All posts by Albion Faeries

Faerie Daisy reflects on the summer Solstice in Glastonbury, with the radical faeries.

AWESOME SOLSTICE.

We came together around the hearth bringing ourselves to each other. The drums sang together, no room for prima donnas; flutes played, the band struck up and the choir chanted, a constellation of voices weaving and rising. Pan was rampant around the sacred flames celebrating audaciously the horniness of life itself. As the energy rose, the leaves of the trees vibrated and danced and sang with us. All of life in and around that epicentre praised the joy of life and the coming solstice.
I left the circle to find water and found myself in moocow field, the young brown creatures were breathing it all in. Stars glittered and led me to water. It was then I heard the sounds of other tribes on the hills and in the surrounding valleys playing their drums. Each had a familiar sound within the complexities of their music. It was the sound of the Faerie drum/heartbeat, they’d incorporated it into their music. In that marvellous wonderful moment I realised that we had inserted ourselves into the whole of life. Nobody, no group nor tribe was in a position to accept us or allow us in, we quite simply inserted ourselves into LIfe. Back home where we belong. There is no going back.

Daisy xxx

Joie de Folleterre by Queaver – 15th August 2013.

A time for joy.
Tears ripen.

Nothing in the trees’ gaze contradicts the flowers
that dare declare they love. All the colours of music,
all the music of the forest, bright with wonder’s blessing.

Think of it as a merry-go-round,
a subaqueous garden.

Bones blur, outlines loosen, a little like trees, indistinct
in summer’s haze, splinters smoothed away.
Hands unfold, steady on another’s touch.
Around the flames of laughter,
the glow of conversation,
kisses tickle, settle,
rest, depart, rainbow-winged.
Settle again and again.

There is something like music that eases each
separate note into one swelling melody.

Wildly beautiful shapes, colours, swirl
and swoon in this lava lamp.

Somewhere bees get busy with tomorrow’s fruiting.
As your fingers coax rope into baskets I drop
my doubts inside. Your offering eyes ignite
my soul that’s been singing
to itself these years, by the far lake.

Yes, eyes meet here, shadows
steepen their lustre
into jewel-light that
bursts beyond words.

Words are clumsy messengers. Here the language is pretty
wraps, wigs, dresses sexpressively excessive.
Fireworks fixed in half motion. Star-beams caught
between silk and skin,
skin and skin.

With the night they sprawl shifting abruptly to dodge
the fire’s frisky smoke.

The days would be roaring and hungry,
gone in a few gulps, just flakes
to record the feast.

A time for sadness.
Dreams ripen. You snuggle in my heart.

A buoyant soul, unshackled and rising – Odanata on Summer Gathering 2013 @ Folleterre.

The way to Folleterre was scenic, light and full of promise. The approach greeted by a meandering stream carving out picturesque spaces for habitation and country-folk recreation in the humble valley place of Folleterre’s home. Pines postured green and tall in peaceful and watchful communion with other brothers and sisters of bark and leaf. The sun held the whole scene in a warmth you felt on the breath, in the chest. The pull up the mountain was a calling – a silken leash gently tugging on the fluttering hearts of a thousand butterflies in the stomach.

I can’t give you many words for my first glimpse of our Faerie haven. I jostled with the tension of a superficial desire to have my expectations fulfilled and the heartfelt attempt to breathe in the first moment of being there. To grasp it authentically, untainted by my prior lust for and dreams of Folleterre.

Nevertheless I had arrived – I was here now. Follettere held me whilst I gained some composure. The environment so strange yet so perfectly familiar. Faerie intention and detail etched into the most inconspicuous places. The pinecone tinsel up the shit tower, the wisps of an absent-minded doodle in the sand of a faerie-claimed beach and crochet-flowers adorning the branches of random trees down the way to the prairie.

And holding I would need. The bosom of Follettere took some nesting. The first task being unpacking my other-world baggage, inspecting the contents with care and sharing some of them round for knowing reflection in heart circle. Then, either making adjustments, scrapping entirely or re-crafting them with a new found, or better honed, loving faerie-artisanship. Of course there are a few bits wedged in the cognitive crevices of a worn luggage, undetectable to naked-faerie eye – but a gathering is a tonic for perspective. There will be other times for these, of that I’m sure.

The appropriate camp caveat of “you better WERQ” accompanied my initiation to Folleterre – a cyclical process of processing and learning and bonding and sharing. But what sweet soulful bounty and harvest did the perseverance yield – akin to bursting out, wild and running, from the dank and thorny thickets of a strange forest into a boundless meadow of wild flower harmony. Each murmur of summer life so present, so disarming.

And then the connections. Thrilling and physical, enriching and penetrative – a reaching out beyond the pre-conceived and anxious, without grasping, to merge with the welcome of another faerie soul. Faerie souls that taught me the boundless nature of love. It’s transcendental quality – the simple, divine antidote to the unfathomable, to the dark.

Anchored in the tired conceptions of how to love and how to be loved, a new way of being with one another in perfect sharing became the new horizon. A personal metamorphosis still unfolding. A flaking off of a tired rusty hue, stripped back by perfect flows of clarity – the buoyancy of the soul unshackled, and rising.

I re-enter the other place consolidated, holding onto perfect realisations, trying all the time with your love and support, to make them permanent manifestations.

Odanata x