Each workshop is an experiment in paradox. While many an initiatory journey test us to bring dignity back to life’s inevitable lessons of pain and pleasure, this particular community-loving spell stretches the heart far enough for sorrow’s song to learn how to also dance with ecstatic joy. In sacred space we make love with what I imagine to be the twin companions of Eros, Compassion and Compersion. How do we enter this magical landscape, into the heart of Eros? Harry and John devised a subtle and elegant spell to focus our attention, a way to be in counsel together until each of us readily steps through our necessary resistances and doubts into a shared intimate adventure. As facilitators we keep the heart circle intact so we can actively explore this dynamic tension between safety and risk until our deepening into trust teleports us into ritual space. The effect is immediate, is as delicate as instinctual, as revolutionary as mysterious. While most workshops make it into ritual space there are no guarantees. Whatever the outcome magic happens.
This week of radical kindness and mutual care with our Fae kin invariably shifts one’s life story, unsettles normative sexual narratives and reinforces a passionate desire for authentic intimacy and belonging. As I write the stellar jays have come out of the forest for the winter and rummage for acorns under fallen oak leaves. They make me laugh and cause me to reflect on the many stories I’ve heard of Harry and John, proud of their plumage, flustering the flock of song sparrows and being a little bossy about it, those trixster-eyes daring me to be half as bold. Until the days get longer and the call to gathering season stirs the soul of these loins I will imagine us coming together again under Grandmother maple at Wolf Creek. Dreamlike memories stir of us mixing the seed of our desires with great gratitude into Harry’s ashes. It is by this magick we call you, the Circle of Loving Companions, home again. Please contact rbirch9@gmail.com if you would like to help organize the 30th anniversary gathering of Faerie Sex Magick.
Ritual In Performance by Crafty / Shelton
H
ave you ever made ritual theater with the Faeries? Blended theater with ritual to cast stories-as-spells intended to change the world? For the last few years I’ve given my early August’s to this such endeavor, working with the Destiny Faeries to put on their Lammas Plays. Two years ago I wrote it, one year ago I starred in it, and this year, I had the pleasure of stage managing and being the embodiment of death as a eight-foot bunny stalking a stage in tattered rags for three thours, shepherding the dead to their new life. But the process has been going on long before I became involved. Each August for nearly the past two decades, Radical Faeries from across the Northeast and beyond gather in the woods of Vermont to put on a piece of ritual theater—for one night only—as a way to mark the harvest. It’s our time to come together, reflect on what we have sown over the year, and reap the rewards as a community. The play is written in the months before the event, but everything else—the casting, the rehearsing, the making of the costumes, and the building of the set—that all happens in the week leading up to 52 RFD 180 Winter 2019
the show, in a mad dash toward communal artistic expression. Frenzy is part of the magic. The chaos energy, the swirl, the late-night costume making in damp tents—these are what make the play alive. It’s a collective fantasy of more than ten dozen Faeries leading up to the ritual act itself: The performance, a singular piece of ritual theater by queers, for queers, in a forest without reliable cell service. Last year, the play, a series of vignettes introduced by Oscar Wilde (played by me), was helmed by P and B, a fierce duo who wanted to explore legacies of loss through seven different texts, ranging from the Bible to Beauty and the Beast, as a lens for community building and working through personal narratives of trauma. From my perspective as narrator Wilde, I watched as different people in the community were brought to tears by the stories that unfolded in front of them. I watched friends move through the trauma of grieving lovers recently lost to suicide; I watched people decouple themselves from feeling shame around sex work; I saw people hold space inside
