter is shared, where meals are prepared with care. A place that can also hold sorrow. A place where every corner of life is seen, tended, and made sacred. This is the work our own soul self longs to do within our psyche. The house is a symbol of our psyche. It doesn't ask us to become someone else. It asks us to inhabit our own inner home more fully. If Fox Woman is transforming that house from a merely functional place into a place of meaning and belonging, the question for us is, how does our soul self transform our very functional busy lives in today's world into a place of meaning and belonging? Yet at the very end of the tale, Foxwoman leaves, and suddenly the story changes. It becomes a cautionary tale. That's a very common thing we see in myths and fairy tales. They don't always end happily. Sometimes they end abruptly, almost painfully, because they are trying to awaken us. They are a sounding alarm. They're saying, pay attention, this matters. Do not overlook this. This is not a simple task. This is not a simple story. We see this again and again in traditional stories. We see it in La Llorona, if you're familiar with this Mexican folk tale. We see it in the red shoes. Across cultures and across centuries, these tales have been carried because they alert the soul to something essential. They are not simply stories meant to entertain us. They are stories meant to awaken us. Their purpose is not to help us escape from life. Their purpose is to help us inhabit life more deeply, more fully, to become more present, to notice what we have forgotten, and to remember what is essential. And I think that is precisely what Foxwoman does. She reminds us not to abandon our pelt, not to exile the very thing that gives our lives vitality, beauty, meaning, soul, true nourishment. I feel this is one of the greatest gifts that myths, fairy tales, and traditional stories continue to offer us. Not just really answers, but images that accompany us until one day we begin to live differently because of them, because they create enough space within us to hold that image as an image for ourselves. If Fox Women still feel foreign to you, maybe in cultivating her image slowly, she will begin to take root and something soon will blossom. For me, personally, stories have been this kind of medicine. They have accompanied me, especially over the last ten years of my life, through moving countries, building new communities, nourishing new ways of engaging with the more than human world, through getting married, through miscarriages, through becoming a mother of two beautiful children, through moving countries again and again, becoming an immigrant, navigating postpartum mostly on my own, and slowly building a new life here in Australia, where I'm now speaking to you from. The story is they never really solved those experiences for me. They never offered me a blueprint for life, but they gave me a language for what I was living. They gave me images that helped me understand the thresholds I was crossing. They reminded me that other women in other times and places had also walked through uncertainty, grief, fear, transformation, loss, and becoming. More than anything, they gave me a sense of purpose and possibility. Because of stories like Fox Women and so many other heroines, I found myself returning again and again to the same questions. What must I hold close to myself right now? What belongs to my soul? What can never be negotiated away? What do I need to craft time for? The stories kept placing before me images of courage, images of belonging, images of relationship with the land beneath my feet, with my community, with beauty, with grief, with passion, nourishment, relationship with the sacred in life, and the mystery of being alive. They opened questions I suspect I will continue exploring for the rest of my life. And I feel this is exactly what a good story does. It doesn't end when we finish reading it or telling it, it continues living inside of us. Now that my life has found a gentler rhythm, my children are finally settled into school here in Australia, and I have the space to dream and create again fully. I find myself returning to an idea I have been incubating and carrying for years. While I was having baby, recording the podcast, writing articles, teaching workshops, and offering courses, this idea never really left me. It was actually incubating. It was becoming bigger inside of me. It was finding and building that internal muscle. Looking back, I now actually feel grateful that I couldn't create it sooner. It needed time. I needed time. I needed to gather all the different threads before I could braid them together. And that braid has become a new program that I am so excited to share with you today called Anima Mythica. Anima Mythica is a year-long journey into myths, fairy tales, and traditional stories of the feminine. Throughout the year, we will journey through many stories, extraordinary tales of sovereignty, belonging, wildness, descent, transformation, and becoming. The program unfolds through three different layers that support one another. The first one is called the Mythic Threshold, which is a recorded introductory module for the program. I recorded these video lessons, and each lesson has between 10 to 20 minutes long, and it's designed to gently introduce you to my way of working with stories. We explore the differences between myths, fairy tales, and folktales. We look at what are symbols, archetypes, and motifs. We speak about how to listen to a story, about symbolic life. I also share kind of a bibliography with many of the books and authors that have shaped my own path over the years. For some women, I believe this will be an introduction. For others, it will become the common language that we will continue building throughout the year. From there, we begin our monthly story sessions. Once each month, we gather life to immerse ourselves in a single tale. Together we listen to the story, just like, for example, I told you today, Fox Women. And then we explore its symbols, its archetypes, its motifs, and ask what these images might awaken within our lives. Just like I did today, we slowly unfold the symbolic conversation and ask what this story is asking of us. If you haven't done a course with me before, this is very much like I teach myth. And I have a gentle presentation that allows you to also receive a visual guidance of the symbols and archetypes. And throughout this year together, the stories explored are organized in three larger movements. We begin with Sacred Transgression and Descent, exploring stories of sovereignty, rupture, and feminine becoming through myths such as Inana and the Hulupu Tree, The Descent of Inana, and Lilith. From there, we enter Wedding the Wild, where we journey with stories of instinct, enchantment, and the living world. Here we meet lesser-known tales from Brazil, such as Jacia Naya, Matinta Pereira, and Yara, alongside stories like The Liar Bird from Australia. These are stories that help us expand and decolonize the imagination, introducing women who are not always queens or goddesses, but shapeshifters, wild women, and guardians of the living world. This is going to be a very special module for me because these are stories from my own land and my own memory growing up as a lover of stories. Finally, we arrive at Alma Mater, where we explore the great mother archetype through stories of initiation, feminine inheritance, and belonging. We journey with tales such as The Swan Maiden, Vasalisa, Mesmeranda, and the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. As a comparative mythologist, one of the things I care most deeply about is holding a wide repertoire of stories. I believe that stories from different cultures illuminate one another, and that each tradition offers its own unique medicine for the questions we carry today. Finally, we arrive at the third part of the program, and this is something entirely new for me, and I am so excited about. It's called the Myth Club. Once a month, alongside our story sessions, we will also gather, not to study a particular tale, but to bring mythology and the work of stories into everyday life. These gatherings are much more conversational. Together we will explore films, poems, songs, artwork, practices, questions that emerge from the stories, maybe, symbols that continue following us, or themes that members of the community want to explore more deeply. It is a space for conversation. So it won't be designed as a lecture, a class, or anything like that. It's designed as a women's salon, a space for reflection, a space where myth leaves the page and begins to accompany our daily life. And together, throughout our conversations, we are going to decide the themes of the myth club gatherings together. One of the greatest gifts of my work over the years has been watching women from different parts of the world discover that these ancient stories speak across culture, and that is very much the spirit of the myth club community. So, in many ways, Anima Mythica unfolds in a simple rhythm. You begin with the recorded foundation whenever you are ready. Then each month we gather for one story session and one myth club gathering. Every live session is recorded, so whether you are able to join us live or not, you can always return to the stories in your own time. There is no pressure to rush through the material. In fact, I would say the opposite. My hope is that each story has enough space to accompany you long enough after our session ends. Throughout the year, I will also share symbolic guides, suggested practices, and additional PDF resources that allow the stories to continue unfolding. One of the things I wanted to create was rhythm. Rather than rushing through many stories, we spend an entire month with each one. I chose a year intentionally because symbolic life cannot be rushed. We change through repeated encounters with stories, through seasons, through conversations, through allowing images to mature inside of us. Ultimately, I feel my deepest intention with Anima Mythica is not simply to teach myth, is to cultivate a mythic education and symbolic life, to help us recover the language of symbols, to nourish the imagination, to cultivate belonging, meaning, beauty, and over time to discover that these ancient stories are not simply stories from the past, they are companions for how we choose to live today. As I said before, this program has been a dream of mine for many years. I have long wanted to create a place where women could not only just listen to the stories and study the myths, but truly live with them. A place that offered a strong foundation for those who are new to this work, but also a space where we could continue the conversation that stories begin. This is why there is this introductory module and why I created the Myth Club, which are whole new components to my work. We will also have a private WhatsApp community group where we can continue sharing reflection, images, questions, and discoveries as the year unfolds. Although my background is in comparative mythology, this isn't an academic course. It is an invitation to live symbolically. Scholarship and research supports our conversation, but the real work happens in the encounter between the story and your own life. If you feel called to bring stories and myths into your life in a deeper way, if you would like to cultivate the symbolic imagination, if you want to deepen your understanding of myths and discover how they can become companion for navigating the thresholds of your own life, I would love to welcome you into Anima Mythica. You can learn more by visiting womanandmythology.com slash Anima Mythica or simply by following the link in the description of this episode. Registrations are now open and they will close before we begin our first gathering on September 12th. One of the intentions behind this program is to cultivate a true sense of community. We will journey together with the same group of women throughout the year, and for that reason, I won't be accepting new members once we begin. If something of my mythic work has stayed with you, or if Fox Women continues walking beside you over the next few days, if you find yourself thinking about your own pelt, your own inner home, or the images that nourish your soul, maybe this is your invitation. My hope is that by the end of the year, you won't simply know more myths. You'll begin noticing the world mythically. You'll start recognizing symbols in your own life, finding language for thresholds you couldn't name before, and carrying stories with you as companions. I would be very honored to walk alongside you in Anima Mythica. I hope you'll join us, and I thank you so much for trusting my work with myth and for being here with us. Mythmaker Podcast Network. And to our dear myth lovers, see you in our next episode. Until then, remember your life is a story only you can tell. Stay close to what feels true and sovereign within you.