The Fox, The Duck & The Egg: A story about love, loss, and learning to receive

Photo by Elisha May

I need to tell you something that I genuinely could not have made up. Not even if I tried. Not even on my most creative, most spiritually activated, most caffeinated day. Because the universe - my universe - appears to operate in twelve-month cycles, delivered via wildlife, and I am only just catching up.

This time last year, almost to the day, a fox started visiting me.

He came three days in a row. And because I am who I am - someone who feeds things, who extends care to whatever shows up at the door - I fed him. Three days in a row, I fed him.

On the third day, he bit my left hand.

The left hand. The receiving hand. The feminine side. Make of that what you will - I certainly did.

I ended up in A&E. Then on antibiotics that completely destroyed my microbiome. Then in a spiral of not sleeping - ten days straight, barely an hour at a time - while the NHS doctors looked at me with the particular expression of people who are medically qualified but spiritually unprepared for what they were witnessing. They were wonderful… Looking at all my other symptoms, rather than the most important one I wanted help with, which was to SLEEP. They had absolutely no framework for what was happening to me. Neither did I, at the time. So I had to find one.

What was happening to me was this: I was becoming a portal.

Somewhere around 2am - 3am - in the thick of those sleepless nights, something cracked open. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Actually cracked open. I felt my chest split wide and something enormous begin moving through me. Energy - raw, ancient, not entirely mine - travelling through my body like I was a conduit for something that had been waiting a very long time to pass through.

I started shaking. Not from cold, not from fear - though there was that too - but from the sheer volume of what was moving. It felt like being a tuning fork struck against the edge of the universe.

And then came the flashbacks.

Men. Love. Every version of love I had ever reached for and not quite caught. Every wound I thought I had healed that turned out to be sleeping, not dead. And underneath all of it - woven through everything like a thread I had been trying not to pull - my brother.

My brother died fourteen years ago. And when he left, he took something with him that I have spent every year since trying to understand, to grieve, to metabolise, to rebuild. The love between us was the first great love of my life. The loss of him was the first shattering. Everything that came after - every relationship, every near-miss, every man who showed up carrying the right blueprint but not the embodiment - has been, in some way, connected to that original fracture.

I didn't fully understand that until that night.

The initiation lasted weeks. The recovery - physical, energetic, emotional - took three months. And at the end of it, I was different. Not healed exactly. More like: excavated. Hollowed out and then slowly, carefully, refilled with something truer.

Days before the fox bit me, a man had entered my field.

I want to be precise about this, because precision matters when you do the kind of work I do. He wasn't a relationship. He was a catalyst. There's a difference, and it took me a while to see it clearly. A catalyst carries the archetype of what you're calling in - the shape of the thing, the blueprint, the frequency - but they are not built to be the thing itself. They are built to crack you open, so the thing can arrive.

He was all archetype. No embodiment. All talk. No walk.

He carried everything I had been calling in - the energy of it, the resonance of it - but he wasn't living it. He wasn't the man. He was the announcement that the man existed. And then, having delivered that message, he left.

Classic.

But here's what I want you to understand: he broke my heart open. And I didn't know it needed breaking open. I thought I had done the work. I thought I was ready. I was ready for the version of receiving I had already practised. I was not ready for the real thing. The fox and the catalyst together made sure I became ready. That's what initiations do. They don't arrive to hurt you. They arrive to make space.

8 months passed. I kept working - on myself, on my clients, on the business I have been building for fourteen years alongside the longest, most unglamorous, most non-linear healing journey of my life. I went back to dating in March. I remained, as I always have been, discerning to the point where some people might call it fussy and I call it knowing exactly what I'm looking for.

And then, around the same time this year - almost to the day, I am not exaggerating - a new man entered my field. Because apparently - I keep calling in energy healing experiences, not an actual man that would become my husband… These things are sent to try us!

Except this recent one is different in a way I don't have precise enough language for yet.

He doesn't talk the talk. He walks it. He doesn't carry the archetype of what I've been calling in - he is the embodiment of it. He lives it. Every day, in the choices he makes and the life he has built and the way he moves through the world. He is, so far as I can witness from where I'm standing, the real thing. Or a potential.

We haven't properly met yet. Our travel schedules are a particular kind of cosmic joke that I choose to find funny rather than frustrating. We might never meet. And somehow - and this is the part that tells me something has fundamentally shifted in me - somehow that's not the point. The point is what his arrival is confirming about where I am now. About who I have become. About what my field is now capable of calling in.

This morning, a female duck visited me.

She arrived quietly, the way the right things tend to. She came to where I was. She received the food I offered without drama, without urgency, without taking more than she needed.

She didn't bite me.

And then she left me an egg.

The fox took. The duck gave.

I stood there looking at that egg for a long time.

An egg is potential. An egg is new life that hasn't declared itself yet, that exists in the space between possibility and form. An egg is something you have to receive carefully, tend to, not crush with too much handling or too much need. An egg is the universe saying: something is being created. Be gentle with it. Be patient with it. Trust the timing of it.

The fox came as a wound. The wound cracked me open. The opening allowed the initiation. The initiation rebuilt me. Twelve months later, the duck arrived. And the duck brought a gift.

The Fox · Year One: A bite. A wound. Ten days without sleep. An initiation that took three months to recover from. A catalyst who carried the blueprint but couldn't live it. A heart broken open that didn't know it needed opening.

The Duck · Year Two: A quiet arrival. Food received without taking. A departure without damage. A man who embodies rather than performs. And an egg - small, whole, offered freely - left behind as a promise.

Same time of year. Completely different energy. Different me.

I have been in some kind of healing arc around men, love, loss, and receiving for fourteen years, since my brother died. Fourteen years of doing the work - the real work, not the surface-level work, not the workshop-and-move-on work, but the kind of work that asks you to go into the darkest rooms and stay there until you understand what lives in them.

My clients, when they work with me, receive faster than I do. I take the long road. I always have. I go the long way around so that I know every inch of the terrain - so that when someone comes to me stuck in the dark, I am not guessing at the way out. I have walked it. I have the map in my body.

That is not a consolation. That is the work. That is my medicine.

And apparently the animals have been keeping score.

I don't know if he's my person. I don't know if we'll ever actually meet. What I do know is that something in my field has shifted so fundamentally that the energy showing up is completely different to what it was twelve months ago.

This could be sacred union. It might just be the next door I'm meant to walk through. Both are significant. Both deserve to be honoured. The outcome is not the point - the next frequency is the point. The fact that what is arriving now is this, rather than what arrived last year - that is the point.

After fourteen years, I think I might finally be ready to receive.

The greatest love story of my life - the one that transcends time and space, the one I have been in preparation for without fully knowing it, the one my brother would have wanted for me - might actually be arriving. Not because I manifested it correctly, or held the right crystals or said the right affirmations. But because I did the work. The real work. The unglamorous, non-linear, sometimes-you-end-up-in-A&E work.

And the duck left me an egg to prove it.

If this story landed somewhere in your body - that's not an accident.

I work with high-achieving, privately stuck individuals who have done the work or not, and still can't figure out why they're not moving. We work at the level of identity, energy, and nervous system - not surface strategy. If you're ready to stop looping and start receiving, I'd love to hear from you.

Book a free 30-minute call here to find out more about working with me 1:1.

Until next time,

Elisha 🔥

* originally written 31st May 2026