I come from a family of storytellers. Story is our way to achieve immortality. And as a storyteller, I have been entrusted with stories as well. Southwesterners have our own way of telling stories. We often start in the middle. Story winds around itself in tangents and spirals. We almost never talk in a straight line. The story is done when you end up back at the beginning. I have been rejected because of story, as well, by one of the characters in this story, in fact. My spirals and embellishments are loved by some and hated by others. It has harmed me professionally (story is seen as a less intellectual tool than Socratic dialogue) and personally. And yet, it was that rejection that brought me to the realization that the way I speak is a precious thing. It is all I have left of my grandparents and my father and the side of the family that found me beautiful and brilliant. All that is left to me of that echo, of the dead who watch over me, is my voice. I could not change it if I tried. That also is part of why this story in particular is hard to tell. But when one is caught up in the love of something bigger, it is love that must be served. All those broken parts of us, all the imperfections, all the strangeness, are what make us compelling. Beloved East, strange as he is, wants me to tell the story, to be the moon to his sun. These stories happened long before I was told that how I spoke was different and less than. It is endearing to me that I am the person he asks. That maybe the thing that makes me different is also the thing that serves love.
I’m going to tell you a story. This is a story all about love. It might not seem so at first, because all the love in this story is different from the love we talk about endlessly. But it is love like a passion, like being struck by lightning over and over. What if I told you that life could be this way? What if I told you that you may be in love like this right now, in this moment, surrendered and accepted for all that you are? You could be, my love. This is the story of your birth, the first time, and for all time. It is the story of how you are loved and surrounded and held, for all time. So yes, this story is in part about you.
There are many stories about the fall, not just one. There is of course the story of the great rebellion, of how the Morningstar waged war against God and he and his followers were thrown from Heaven. That angels came into the daughters of men and had children. That these children were abominations, and in part, motivated God to wipe the slate clean with a flood. East rolls his many eyes at this story. He knows better. He was there.
These stories are not always tragic. In some places, the children of the Sky People were accepted and became part of those cultures. The stories I learned of the Sky People as a child were very different than those in the Bible. Long ago, we were small people and ate only flowers. The Sky People came and we welcomed them. We are talking about our early ancestors from long ago, who developed potatoes and corn and squashes. We knew about genetics. When new people came along, folks knew it was a chance to expand that gene pool. That makes visitors very, um, welcome. Yeah. We sang together. And as usually happens in bands and choirs, that kind of intimacy leads to other kinds of intimacy. There is even a symbol of the first union, it looks like the Maltese Cross. Because we practice a kind of syncretic Christianity, we can pass it off as a cross. But it really is the symbol of the paths of starlight home. I remember my Tia telling me about this symbol she had crocheted into an afghan, a white cross with a red five-petaled rose in the center. The rose was crocheted separately, each petal perfectly formed and standing up luridly from the rest. The white cross, the black background, the edging of small starshapes that trimmed the edge, all of these things told a story. Tia Salome said it was the symbol of all the worlds. “It’s about love, sobrina. The love of the sky for the earth and the earth for the magical world of Little Brother Deer.” The angels, the quick, and the dead. We had been small and peaceful. We would have never survived. But now, in some clans, we are tall as ironwoods, and strong as bears. That is the reminder of who we are. That story is written on my own body.
East says that my people had it right. It was very clear in the first fall story I ever heard that it is not about a fall from grace. It is about falling in love. Maybe not falling in love as we think of love as human beings, a concept that is culturally bound and constructed, but love as something much larger and messier. I’d say communion, but that isn’t the same thing. Love is how this universe is held together. I’m sure that institutional power benefits from a story of rebellion and angels becoming demons that make us do terrible things and the punishments due those who disobey. Quieter stories of love do not make good cautionary tales. This is how something of great beauty got stolen and turned into a weapon. It was the fallen that knew love, and the others hated them for it.
The second idea I learned is that love, like matter, is conserved. Love cannot be lost. It is the fabric and essence of all life. We are part of that warp and weft that is made of love and the magic that arises between the latticework of reality. In this way, we are products and participants of a larger love song. So, we walk on earth and are kept by angels and watched over by the dead. We witches are the remembrance among humans, and the expression of how love built something mysterious and powerful, framed in loss and joy. We are the love conserved. East once said to me about witches, “There are a thousand ways to fall in love with the world. A witch seeks to know them all.” We are joyfully fallen like the first fathers. I, even now, am still learning new ways to love. I’ll continue to do so until I stop breathing on this cycle, and even beyond it. I love you. And I’ll come back to you. Perhaps one day you will be my teacher.
This story begins, as both the biblical and the family story begins, in a desert. I was travelling home from a queer spirituality gathering in the New Mexican high desert. I was so much younger, and yet, not young. Just a leatherdyke witch travelling with my collared girl, who was the most precious thing to me in the whole world. People often misunderstand dominance and submission. They don’t see the power that lies beneath the part that shocks you. People see the collars and leashes and tags and such, markers of possession, and immediately see it as abuse. It is an exchange. As a top, I give you control. You can stop it at any time. In exchange, you give me the power to decide what is going to happen. You can rest in that, knowing that I am holding you. Maybe part of that is pushing you to explore your limits, or just providing a structure in which you can achieve new things. Being owned means there is always somewhere to belong. And owning another means you get to see through the eyes of the gods. You receive adoration. It is not an easy thing, to receive. We are taught it is selfish and wrong. But here is this huge gift, and you must find a way. It forces you to see yourself as worthy, it pushes you to be worthy. And before you start to judge me, you might want to understand this one thing. There is huge power in submission. To be able to hand over yourself to another is evidence of the fact that you are the only entity in the entire universe who is entitled to do so. It happens at your will, and with your consent. A powerful submissive is subversive, because they know their own worth. The more powerful the submissive, the more valuable the prize. And so, I loved this woman like air at the bottom of the ocean. I burned for her. As for her, it is hard to say. She was an atheist, a materialist, a devoutly non-magical person (if one can be devoutly not something). But through what we did together, she had come to regard me as most definitely a magical person and admitted that she could not explain things that happened around me. I had been initiated into the Tradition a few years before we began our relationship. I walked through the world swimming in magic, part of the love song. My girl was charmed by how other witches offered themselves to me in bars. How I could charm a butterfly onto my finger in order to help it back outside. And how I could make a magical space for us to fall into when we were together. Witches can be handy that way, but it will fuck up your world view.
On the way home from New Mexico, we decided to take a trip through Southern Utah. We stayed in Moab so we could go to Arches National Park. We knew that it was a skypark, a place where the lack of any nearby city meant that the skies were dark at night. After we checked into the motel and ate some dinner, we grabbed our coats and headed out to the park. The sky was glorious and the rock formations stood out as black shapes against the field of stars. We ended up at a formation called Balanced Rock. I clambered out of the car and I stood there before the formation, a spire topped with a huge boulder. Two huge sentinel stones stand to either side of the spire and boulder. Balanced Rock is singular in its grace. Simple and strange, it opens the mind to perceive the impossible. As I stood there I could feel this loud vibration, like someone sounding a great horn, but with a pitch so low that it shook my bones and teeth. I had been an initiate of my tradition only a short time, but I recognized his voice, and it filled my whole mind. It was East, calling and singing, the winds tearing through the night sky. And as I stood there, my head full of the vibration, I realized that through those two sentinel stones was the direction of the rising sun. I had somehow stumbled on a gate. The world is full of them, after all, if you know what to look for. I didn’t really have to look for this one at all. He had every intention of saying hi.
I have no idea what the girl heard, but she knew something was happening, as I had tears in my eyes. She looked at me, questioning, and I grabbed her by the leather collar around her neck. I pulled her to me, I always pulled her to me, like gravity or some physical law that rules the motion of bodies.
“What do I offer a Guardian after tripping across his doorstep?” I asked, smiling dangerously.
“I have a feeling it’s going to involve me,” she squeaked.
I pushed her roughly up against the trail railing in the dark. Her eyes glittered like the sky behind her as I held her there against the railing, listening to the singing of the vibration. I unzipped her cutoffs and reached into her soft wetness, sliding my hand along her folds.
“I’m scared,” she breathed. I didn’t care. That was a feature, not a bug, and this was not a complaint. She moaned and pushed herself against my hand.
As I pushed my hand inside her, I asked her “are you still scared?”
“Yes. Yes I am,” she gasped and cried out as I fucked her. She held tight to my jacket, shaking. She buried her face in my shoulder.
“And isn’t fear often the point in relationships such as ours?” I fixed her gaze in mine as I moved inside her.
Her eyes got wide, her eyes darted to over my shoulder and she said, “WTF? What is that?” I pressed against her, standing up.
“What? Oh, fuck. What?” I looked around expecting to see another person.
She was clinging to me for dear life at this point, and she was trembling. “Mistress, something lives here. I can feel something.”
I laughed, petting her face tenderly. I wanted to cry just because she felt something. That, in itself, seemed like a miracle. I replied gently, “Something lives everywhere, petling. The world is alive and breathing all around us. That’s where the magic lives.” I held her by the hair at the back of her head as I grazed her neck with my teeth. “It’s the desert. There is no cover in the desert. All those beings are out in the open.” You cannot lie to yourself in the desert. In the desert, you don’t get to negotiate. You must meet it on its own terms, whether that means carrying water everywhere, or staying out of the sun at the midday, it doesn’t matter. You deal with it as it is.
My girl, she was an urban creature. A proud East Coaster, she was more accustomed to pavement than sand. There was no place in this precious beautiful pervert for sand. But I was making a place for that, for her to be with me in that moment. I was making a place for her to be part of the magic, because she was mine. She wanted to throw herself into any world I created, any chasm I opened. I suppose that is what is compelling about witchcraft as well. The two are not so different in the end, I suppose. The greatest act of any initiate is an act of submission.
I was nearly on top of her at this point, lost in the sensation of her, my back feeling like the Milky Way was springing from my spine. She was ejaculating all over the sand, screaming into the wind, her hair wild and her head thrown back against the stars. This was exactly where we wanted to be in that moment. I could hear the desert sing in response to being offered this, an offering of moisture in the dryness, of one’s sex to the stars. I held her firm as she came, holding her up with my body, tracing the line of her neck with my lips. “Sacrifice is to make holy,” I breathed. We stood there for a long time, as we shook, trying to catch our breath. Finally, we headed home, after I found something for her to sit on in the car. Because passion is holy, but car seats are car seats, after all.
We got back to the motel, and all I wanted was to drag her down to that place again, where she could let go. I wanted to push her. I wanted to consume her, to somehow make her part of me. Finally, we both collapsed in each other’s arms and fell asleep. However, if you knock on the door and bring an offering, one had best be prepared to be welcomed in. East decided to give me a gift in return. He had other plans for his witch.
That night, I had a dream. Not a regular dream, one of those kinds of dreams that you know is important, that shakes you so that your teeth chatter and it stays with you all day. To this day, I am to be careful how I think of this dream, because it can drag me along with it. It is the gift of a story, and one that is hard to tell and to listen to. It’s a story from a Guardian to his witch, one that can shatter my mind like glass. I fear it every time he tells it. I fear writing it down. But I know that I love him better for knowing it, and it is a pain I return to with gratitude for being given such a gift at all. Not all ecstasies are joyful, and sometimes it is the painful ones that break us open and set us free. It is in those moments that we understand what it takes to reach out to us, and how we cannot receive it without loving in return.
In my dream, I saw a woman drawing water. She was dark-skinned and had a head full of hair that wound like snakes about her shoulders, colored golden with fat and earth. I was filled with a feeling of confusion, and yet unable to turn away. I could tell that feeling did not come from me. She was the only child of a man who was a navigator, and she carried on the skills and traditions of her family. These skills would have made her valuable as a wife, if it weren’t for the strangeness that was at her very center. As they moved from one place to another, she followed the stars and knew the way across the scrub and sand. She followed songs and memories buried in the Earth. She wore a scarf over her head, and her eyes were made for looking up. That is how she met him. She was staring at the stars a little too long. She had charted her way, and was just stargazing, longing for something that even she didn’t understand. She didn’t know that was a call, an invitation. She danced and sang to the stars, wanted to sleep beneath their light. And then, there he was, in all his burning glory, without so much as a sound.
“Do not be afraid,” he said. His voice sounded strangely like it came from everywhere. The emotions were so pure, the need to connect, the risk of terrifying her and having all this effort be for nothing. The need to connect was greater. Every part of him stretched out like ribbons of consciousness. But this one, strange and full of wonder, just wasn’t one to run in fear.
“Does that ever work?” she laughed nervously. She was shaking, but she was also standing fixed to that spot. Terrified. Curious. He felt and smelled familiar, like she had known him all her life. It was like a distant memory she struggled to retrieve. And in that moment, with her hair and skirts swirling about her in the wind, laughing, she was the most beautiful thing in all the world. She broke. She broke and opened up like a flower. She shone and she knew it and there was no going back.
Angels don’t love like we do. There is something ferocious about it, primal and huge. And frankly, none of them were ready for it, either. As I dreamed, I could hear an edge in this story. He desperately wanted me to understand something. I felt like I was suddenly standing there, next to this woman watching the visitation happening before her. And then he spoke, in a voice that shook my bones. He said to me so very gently, “We did not fall from grace. That is a story told by those who crave to consume the world. It is a lie. The truth is much more complicated, as it always is. The truth is that we did fall. We fell in love. We fell in love with the beauty and courage of these hearts. We fell in love with the oceans and deserts and wind and light through the trees. We fell in love with the murmurations of starlings and the color blue of glaciers and the sound of wolves howling across them like a lover’s caress in the dark. There was nothing we did not love. We even loved death and how precious it made you, but we were not ready. We were absolutely not ready for love.” I could hear how language could not do this justice, how he wanted to share this with me but it just could not achieve clarity. It could have been that need to connect, or a warning about how reckless I was being with my own soul. So, he let me feel it.
My mind stretched and lurched. I stopped breathing. I could feel myself going mad. I wanted to throw up, or had I already barfed in some ancient past? I knew I could not hold it. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. I was here, I was there, I was lost in some strange sea. I couldn’t move. It was more than sleep paralysis. He was holding me down. It was a gesture, one that was meant to say, “I need to you understand, to be with me.” And I was sinking. I could not handle it. Finally, I was able to get out, “You are hurting me. I will break.” And he let go. I woke up, kicking and crying and gasping for air in a strange bed. My girl was curled beside me, and she woke up because she saw that I had jolted awake.
Love is a wild thing. We like to think we know about love, but we don’t. We love the best we can, but love is not the personal thing we think it is. It is the force that holds everything together. If God is love, then that makes sense. She doesn’t care about us personally. It is holy longing that forms bonds and builds bridges between the Outer Dark and this place. It is love that reaches out and drags the stars from the sky to be our lovers and stay with us forever, even when our bones are dust. It is madness. It is ecstasy. It is awkward and messy and somehow elegant at the same time. It is the willow from which the Basket is made.
That is not where the story ends. The love story of the daughters of men and the sons of god was not to be blessed or happy. Their children, the Nephilim, were hybrids. Their bodies were mortal and precious, like their mothers. They inherited the particular badassery of the women who looked into the stars and then looked at their own kind and looked back up and said, “I’m going to get with that.” What exactly does it take to do that? They had it. But the Nephilim also had angelic souls, like their fathers, star souls that did not return to the source, but stayed in this place, tied by love and fallen to the beauty. Souls that remembered and stayed conscious. They lived a very long time. They were bent and broken, they were strange and didn’t look like or act like other people. This was not a weakness. I cling to this in my disabled body and remember that I am gleaming and bright. That I am an echo of these ancient heroes. They were larger than life and so they had to die. Such a human thing, the need to destroy everything that we do not understand.
This was not an act of some jealous petty desert god with a fragile ego. It didn’t begin all at once, either. There were murmurings, and the families moved to other places. They hid. They moved around so they were harder to find. But in the end, they were found. Fear is enough of a god to account for the murder of children. So it has ever been. So it will ever be.
I have no way to describe what I watched happen. A genocide. The wide scale slaughter of those who had the blood of the stars. The screaming was horrible. The woman at the well, who I was now very attached to, was fighting with everything she had with what weapons she could lay her hands on. In my mind, I screamed and cheered her on. I wanted her to win. I desperately needed her to win. She fought so hard, and then, amid a chorus of inhuman shrieking, watched her own son die. The earth was shaking and the air full of chaos and the smell of blood. But mostly, emotions. They hung in the air. The ones I could recognize and the ones that were not human, that never were human. And indeed, had never existed until that moment. Emotions I could not endure. I was awake, but he was still telling his story. Of loves slaughtered by those in fear, those they had watched over. Of horror that was somehow hollow, a strange sense of receding, only to always return. Always. Always. Like an endless echo of sinking and never wanting to surface again, but somehow always bobbing to the top.
My girl kept saying “Mistress? Are you ok?” I did finally get up, but I could not let go of that image of the woman at the well. I looked at my girl, the depth of my love for her only a sliver of this. I told her, “He’s still telling me a story. I think he will let go when he is done.” She packed up the things (as all good girls do) and I laid there. She said I laid there like I was sleeping with my eyes open. I have to say, she dealt well with having a witch as a Mistress. It isn’t always easy being part of the magic, perhaps even harder being magic adjacent.
There is a mythology among witches. Some believe that witchblood is inherited, that Eve and the Serpent had union , and that we inherited magic in that way. The blood of Cain. Others believe that it is a spiritual inheritance, that the Nephilim reincarnate as witches over and over across time, howling across the Earth in the times in between. If you wonder why the Powers give a rat’s ass about us, it’s because we are their children reborn. Each lifetime different, but always we remember. They watch. They guard. They challenge. We are the living bridge between this Earth and the Hole in the Sky. We are the children of the first union. In this way, we are the seventh Guardian. We are the bridge between heaven and earth, the souls of Watchers, the bodies of mortals. We are so much more than we seem.
If only it ended there. But it doesn’t. In the family story, the Sky People were welcome. Their children did hide for a while. They survived and became part of us, and specifically part of the clans that defended the people. Strong as they were, welcome as they were, their descendants still had to face a genocide. I could smell the acrid smoke of the villages, this history of my own people. I couldn’t breathe again. I could see them dragged off to work the silver mines. I saw the train station where they were sold. Why does this have to keep happening? Over and over we do this thing, this very human thing. I could feel East pressed against me, trying to get me to understand something about this need to kill everyone. It isn’t some outer power that drives this. It is us. Our greed and our fear. I had slammed my eyes shut at some point. All I could do was cry. Some part of me understood why he wanted to tell this story to me. And that, like dominance and submission, it is never easy to receive a gift of that magnitude. He was still present and stayed pressed up against me for a while. And I was loved.
I gradually came out of it. We went back to watch the sunrise. It rose up through the sentinel stones of Balanced Rock. I screamed out his invocation and opened my arms. In my head I could hear the claxon voice. “I am the angel of storytellers, the singer of songs. I am the memory of all times, and you are my child.” I stood there weeping, the sun warm on my face, drying my tears. You can’t try to understand them. They don’t mean to hurt you, it is just that they are so big. They are the hoops of heaven, the rings of reality, binding matter to matter, holding everything together. And they love us. They love us in a way that we can never comprehend.
Then we went to eat pancakes. The girl watched me, concerned, as syrup dripped onto my fingers as I stared out with shiny eyes and gesticulated wildly, and struggled to find my mouth with my fork. I told her that I couldn’t really explain or talk about what just happened, only that I loved her so deeply for standing at my side. She was mostly trying to test me to see if I had had a stroke. Press your chin to your chest, stick out your tongue. Show me you haven’t gone mad after seeing some rock. I’d say she didn’t know what she was signing up for, but that is not true. She loved being Sewa’s girl, she loved serving some raving mystic like me. I appreciated her in that moment for being willing to be sacrifice and servant, companion and witness. Perhaps it makes everything that happened later harder. Did she love me? Did she not? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It was a moment in time, trapped in a story, a girl and Mistress that belong to a night in the desert. Her love may not be the important love in this story. We paid the bill and I drove away into the desert, sticky with syrup, still mad eyed and shining. That is how the story ends, with pancakes.
Seyewailo 