You can only be there to be transformed.

On leaving Brighton last June, I was full of bravado. Determined for a new chapter and challenge. Calling out to London and the next rung of academia, I was determined that this city in all its sprawl and corners; its chaos, capital and overwhelm, would teach me a lesson. Help me smash the plant pot that had become Brighton for the previous decade and revitalise me somehow – let me grow.

 

Probably naively – wide open and fatigued from the summer downloads of Folleterre and heartbreak of Berlin – I rocked up to meet her in my typical state of unpreparedness. All tentacles, no core. 

 

In retrospect, owing everything to the wild resilience of other residents, who gave me shade in all manner of ways and allowed me to probe and curl new roots around the curves and cracks of this relentless, steaming slab. 

 

I hit winter hard. Watched another illusion of encounter and connection whither. And set into a space nearly and then finally my own. Alone in the east, smoking and drinking too much and posturing in unhealthy ways around too much Netflix and procrastination, I burned out. Sank into chronic pain and scared myself of how unwell I can become. Popped up every now and again to talk to people about gut health – mesmerising them with northern articulation, anecdote and stand up. The download that leaves me depleted. Then went back to it. The lack of embodiment obvious;  ashamed to talk about healing in such a state of dis-ease. 

 

Up until early spring, I was up for calling it a day. I think the thought of anyone close to me having to navigate the chaos of my material legacy after the fact was the only pacifier. The sun was a rescue at first if only in animation. Found myself wondering cruising grounds too early until I met myself. And that’s kind of where London took me – really deep into the pain that I think Brighton bandaged. Scared me hard enough that I had to look again at my shit. To look again at why for so many years I kept cycling through peak experiences to crash upon my arse lost and alone. This time, she gave me a place where I would be alone and then let me really sink into it. 

 

After years of meeting my makers in folds of geometry; holding, receiving and pouring into heart circle, singing with frogs and puking into buckets; sweating in lodges, vibrating around fires and sucking cock in ritual – it was clear that yeah, I still had some work to do. 

 

Part of that began at Unston Grange at the beginning of spring. Where after a long and deliberate hiatus from the Albion circle, I tentatively reconnected with the community. Momentarily bringing a bit of that shadow into the light of a relatively new format for domestic community. Away from the corridors of the castle and some of the trickier relating I find there, and perhaps a bit of the unprocessed shame and history of Avalon – here, there was a rhythm of community that spoke of home again. In both the silence and the stars, I felt held. And I went back to my lair in London in a kind of renewal. 

 

In Spring I found myself co-facilitating a gathering in Portugal. Finally in that place of stone and lavender which had been such an online effort in shadow to help co-create. And I felt fully home again on-continent, in community and surprised myself at how boundless, connected, in love and strong I could feel. How accepted and accepting I could be. 

 

At this gathering I brought the shadow dance – product of years of fantasising about this form of ritual – and watched through my mask, in awe; charged and connected in a way I’ve only known with the plants – as the community, initially apprehensive, responded. Lurching and moaning in shapes around the fire in honour of one of our most taboo, tricksterish, yet essential teachers. And then walking back into sanctuary revealed somehow. Honest. Open. Seen. 

 

After having the opportunity to deepen my connection with a faerie at ADF, already known but not known, they said their goodbyes and gratitudes to me in the bathroom whilst I hid behind my toothbrush. But I heard what they said and it re-inspired me to the kind of heart I’m capable of. Later as I sat bare arsed on a chocolate and banana cake in no-talent, windmills gushing to my left on the hill – I felt the reminder of inner rest flow through me like I hadn’t in a long time. I’d come home. 

 

Beltane was the ignition for self-love, clarity, assessments and therapy. And for the first time in my process I got some answers around why my experience in the world had been pitched the way it had been for so long. I saw very clearly who I could be and wanted to be in the laboratory of community and the work I’d need to do to brave that heart in the rest of the world. 

 

Probing and manifesting those depths is never seamless though – and on leading upto some of the biggest medicine of the year, Pan Gathering – I wobbled. Felt the pressures of navigating the system in the city materially and reluctant to shift my focus to where it counts. But I went and arrived in the heart of a process where wild, free and naked in the woods I fully embodied the truth of my names in a circle of Pan revellers both old and new. Let my heart fully connect and worship another unconditionally. Fully knew my Libra in Venus. Re-calibrated on what I need in terms of romance and feeling in the collective. Renegotiated my polyamory – maybe even abandoned an aspect of my polyamory. Got a taste of where to go when I am cut adrift. Held space graciously despite my ram. Felt my power. Reconnected wholly with my spirituality through drum and rattle. Believed again. Heard the horse on the hill whinny at my private ritual at the ancestors tree – just like the first time, years ago. Felt totally the wisdom of my sisters and what they mean to me when I reach out and allow. 

 

In that gathering I heard such profound poetry and meaning and fully understood the experiential nature of our culture – our profoundly oral tradition. Breathing in medicine for the heart in whispers and eyes, like silk parcels through the letterbox of my soul. You can’t write these exchanges to their full potency. You can only be there to be transformed. 

 

Despite a few closing thanks – this is where my piece initially ended. I hesitated at posting at first because of the more raw truth in the struggle. But also, a technical issue with the website came up and I couldn’t get in to post. So I kind of sat on it. Almost forgot. And then Queer Spirit Festival happened and in retrospect, I couldn’t have really said what I wanted to say without it. 

 

Any of the community close to me know that I’ve had some political misgivings about the impact of the festival on faerie culture. The groundswell of new energy and the challenge it brings for the sensitive transmission of our cultures and ways – and for those negotiating and finding their space in our folds with their own histories, experiences and boundaries. The energy it takes to grow, rather than tend. But more personally, community is a delicate web for me where I feel trust through being properly seen and understood. And despite the excesses of Fish Wife, Octopus is a creature of solitude or at least, of a tight nest. 

 

But in the spirit of the medicine this year, I showed up. And I was moved. 

 

The faerie encampment was such a profound healing experience of a circle within a circle – from where I could stretch out, dance, laugh, feel, touch, taste, fondle and fuck with this enormous and beautiful sodden love nest of queer hearted beings. I was honoured to serve the high priestess GayLove in assisting in the sacred sexuality temple; where I saw the most radical visions of queer utopia in action. The full spectrum of gender embodied in the play-fighting, foreskin stretching, cunt sharing, pain meditating, queer orgying ecstacy; which spoke to me of a true and honest scope of our boundaries and readiness for evolution in the co-creation of fundamentally queer places of spirit, play and worship. Both sober and messy, I found and felt profound love in that place. It dawned on me after all of these years in community, what I don’t see or hide from. That we are fucking family. And it was deep – no prose needed. But also, that exponential broadening, deepening, spreading and sharing of our spaces is the work. And that I am part of it. Gratitude and graces, Octopus may have been a bit late to the party. 

 

I am now in Berlin. Still riding the waves of QS and entering Virgo season feeling a bit like I’m being blown apart and filed into a different path. It’s bringing more truth, more clarity and a search for the future of me; of the love and the spaces I want to be part of and to create. It’s not that this isn’t without its bumps, retraction, re-entrenchment, old-patterning and a bit of mania-dusting – but it is what it is and overall, it’s promising. 

 

And in that sense, dear faeries – this is a thankyou. Thankyou for saving my life time and time again. Thankyou for loving me. Thankyou for showing me a life that I am so blessed to live with you. Every year I am changed through you. 

 

And while yes, I can curl up all tendril in my time away – not sure where my point of reconnection is, whether I can relate, or how to start over – I know that you’re waiting for me to begin the walk again. And that each time of holding your hands up and through it, I come back to myself more whole. More potent. More wise. That this dance never ends and that I still feel you in my hair, when I walk the other paths alone. 

 

Changes are afoot. 

 

Octopus & Fish Wife X 

 

Special thanks to True Paradox, Ofra, Eyal, Ananda, GayLove, Sprouty Merlot, Blue Star, My Little Pony, Bliss, Shokti Lovestar, Faunalicious, Foxie Plethora Deux Mille, Hazel, Printemps, Wood Pigeon, Andy B, Mushroom, Kingfisher, Thunder, Princess, Iris, Bholenath, Nigel and Ed.

Other stuff by Octopus:

Breakups | A Call to Sisterhood. 

Our Glorious Bodies. 

Equinox Full Moon Queer Spirit Celebration

Wheatsheaf Hall, Wheatsheaf Lane, London SW8 2UP
Friday September 13th 2019, 7 – 11pm

The London Radical Faerie Drum Circle was at first known as the Queer Spirit Circle, offered from 2005 as a space for spiritually inclined LGBTQ+ people to find each other.  The Circle manifested in a former Victorian maternity hospital in Stockwell, which was then squatted by an artist’s collective, who held it as a creative community hub (now the space has been converted by Lambeth Council into luxury flats).

After the hospital the circle found a home in a private rooftop apartment in Old Street for some years, during which a core group of people nurtured its development, before arriving at its current venue, the atmospheric Wheatsheaf Hall in Vauxhall, on the 21st December 2012 with an ‘End of the World Party’ to celebrate the Mayan Calendar. We created a portal into a new paradigm, viewing this date as a significant marker on the way into the Age of Aquarius, and stepped or danced our way through it. The Circle was by this time becoming known as the Faerie Drum Circle, meeting mostly at full moons to raise energy, release emotion and build magical connections.

Since 2012 the Radical Faeries of Albion have attracted increasing numbers to our gatherings and circles. A rising tide of queer spirituality, free of religious bonds, reaching for the shamanic truth at the core of queer nature, has also given birth to three Queer Spirit Festivals –

500 pioneer queers came to Whittlebury Park in Northamptonshire at the Aquarius Full Moon this August to celebrate, explore, play, expand and rise in love. A vast range of spiritual flavours was on offer – from early morning yoga to late night trance from our awesome DJs, via shamanic journeys, holy chants, medicine wheels, creative pursuits, drumming, healing workshops, activism, inspired performances, sacred sexuality…..

Every part of the LGBTQ+ rainbow was present in good numbers. Radical Faeries have the history of being birthed by gay men, but Queer Spirit Festival has from the start been created by, and intended for, every section of our queer multiverse. This brings challenges, which we gladly rise to, creating a powerful culture of respect, consent, curiosity and openness that enables the love to flow freely around the field. Queer Spirit revels in the beauty that is diversity, and the unity that arises from honouring everyone’s uniqueness, from all being free to be ourselves, and to express our inner truths and our core loving nature.

The Faerie Trance Dance was my personal highlight of the festival this summer. 15 years of dedication to the Drum Circle was rewarded grandly as I merged into the powerful rhythms and ecstatic dancing with a hundred or more beautiful, wild, witchy, shamanic, magical, radical queers, who just seemed to slip through the gates instantly, becoming their spirit animals, once the beats began. The festival draws together various strands of queer shamanism, tantra and other forms of spirituality – in the trance dance all these energies became one melting pot of high vibrational spirit. The power of the dance was magnified by having the opportunity to collaborate with DK Green, whom I invited to cast the circle – he taking the ceremonial gatekeeper role that has historically been held by trans people in cultures across the world – and Andy Fowler, a teacher of world percussion who had been inspiring dozens of queers to discover the healing and uplifting power of the drum throughout the festival.

The London Drum Circle starts its Autumn run at the Full Moon in Pisces on Friday 13th September. Pisces is the mystic – its transcendent perspective is gained through compassion for all beings. As more of us recognise that all beings are one being, are us in other forms, deserving of love and kindness, and seek the company of others who also live in or aspire to that lighter vibration, we ask all who come to ensure the drum circle is a welcoming space of coming home. The Radical Faerie term recognising the unity of life is subject:SUBJECT consciousness – a term that honours that I am another YOU and YOU are another ME, a life-altering perspective change once embraced.

We will gather at the September Full Moon

    • to give thanks for our summer journeys as we approach the Equinox turning point into the Autumn
    • to celebrate the amazing manifestation of love and magic at Queer Spirit Festival
    • and to invoke blessings for the first ever LONDON TRANS PRIDE MARCH, which is happening in central London the next day.

 

Trans Pride March link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1187419778106248/

Drum Circle links:

There are lots of drums and percussion to play with, the drum circle is a free flow space in which you are welcome to drum, dance and socialise as you wish. We arrive from 7pm to set up, and it is recommended to arrive by 8pm for the circle casting. You are welcome to bring any instruments along, plus snacks/drinks to share, and if possible £5 donation towards costs. (The Hall Hire charges have gone up recently.) As with all faerie events, payment is not insisted on – NOTAFLOF applies: No-One Turned Away For Lack Of Funds.

Read more: https://albionfaeries.org.uk/healing-power-of-the-drum/

AUTUMN DRUM CIRCLE DATES:

Friday September 13th  Equinox Full Moon

Saturday October 12th  Aries Full Moon

Friday November 15th  Samhain Full Moon Ancestor Celebration

Thursday December 12th Gemini Full Moon

Saturday December 21st  Winter Solstice

 

Blog by Shokti