I was born on the last day of the year of the Wood Dragon in January 1965 and I am writing this on the final day of the Wood Dragon year 2024-5. With Sun in Aquarius and my Moon in Capricorn, my lunar return is happening as I write and my 60th solar return just 3 days away.
The Chinese zodiac depicts creation’s subtle cosmic energies through elemental and animal imagery. There are five elements and twelve zodiac signs – Wood is associated with life force energy, vitality, flexibility and steady, patient growth. I feel those words describe my life very well – despite contracting HIV in my early 20s and given a prognosis of 7 years to live, I survived the ordeal of full blown AIDS and have forged a unique path during the past 25 years, as a soul healer, spirit connector and community creator. My growth has been steady and cyclical, like the spirit of wood – I do feel like a tree, blossoming and radiating a little bit more each summer, withdrawing into my roots during winter.
The 60 year cycle of the Chinese zodiac aligns with the astrological phenomenon known as our Saturn Return – as we approach 60 years of age Saturn revisits his position in our birth chart for the second time in our lives. My first Saturn Return, aged 30, brought massive life change – my body got weak as it entered its AIDS journey, but my mind and spirit came alight with inspiration and passion. As I prepared for death and opened my mind to the possibility of a spiritual reality (I had defined myself as atheist since the age of 12), as I released attachment to the body – the inner lights came on. I can remember at the time perceiving that I was entering a period of transformation, but still assumed that it would likely end with my death. But as low and weak as my body went, the life force (plus my loving partner and the medicinal power of cannabis) sustained me and in 1998 the story turned around. New medication had rapid positive effects on my health, and within a few months I was getting my head around the fact that I was in fact going to survive. But part of me had died – the ego in me that believed our individuality is all that we are.
My grasp of reality had completely transformed. My materialist, athestic mindset had dissolved. I knew now that the root of reality is not physical matter, it is consciousness – experienced as awareness and feelings – that gives rise to existence, to the material realm and to everything that we are. As the Hindus say You Are That. The Bible quotation ‘I am That I am’ now made sense. The sense of Self is the divine spark. The Atman is Brahman – the individual self is the Supreme Self. As a kid I remember being called ‘one of them’. But people had forgotten what the Them is. Now we in the age of They/Them and we’re ready to remember. The Thems are the Thats – through the union of male and female in one person, we become vessels for the sacred powers of the soul.
The priests of the materialist, scientific paradigm have got humanity brainwashed, subservient and powerless. But the fact is simple – We are not matter. We are the union of mind-body-emotion-spirit, divine creators designed to attune to and channel the power, the joy and bliss that gives rise to existence. We each have individual self-awareness but also the potential within us to experience and develop unitive, collective, cosmic consciousness, through which we experience the interconnectedness of all things. The doorway to unitive awareness is to embrace both genders within ourselves, and to regard nothing as separate. Once we know, we don’t have to look back. But we do have to find ways to grow in this new awareness. I learned to do this by living in alignment with nature, honouring the planet’s seasonal shifts, conscious of moon phases and astrological transits, using language that affirms our wholeness and choosing to see all beings as divine.
“After we have had direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions of reality, the idea that the universe, life and consciousness could have developed without the participation of superior creative intelligence appears to us absurd, naïve and untenable.” Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game (1997)
The point is – that superior creative intelligence is also in us, is what unites us, is us, but religion took it away from us and made of it a dominating father in the sky, made heaven something to aspire to after death. For me my youthful atheism was me rejecting this daddy notion, and my spiritual awakening was when I found another way of seeing things – from the inside. I experienced AIDS as an Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self, and have been preparing ever since for the coming collective awakening. In the mid 2020s we are entering the time of the Great Reconnect, where the portals to Oneness are once more engaged within ourselves, when heaven is understood as a state of being that exists right here, and a gradual, collective, paradigm shift will change how we experience life on earth.
My 60th year on the planet, my Wood Dragon year has seen me walking in my wisdom, opening my wings and speaking my truth – especially at the Queer Spirit Full Moon Drum Circles I have been running most months in London since 2005 and the incredible 5th outing of Queer Spirit Festival at Bridwell Park in Devon in August, and also around the world.
My dragon wings have been open – in the Spring I visited Radical Faeries in Oregon and California, where I gave a talk on faerie history and the role of queer people in the Great Reconnect, went to a Beltane gathering at Shimmerback Ranch and visited Wolf Creek sanctuary. Then from mid November to mid January I went for my first ever visit to the beautiful Rad Fae communities in Australia and New Zealand, including an amazing solstice at the Faerieland sanctuary: my first ever December solstice in the southern hemisphere, followed by my first ever Christmas day naked on a beach! At Faerieland I spoke again about Faerie history and cosmic destiny, and saw the impact of my words on the assembled community.
AIDS removed so many evolving queer men from the world, so there is a shortage of elders in our Faerie tribe – we have elders, respected and adored, but way fewer than there might have been. There has been a shortage of voices passing on our stories and our discoveries, but still the magic works and our tribe gradually feels its way forwards, learning to listen deeply to each other and to the land and spirit. I am excited to bring my global Aquarian vision of our purpose, plus my knowledge of our history and 3 decades of magical experience to the tribe, but I certainly feel quite a lone voice, a rare survivor of the plague, even rarer that I came out of the ordeal strengthened and emboldened. Yet I also sense all those departed brothers right alongside me, which explains my strength and the sparkle you might see in my eye. On my dragon travels I have felt respected for my experience and knowledge and now as I enter my seventh decade of this lifetime, I seem to have got my head around taking on the ‘elder’ mantle! I’ll do it with LOVE and JOY.
As I turn 60, having spent 30 years exploring the medicine of cosmic alignment and community consciousness, my second Saturn return alongside my Wood Dragon return has me walking in my power with my wings more open than ever before, but I do feel like to share that I cannot stand for any more non-sense! Even among my spiritual and faerie friends I see so much suffering stemming from attachment to belief in physical reality and fear of the unknown. I will bang my drum – it’s time to reprogramme beliefs into ones that support our growth as divine beings, to face the fears, the shadows and the hurts and realise our cosmic destiny. To embrace that darkness exists as a catalyst for more light and become fully embodied, light-filled warriors of a new age. (My goddess I see so many queer folk hungry for psychedelic experience in every part of the world I visit, I’m like – come on! Get the point and bring the magic into life! Substances may open doors of perception but it’s personal commitment to self-knowledge and manifestation that brings us home.)
Life is an absorbing drama. There is on the one hand a rapid expansion of consciousness and a mass awakening underway on planet Earth yet on the other it seems that the dark visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984 have come true.
Consumer culture and information overload keeps people locked and confused in a limited frequency range, with thoughts and feelings constantly bombarded by the exterior world. Yet also there is a huge movement of self-discovery, self-realisation underway around the whole planet. Since the year 2000 I have been exploring various manifestations of that movement around the world and found my home among the global Radical Faerie tribe.
Radical Faeries are queer beings who co-create liberating spaces of self-expression and communal joy – in the UK Faeries get together with other LGBTQ+ activists to produce Queer Spirit Festival, where hundreds gather to celebrate the natural, earthy, cosmic, healing spirituality of lesbians, gay men, bi and trans people, and are proud to be part of changing the story of what it means to be a queer person – reclaiming the spiritual roots of our nature. We are uncovering the history of queer souls in spiritual service to their communities around the world and discovering what that might mean for us in the world today as we make the leap from a world of division and disease into a new, healing, paradigm that recognises our innate Oneness with nature and the cosmos, and realises that through love, compassion and joy.
If you would like to support my work in the world
I invite you to consider making a donation to Queer Spirit Festival Queer Spirit Festival Fund
If you would like to receive email notices of London drum circles, Queer Spirit events and UK Radical Faerie gatherings you can sign up at Queerspirit.net and Radical Faeries of Albion
I list the Full Moon Drum Circles on a Queer Spirit London MeetUp group – this group has over 1100 members and could be used much more. If anyone is interested to run any events – such as talking circles, meditations, socials – for the group please get in touch.
I also administer Spiritual Gay Men Facebook group, which has 23700 members and reveals that gay men are becoming more conscious across the world and many are active as healers, facilitators, community builders and creatives.
I blog at rainbow messenger – shokti on the awakening
and Shokti – Medium
marcolovestar<at>gmail.com
Thanks for reading!
JAI MA!
rainbow messenger 