My first great love. I was 16 years old. It was April… I was connected to this amazing organisation in the town I grew up in that deeply and beautifully tended to queer and trans youth. We got to partake in sit-ins, learn about the history of protest and queer activism in our region and wider networks… and I got to learn how to say CUNT without flinching. Literally a beautiful, fat dyke drove me home one night from one of our gay-gay-gay-cafe nights (incessantly cute!) and would not let me out of the car until I was able to basically growl-scream the word CUNT with all my power. Lesbians have always been my favourite teachers… but - my first great love. I was 16 years old and I already knew how to wield the word Cunt with some amount of finesse.

We saw each other across the room of the queer youth dance party that was held at a drop-in centre in the Fortitude Valley of so-called Brisbane, in Yuggerah, Jagera, and Turrbal Country. To this day I know that I fell in love with him the moment our eyes locked. I don’t think I’ve felt that since. That love initiated me into falling-in-love. His love stole me into another world. Side-note: I’m a priestess of Persephone and if you know anything about that Goddess, you’ll know that there is a story encoded in the ancient Homeric Hymn to Demeter in which Her Young Self - Kore (meaning Maid or Sprout, or inferring another Mystery that translation-history doesn’t show) - is stolen by the Lord of the Underworld Himself, Hades. She is taken. She falls down… ultimately, in Love with Himself. Persephone is revealed to become the ineffable, mighty Queen of Hades. Herself to Herself. I relate - for so many reasons - to Her Story.

He taught me how to kiss… he taught me how to make love… in his skilful, insatiable hands… I was reforged into the kind of lover I had longed to become. For some reason I was mostly always the bottom, which haunted me for a few years, until I realised I was allowed to want to be the top as well, which haunted me for a few years… but I think of him - the first one I fell in love with - because I understood fire through him. Fire.

Witches and mystics who are alike to witches - and most poets who write of love and desire are… - speak of a holy fire that moves through our blood. In our lore and legends it’s a fire forged of a primordial romance between us and the gods, or the fallen-in-love angels, or the faerie people. It’s fire stolen to ennoble us, in Promethean fashion. Or fire we ourselves dared to steal, Luciferian and audacious. And as my beloved Ravyn says, “the difference between a prayer and a spell is audacity.” I think most humans might understand this fire if they consider what happens to us when we fall-in-love. Okay, so now I want you to imagine consciously working with and wielding that kind of fire every day of your life, every week, every month, every year… and learning how to ride and be ridden by it, until a third road opens up… we call this Initiation. It fucking hurts. It harrows us and then… hopefully, we come through. We are renewed. We become as Spirits.

Spirits haunted by a falling-in-love that changes us, melts our skin off and unmasks us to the cellular material, down to the DNA strands. Down to the soul-story…

I think the greatest thing that links us together is our capacity for a soul-story that both binds and unbinds us. I am interested in the knots. I am interested in how - despite losing our goddamn minds and our hearts essentially shitting themselves in the process - we can untie the knots that bind against us.

Let us have grace for one another in that. Precious wild earnest grace - which maybe I’ll just call courage - that has us be able to honour and be present for one another in the unsettling, in the way we have to change our shapes for love, so much so that our bones seem to have to move and rejoin. It doesn’t have to be painful, but it is often uncomfortable.

For me, it has been that learning that riding and letting myself be ridden simultaneously that has been the nectar. So let the nectar and the fire remind each other of who they really are.

And how lucky are we that it gets to happen through us.

x