5 WEIRD FAE TRUTHS THAT MARK YOU AS “WYRD”

As May Eve sunset burns low on the horizon I am listening to “Alegria” from the Cirque du Soleil  soundtrack. I am reflecting on what it means to be fae, a term I first got called 6 years ago but which resonated for me from the very first moment that I knew there were faeries.

(And I don’t even remember that moment, so young was I; there has never been a time for me without faeries.)

This is a very intimate part of my soul that I share this night, but I have learned that no matter how weird it is, sharing the truth that resides within you is a must.

It is not only the only way to connect, really connect with your tribe on earth …if you have a weird tribe and they are on the internet, which is perhaps most of us here… but sharing from that deep shakey place is actually what creates magick.

So here’s truth one:

1. No matter what kind of magic you do, sharing from the deep, shakey, I almost feel dizzy and woozy in my gut place makes it more powerful.

Or in Spenserian terms,

“He oft finds medicine who his griefe imparts;
But double griefs afflict concealing hearts, As raging flames do those who strive to quench them.”–Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

If expression is the medicine, to use an Indigenous term for magick (which Spenser would no doubt have been a complete jerk about, given his total willingness to side with the oppression of the Irish during his own time) that heals your soul , then there is one surefire way to find it:

Speak up.
Share that painful thing.
Tell that untold story.

Unveil the ugly thing you think no one wants to see (I mean not your vulva, that shit will get you kicked off Facebook and besides, not only are they beautiful but also, very highly in demand).

Georgia O’Keefe’s Flower of Life II

No, I mean this: unveil your soul. Your soul is the cosmic flashlight that will light your way and it is your very weirdness that is your beacon.

Or in the immortal words of Australian pooka fae (my interpretation) Jessie J,

“I’m stuck in the dark but you’re my flashlight,
You’re getting me, getting me through the night”.

 

So if weirdness is the cosmic beacon, and we’re basically ALL kind of weird, no? then why aren’t we all just glowy shiny attraction creatures right now?

Well, we kind of are, but that leads me to fae truth two. Truth number two is:

2. Just speaking up is not as easily DONE as said.

Or in Spenserian terms:

“Oh but,” quoth she [the Queen], “great grief will not be told, and can more easily be thought than said.” –Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Despite our out-loud media culture, just speaking up is not as easily done as said.
In fact, it takes extreme focus, clarity, and inner personal balance to spread your message as far as you need it to go

(and if you’re reading this then I believe that you are one of those people who are meant to be a message-spreader and a hope leader). Why else would you be drawn to my writing?

In this evolving world of ours, the weird are the leaders.

Everyone else’s map is outdated.

Yes, I will sell you no marketing bullshit here; maybe now is not your time. Speaking out is so hard.

Sometimes, no matter how hopeful we are that now is the time and we can finally speak out, there may be years before it all comes together:

-Maybe you want to market your product and your voice and the momentum just isn’t there.
-Maybe you’ve known or had it prophesied over you that you will accomplish something great…
-Or it is simply that your inner voice tells you it is so.

If now is not the time, then you have but one task for the foreseeable future and that is, hold on.

Just hold on to yourself. Keep your soul, keep your inner flashlight batteries charged up however you can. I prefer music, my cat, good company and old poetry.

Because if now is not the time to stand out and speak up then one day, your time will come.

And when that day comes, it will not ask you to be perfect and it will not ask you to have prepared in advance for every moment, but it will ask you only and completely to be yourself.

So hold on to that.

Hold on to that and in this difficult time, this transformative year of the Monkey where wild leaps are rewarded and safe bets fall apart…

Stay with us.

Just stay here on this earth plane, please. You have so very much to contribute one day but really, your presence is enough (and that is the thing you will find out on the one day when your fame and your message takes off, oddly).

As my (I wish) homie Jessie J, with the heart for the weird and alone, sings so poignantly:

“Don’t lose who you are, in the blur of the stars
Seeing is deceiving, dreaming is believing,
It’s okay not to be okay
Sometimes it’s hard, to follow your heart
Tears don’t mean you’re losing, everybody’s bruising,
Just be true to who you are.”

But wait, there’s more.

If you do want to speak out someday, then fae truth number three is for you.

Fae truth number three is:

3. You will face the worst kind of rejection before you “make it” and what’s more everyone who ever ‘made it’ faced this precise rejection.

As Antony Waller writes in my favorite tongue-in-cheek poem on Shakespeare:

“Dear Mr Shakespeare, I really must protest
Your latest work, that manuscript
It’s clearly not your best…
Your play lacks form, no ebb nor flow…
Will, what are you thinking, a Scottish plot
With […] three old witches round a pot?
I think that you should make some cuts…”

Note: This poem is based on actual critique Shakespeare heard from one of his publishers, Cuthbert Burby. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous now?

So… your inevitable rejection is actually the good news.

It puts you on the same page as everyone who ever made something extraordinary of themselves…

Yes…

…Everyone with great success has experienced horrid rejection, whether they talk about it publicly or not.

This also means that

your addiction,

your ADHD,

your HIV+,

your fat,

your queerness,

your “ugly”…

…are not the obstacle. Actually, these vectors of rejection are quite possibly the means of your salvation and success, if not now then one day.

Why?

Because the things that one crowd of people hate and fear you for, another crowd urgently, urgently needs to hear. No one is born onto this Earth without a purpose, and your shame is their freedom… as soon as you make it yours.

To prove this, I do not ask you to take any risks. I only ask that you observe an anecdote from my own life:

Here it is.

I have struggled with my weight my whole life.

What’s more, I am transgender (assigned female at birth, felt like a boy from middle childhood).

It is a legit miracle that I am married to a person who loves what I am deep down and just happened to be my best friend for 10 years, because literally nobody sees me for what I am.

Until now.

Naked magick using is a fine old tradition…

You see, for the longest time, this body was, I believed, not my friend. In fact, for most of my life it felt like a horrid prison.

It still does some days.

And it felt especially prison-ish because I just knew I could not:
-speak up
-speak out
-have a successful practice in (of all things) my shamanic calling (I mean, how not-body-based is that?)

…until my body got into that spot where I was comfortable doing videos (I am still not).

Guess what?

After five years of knowing I had a mission to fulfill and hiding out behind this “horrible” body, I consciously decided, Fuck that.

And I began to put myself out there.

I am, as we speak, receiving amazing requests from around the world to coach, to speak, to teach and to generally be the ‘teacher of teachers’ that was prophesied over me during an incredibly transformative jungle Kundalini raising period

( I spent 5 years trying to figure out what that meant… good intuitive readings are fucking prophetic).

And now here is my latest Facebook post:

Wait wait.

I know, you think, “This person is white, conventionally pretty and has good makeup,”

in other words that I have privilege.

I do, and it’s not fair, and it is why I started a magazine called Wyrd Fae to amplify the voice of the strange and the other.

Which is, don’t get me wrong, not about “getting a cookie.”
It is the very least that I can do as a person born to privilege on this planet.

So please, if you are weird and have a cool important story to tell, friend and write me on Facebook (if you don’t friend me you may get stuck in that ‘other inbox’ for a little while… it is fucking frustrating that still exists).

But also, the point here isn’t so much about privilege because as you see, I have enough.

It is about the limits I placed upon myself.
The Devil’s card, in the Tarot.

It’s that I thought I was gross because I was round.
And in fact, I am beautiful because of it. As soon as I began to do the work of putting myself out there anyway, this stopped being an issue. In fact, now it is a strength of mine.

Because that “fat” picture caption is 100% true, by the way.

I DID gain weight as I went from being a self-conscious hide-away being to a consciously out there being i.e. My True Self.

And guess what? I put that on Facebook because that is my honest self, warts and all.

I am beautiful.
I am round.
I’m still a boy even if I still look like a girl (at least in makeup I do).

So what?

I absolutely refuse to be defined by my body.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if this radical honest-being-in-community makes me lose massive amounts of weight, by the way.)

Don’t get me wrong though.
I do care. I just refuse to let myself be stopped.

I will speak, and teach in seminars, and travel round the world with this message of mine, healing people as I go, and ALL of it in a BIG, FAT BODY.
Why not? Until I fully learn to see myself as beautiful.

Yes, I am so so vain, but my body isn’t the point.

This is about the chains you have placed on yourself.
And that I had placed on myself.

Please take them off now, beautiful one.
It is safe.
You are enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUXgTO64xIo

Now, as a sneaky way of proving my third point, that sharing your “ugly” will actually draw people to you…

Please now look within yourself and see what your reaction was to all that I have shared above.
Do you feel that I am gross and horrible and ugly?

Or do you feel closer to me?

If I have learned anything from the stories *I* love it is that most likely, having read this, you now feel a stronger bond with me.

Yes.

That is exactly how people will react to you going ahead and sharing your own message with your own warts.

In fact, if you don’t share whatever that dark thing is, most people are going to be left wondering exactly what you are hiding. And they will be right to wonder.

We humans are canny creatures and we do not believe anyone to be an angel (even if you are angelkin).

So in fact, please share your worst thing.
It is the mirror of your best thing.

Which brings me to fae point four:

4. Nothing here on Earth is, apart from that you see it so. And when you alter your sight, by power or transformation or just moving to a different part of the country… your reality also changes.

This IS magick.

Or as The Faerie Queen puts it:
“Why then should witless man so much misweene [misunderstand]
That nothing is but that which he hath seene?” –Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Do you identify as Fae?

I do.

If you do, you have an additional power to change the world, because you have always seen it as different.

There is a reason why they call fae powers The Sight.
And once they work, they are more enchanting than any opium.

But, you know, won’t take you completely out of commission seeking a high (although they will change your life).

Changing what you see, and what others see of you, IS power and it is magick and if you feel fae, then you already have this power inbuilt.

I’ve always been otherworldly, misconnected to this earth and very connected to something else…

…magickally inclined from my own body, blood, spit and breath.

I am fae.

WE are fae.

We are HERE.

Mermaids, otherkin, wampyres and nox witches, we are all here.

Are you something other than that?

I fucking believe you.

I’ve met brownies, wolfkin, magic users from space, Indigo children giving birth to Crystal children, and more…

And I know that there is way more out there than I’m aware of.

Which brings me to my final fae truth:

5. Your worst thing is also your best thing; they are mirrors of one another.

If you cannot be open about one, the other will not come to you. (Or when the good does come it will be horribly undermined by that hidden bad thing.)

This truth is backed by none other than Shakespeare in his own words in that same Scottish play:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” -Macbeth

This means that not only is nothing just what it seems but your darkest thing is really your power, your strength, your beauty.
It also means you don’t have to share just everything. But, what is the thing that feels like it is most holding you back? That, I promise, is the secret strength.

image source

Or…

It can stay your worst thing forever, where it will fester and grow inside you.

I would know.

Just as Lady MacBeth could not remove that damned spot and her refusal to deal with this doomed her to madness, I tried and tried to get rid of the things that, I thought, were my ugly side.

I starved.
I became the kind of person who wore slabs of makeup every day.

And as I say this, you know exactly what I am talking about in your own life.

It is that thing you fear to show.

It is your “worst ugly.”

It is the morphine addiction, it is the prostitution, it is the fame addict that you are and that I am.

It is the ugliest place you ever found yourself.

For me, that was barfing my face off, head deep in a toilet even as I grew ever more overwhelmed when I went to war in Afghanistan.

For you, it is almost certainly something else, but it is still a preoccupation.

I want to hear about it, if you can tell no one else.

And if you want to release your raw story wild, yet perfectly edited, as you make your powerful debut…

Consider doing it with me.

Just tell the truth.
And be yourself.
Then you win.

We all win.

Here’s one last piece of inspiration from my all-time favorite artist of truth in lies, Lady Gaga, (very fitting for the night on which faeries are said to walk this earth):

“I’m gonna marry the night; I won’t give up on my life
I’m a warrior queen
Live passionately tonight
I’m gonna marry the dark
Gonna make love to the stark,
I’m a soldier to my own emptiness; I am a winner…
I’m gonna marry the night
I’m gonna marry the night
I’m gonna marry the night”

So.

Do you want Beltane power that is inexhaustible?

Want to tap into your true fae self?

This Beltane, if you want to re-enact the Great Marriage of Thelemic Magick…
Or bring about the fiery impregnation of divine copulation between Virgin and Lord of Summer with which pagans have forever celebrated May Day…

You don’t need a rite, per se.
You don’t need incense, herbs or oil (although these are always powerful).

But you need to make deep soulful love to your darkest secret.

Let that bitch ride.
Do it skillfully.

And then as the summer season dawns, you will have the power to shine.

 

….Want more?

I’m so touched you do.

In a nutshell, yes I turned my biggest shame into my biggest gain.

You can do it too and if you decide to be open, finally, not only will it be a huge weight off your shoulders but you will benefit from it.

But if you don’t already believe me, please get convinced with my girl Jessie J that your deepest shame is really your masterpiece in disguise:

“I still fall on my face sometimes and I
Can’t color inside the lines ’cause
I’m perfectly incomplete
I’m still working on my masterpiece”.

Happy May flowers, dear one.

 

About the Author:

Uriel Gray is the leader of the Wyrd Fae movement, and a practicing shaman with a wyrd backstory. He loves Sphynx cats, the gods, and the wyrd. You can go to his website to learn more about shamanic coaching for transformation and check out Wyrd Fae, where the wyrd and the fae hang out.

 

 

 

featured image – Author’s own

Merken