One Fey's Tale - Installment 5

[a partial list of faerie sanctuaries and faerie circles]

The question

by middle

only on lifelube

I know I’m not the only one. I’ve talked to others about it. After our first experiences – a few months or years after we start hanging out with faeries – we find ourselves wrestling with the question.

Ironically, after a short while we have no qualms about slapping the label on someone else. "He’s such a faerie . . . he just doesn’t know it yet." Sound familiar? When we gaze in the mirror, though, there’s this weird crisis of commitment. In quiet conversations with friends I hear phrases like "I haven’t decided yet," or "I just don’t know if I am or not."

It’s hard to keep a straight...um...poker face when some curious type asks, "how do I apply to attend a gathering," or "how do you become a member of the radical faeries?" My mirth reveals much about both the "normal" world and the fey realm. "Ask three people to define the radical faeries," my friends always say, "and you’ll get four answers."

I hang out with fey folk in fey spaces, participate in faerie rituals, and think I share core faerie values (whatever that means when you define everything for yourself.) I love the earth, believe our queerness is a fabulous gift to the universe, and revel in the energies of intention, magick, and love. I wield an understanding of collective process and power that I’ve learned best from faeries. Yet when asked directly, I still sometimes hesitate, hearing echoes of that old internal debate.

I think it’s a reminder to focus on my path instead of any destination. It probably represents a subconscious reversion to conventional thinking – a useless investment in labels, a sometimes necessary but troublesome concern about things politic, an obsession with perceptions about rejection vs. admiration.

It’s a dilemma that stems from being part of something that defies convention. How can it be possible? Tens or hundreds of diverse humans, ostensibly strangers, gather, feed and take care of one another, share zany and profound experiences, and embrace a new home and a new family.

A counselor once reminded me, "It’s ok to sample things. You don’t have to marry them." She was right.

I believe what Joey Cain wrote on the lifelube blog shortly before I began this series: "As Faeries, we share a view of the world in which the dualities of either/or, minority/majority thinking are dissolved in the experience of ‘both/and,’ ‘I am you’ ways of thinking and being."
No application. No membership. No marriage. Just being.

So the truth is this: Last week, when a table full of queers asked me, "Are you a radical faerie?" I answered, "Yes!" without hesitation. On other occasions, often when the outside world permeates my existence, I sometimes answer differently, smiling, "A radical faerie is one of the things I am."


Read previous installments of One Fey's Tale here.