Gifts of A Goddess, part 2

…I walked up the hill, picking my barefoot way through the limestone gravel. By the time I arrived at the Stone Circle, people were noticing me. A friend came to me, put his arms around me, kissed my cheek, and purred into my ear how beautiful I was. I kissed him back, and already I could feel the benediction in the kiss. People moved out of my way to watch Her, or they came up close and talked about Her beauty. It was more attention to my beauty and attraction than I had ever gotten “on my own.” 

The ceremony itself peaked with a great dance in the embrace of twenty-some Standing Stones. And Aphrodite led those who identified (for that time, that ceremony, those moments) with women’s sexuality. Aphrodite danced in circles and in the center of a crowd of mostly women, a high femme goddess amidst everyone in sarongs and camping clothes. And the women danced with her. 

Strong, thin women with cords of muscle. Fat women who pulled the ropes to raise the Standing Stones, unused to dancing in public. Elegant, urbane women and women who didn’t give a thought to grace. They danced. Women for whom dancing was central to their spiritual practice and women terrified someone might catch a glimpse of them dancing. They danced. They all danced.

They all danced beautifully. “Beauty” could have been a collective noun for what they were.

Women, non-binary, trans, and cis, who had never been comfortable with their bodies took off their clothes and danced bare-breasted or naked as jaybirds. They threw back their heads and laughed at and for and with themselves, delighting in the joy of our shared beauty, power, and strength. These were femme women and others for whom femme identity was the farthest from who they were. The dance grew toward ecstasy with the insistent drums.

Irrespective of the identities of these followers, it was Aphrodite, herself the femme-in-glory, who called out the Dance. She called out with the sway of the hips, the roundness of the ass, the conspiratorial smile, the eyes looking out from darkened lashes, the knowing laugh, and the arms reaching high as though to catch the green-gold light spilling through the leaves. She called out through my body. Through my body. She used my fat queer body to call out the Dance of sexual allure and beauty.

The sun shone on Her white-gold gown and and the tiny glittering crystals in Her hair. She welcomed everyone, she invited everyone into the Dance, a Dance that grew from hesitant to wild. Her radiance shone on everyone in the circle and invited them into a part of themselves they may not have experienced before.

I don’t know what that invitation was like for all the others who responded, except that someone neither butch nor femme, neither particularly masculine or feminine, was the first to come up to me in the following days. “I have been dreaming of Aphrodite. And in my dreams, She is you.” And in my dreams, these years later, Aphrodite is my femme queen. She is the one who gave me the gift of knowing that I could be the one I’d wanted all along. That I was the one I’d wanted to be all along, and I needed no one’s permission to be so. Indeed, asking permission constrains the beauty and joy of self-expression that are at the core of my femme self.

Aphrodite blessed the ceremony with Her presence, and She blessed me with my first conscious awareness of femme identity. When She left me, hours after the ceremony, I was returned to myself. I was back in camping clothes, still with beads in my hair, most of my eye makeup sweated off, and lounging at the Faerie Fire. Lounging, drinking, smiling, talking…and more than I had been before. Aphrodite gave me more of myself.

Aphrodite worked in her purview of the heart and reminded me that neither beauty, nor sexual power, nor love, nor the joy of self-expression belong to bodies of any particular size or shape. She reminded me that Her love is poured forth upon Earth, and that I am welcome to be an amphora for that love, being emptied and filled, emptied and filled.

All the femme notions and potions that would come later in my life stretched out their roots that night. All the radiance and glory, the beauty and the strength, the mirth and reverence, the self-expression and claiming of sexuality that I now experience as a queer femme came through a door opened to a goddess. I am so grateful to Alan for asking, to myself for agreeing, and to the door for opening. Most of all, I am grateful to Aphrodite Herself, who lay her golden hands upon my head, my lips, my breasts, my belly, and my feet, all to bless me in the service of blessing others.

Thank you, Lady. May I remain your faithful femme until you release me, death take me, or the world end.