May 2026

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

— Wild Geese (partial), Mary Oliver

Last week, we held a Maidening ceremony for a friend of the family.

A Maidening ceremony is a “coming of age” celebration for a young lady who has begun her monthly cycle. Traditionally (heterosexually?), this initiation involves a lot of talk about becoming a woman and the ripening fruit of the womb … but, being a relentlessly queer magical group, our first instinct was to question everything about the very concept and center of a Maidening.

After all, she had come of biology, not of age ... nowhere near the age to "use" that biology, which furthermore was 1) none of our business, 2) a horrific simplification of the innate human ability to create, and 3) certainly not an excuse to bemoan and trauma-bond over the monthly "womanly burden" she was now to share with us.

Instead, we focused on the new levels of choice, and thus personal responsibility, dawning in her life. She wasn't being dragged around by mom anymore, told where to sit or how to dress. She was in her last year of grade school, soon to enter new environments and challenges in the middle grades.

Who was she to become, and how could we support that journey as her extended family?

As part of this celebration of Becoming, those in attendance would share a piece of wisdom. Something they wish they had known at her age: a thing that would have simplified their lives, given them strength, or spared pain. Some of this wisdom is doomed to be aspirational, of course: "don't let the bastards get you down" is something few grown adults can manage, as we still must consider the bastards. But we were all touched at how sincere and loving the messages were, both in service of the young lady and how it honored the often difficult girlhoods of the women gathered.

As often happens, the wisdom that I brought to the table proceeded to haunt me day and night after the ceremony. It was for both of us, it seems.

The one thing I would say to a younger version of myself is this: begin a speaking relationship with your body. That is, befriend it.

Our body is a strange thing. It is us, and it isn't. We can push past it, ignore it, punish it, stress it out if it can't keep up with the designs of our mind. Sometimes it will malfunction, and we react like a pilot perched in a robotic suit of armor: what's wrong with you? Why did you stop?

It is more ours than it is us, but not in the sense of property. It is ours in the sense of stewardship, the way a beloved pet is ours to care for, provide for and protect.

The idea of property versus stewardship is a dual-edged sword, and something that really tends to mess us up in the West. “My Body, My Choice” (autonomy and right to care) stands alongside "It's my body, I'll do cocaine if I want" (self-destructive tyranny). Why does the simple ownership of our body drive us to feel justified in abusing it if it doesn't "behave"?

We are equally self-policed in the positive aspects of embodiment. Most of us grew up in a society where physical pleasure is taboo, or strictly regulated through the church and/or culture. Pleasure, and the body that generates or experiences it, should be resisted or silenced in order for one to behave well, and not desire too much.

Bodies are subject to efficiency and optimization like machines, instead of vessels of art. As a result, we lose communication with our physical form, and that self-silencing allows us to cross more and more of our own healthy boundaries. This makes life much, much easier for those who would use and abuse us.

If Mars is direct action, Venus is the experience of performing that action. We are not unfeeling tools, and our life becomes a simulation or video game if we go around Doing without Feeling.

Capitalism seeks to eject us from the experiential, Venusian seat of ourselves. It doesn't want us in the miracle machines that are our bodies, feeling and listening to them and collaborating on our everyday sensual experiences. Otherwise? We would stop chugging Monster energy drinks (I'm looking at myself, here) and waking up at 4 am for the hustle. Lots of "terrible", regime-ending things would occur if every human on earth woke up deeply embodied, which is why Somatics is such a growing field of personal liberation right now.

Somatics was deeply woven into my psychedelic facilitation course and, at the time, I resented it. I didn't want it. One thing Somatics takes is time (minutes and minutes to let a feeling settle, or follow it where it wants to go in your body), and I staunchly believed I had better ways to spend my time. I worshipped at the altar of facts and wanted the cold, hard science behind psychedelics before I understood that entheogens function through connection—and more than ancestors and lands, often the first thing they connect us with is our own bodies.

This is vital. This is healing. This is Venusian, reclaiming the feeling seat of ourselves and all the wisdom therein.

Oh, the things our bodies would tell us, if only we would listen.

The practice of facilitating with psychedelics is beholden to Somatics by many names, in both indigenous and modern settings, because you must be able to hold someone with the subtle feeling of your own current as they process difficult things. To truly attend someone in transformation, you have to be a safe body filled with calm, not just a safe mind filled with data. A safe heartbeat, a soft gaze. More liquid than solid: flexible, responsive and open, but resistant to the crystallizing compression of stress or the startling, spore-like dispersal of fear.

You must be a safe presence, not just a list of emergency contacts and a home study CPR certificate. There is a sweet animal in you that will comfort the sweet animal in them, no matter how many times it has seen the back of a hand or a rod. That is shared humanity, on a vibrational, spiritual, and flesh level, and I have come to believe that there are few things holier and more affirming than sharing this kind of support with another soul. Because it is shared: as you are giving it, you are experiencing it. Venus.

It's unsurprising to realize that I resisted Somatics so much because of how truly uncomfortable I felt inhabiting my body, because I had stuffed a lot of feelings down and away for a very long time. And it's a little sad—okay, a lot sad—that the first thing that made me consider my somatic health (my somatic standing? complexion? habits?) at all was the prized ability to use a well-regulated body to assist others in a spiritually heightened state.

There's that word again. Use. Dang, I'm outing myself here.

My body is still a tool, and I have used it as such, mostly as a shield and a shell and a packhorse. Now, I am opening to my body as a partner, too.

I'm sure the Inuit consider their working dogs "useful," but tools? No. Their qimmiit are companions, charges, partners in life, deserving of honor and respect and love. Beloveds, and reflections of the peoples’ deep relationship with the land.

There is a partnership there that we often lack with our own bodies, so that’s what I brought to the Maidening circle. This is what I said.

“Sometimes your body will know something is wrong before your mind does. Start talking to it now.”

“You want your body to be the first to tell you something is wrong, not the last. But to do that, you need two things: trust, and a language you share. That is built through dialogue and time.”

At the time, the young girl ducked her head and sing-songed "hello!" to her tummy.

I said, you think you're joking, but you're not. Do that. Check in. Tune in. Say hi.

Whatever you do, your body is listening, and it is you.

It's no wonder we are estranged from our physical bodies, especially with the mental-air-internet-digital push taking us away from the trees and the world and human touch. All of us have surfaced from an hour (or more) of doom-scrolling or writing an essay only to realize our muzzled body is in knots, a mere fleshy laptop stand to support our compulsive, endless mental labor.

It may be hard to conceptualize the kinds of love or reverence our bodies need, or deserve, but I find that this simple reframe helps break the programming.

You have a precious animal. It is sweet, and soft, and loves you unconditionally. It has been with you since the beginning and every day since. You carry it with you everywhere. You eat together and play together. It doesn't speak your language, but since when has that stopped us from loving little creatures?

If it slips and falls, are you going to beat it? Why?

If it doesn't behave perfectly, would you starve it? Why?

Your heart cringes at the idea of abusing a little animal that trusts you, as it should.

It hasn't done anything wrong—it has no conception of wrong—or, if it has, it's trying its best. It needs time to learn and understanding along the way. Violence isn't an answer to earnest effort. It only harms trust.

We are so quick to punish ourselves; sometimes externalizing our harm is a way to reveal the cruelty we are enacting. Our dominion over ourselves isn't a divine right, it's a divine responsibility.

That sweet, soft animal of you is a gift, and you will guide each other through this world step by step.

(If you are curious about the practice of feeling, Ailey Jolie (instagram) is a Somatic Psychologist whose work I've greatly enjoyed/detested. You know the feeling. That mixed resentment and wonder as someone cracks you open with a sentence and you think, great, now I have to deal with that. Her focus is the challenges that the feminine face in the modern world, and how many ways nervous dysregulation can mask itself as functionality and obedience.

Also, if you are local to the DMV, we offer Maidening ceremonies and other initiations, just drop us a line!)

If you haven’t checked this movie out already, do yourself a favor and try to catch it on the big screen. It’s the very definition of hopecore, is absolutely beautiful, and will leave you filled with joy and love and the belief in connection.

Oh yes, we’ve been back on our fanfiction shit. Fanfiction frequently gets a bad rap for being self-indulgent, amateurish, poor quality. And we’ll spare you the rant about how fanfiction can be high quality and the value of free community art, blah blah blah—we’ve written about it academically, we could be here for a while—to simple say: So what? So what if it’s bad, so what if it’s not winning any Nobel Prizes in Literature, so what if it’s terribly self-indulgent? Who said all your engagement with art needed to be with art of the highest quality? Who said all meaning had to be wrested out of challenging works?

Venusian energy is all about indulgence and care and fun. It’s not about “high art,” it’s about felt art. So let yourself indulge.