Do You Believe in Faeries?
The Solstice is Coming
I do believe in faeries. I do.
I did not like the depiction of Tinkerbell as a child. I thought she was kind of mean, and although I did believe in faeries, well, Tink à la the Disney movie, kind of ruined my belief for a while. I remembered magic and love not jealousy and fear.
So, along with much of my magic, I set it aside for a time (it was life that got in the way of my magic around the age of 8, to be clear, not just Tink, but she left an impression for sure).
In college, my roommate Sharyl got our other roommate, Kathleen, a deck of tarot cards for her birthday. We shared a big and drafty 3 bedroom apartment right in the midst of the Lakeview neighborhood in Chicago. Kathleen was deep and kind of witchy in the best of ways and she’d been wanting a deck. I got her a bust of Elvis. She had an Elvis obsession, and there was a laundromat we’d often walk by that had Elvis busts in their window.
I’m still not sure what the connection was between the two, Elvis and Laundry, but this is a true story.
She worked late as a cocktail waitress (does anyone use that term any longer?). The night before her birthday, while she was at work, I put him in her bed, on her pillow, on his side, and then made a body for him from her other pillows under the covers along with a card with a note from Elvis inside, and then went to bed. I awoke at 4 am to the sounds of her shrieking with laughter.
We had so much fun. It was the Rider-Waite Tarot deck Sharyl had gotten her. We’d stay up all hours drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes (just about everyone in the Columbia College Theatre department smoked in those days. I started when I was 19, definitely old enough to know better, and yet the peer pressure got to me as I watched everyone around me light up), and do readings for one another, diving deep into the magic. I started to feel my intuition coming back online again the more we played.
I finally got my own deck after another friend did a reading for me and suggested that I needed to get a deck of my own. I had it in my head that one should not buy their own tarot deck, and that they always needed to come as a gift.
“What better gift than a gift you give yourself?” she responded. Okay, that worked for me as I set that superstitious belief aside.
I headed off the next day. There was a shop right next to The Alley in Chicago that sold crystals and incense and tarot and other magical tools. The dude behind the counter, after chatting with me for a bit, pulled The Enchanted Tarot by Amy Zerner and Monte Farber off of the shelves. “This one just came in. It’s new, but I think it’s exactly what you’re looking for”. He was correct.
I was immediately obsessed. Amy Zerner’s artwork spoke to me, and I spent every night after work for a long while on my bed crosslegged, learning the deck, doing readings over and over, first for myself, and then for anyone who would let me.
It was not long afterward that another Amy entered my life. You can read more about our first time meeting and our first time channeling together in Meeting Mirando - A First Contact Story
This Amy is a faerie. I do not say this lightly. I say it with absolute reverence and as a stated truth. The first time we met her feet were off of the ground. I could not initially see the ladder beneath her, and it looked as if she may have flown up to hang those panties on that wall. To this day, I would not be surprised to actually see her do this, fly that is.
Amy reawakened my knowledge that faeries are an actuality in this Universe, and she was (and still is) always willing to partner with me in any and every magical endeavor either of us could conjure with complete and total abandon and joy.
I do believe in faeries. I do.
It was 1997, and the Solstice was imminent. Amy and I had big plans to head to “The Lake”, as everyone in Chicago called Lake Michigan, and play in the energies. I left my apartment in Bucktown, picked her up at her place in Rogers Park, drove north out of the city at around 11:00pm, and arrived at one of our favorite lakeside parks in the North Shore town of Highland Park. You needed a sticker to park in the lot, but previous adventures and investigations had shown us that we could park in the neighborhood a block or two away and walk into the park.
Why Highland Park and not the city? It was a good 40 minutes from where we lived, after all. Well, Amy and I had spent many a night being ejected from various city beaches and lakefront areas by the police. The lakefront in Chicago closes at 11:00pm, and no self-respecting witch is done with their magic by then. Most self-respecting witches have not even started their magic by then. Plus, we needed the area to ourselves. Technically the park we chose in the suburbs was also “closed” at that time, but there were no patrols like in the city.
One night prior to this Solstice, Amy and I said “Fuck it” to the rules (many a night we did this) and settled ourselves into the giant rocks lining the shore at the very north end of the city. We were channeling and talking, to-go coffee cups in hand, when suddenly we were lit up by a brilliant light. I gasped and grabbed Amy’s hand, thinking ET had finally landed. We’d had some sightings a couple of times of lights in the skies, (including one massive butterfly-shaped craft completely outlined with red lights that flew low and right over us that only she and I saw although we were sitting with many people around us at the time), and I thought for sure that this was it. The ship was landing, and my body responded with fear.
”Uh, Nora, it’s the cops,” she said in her most exasperated voice.
Apparently, they had been watching us for some time and decided to roust us out of there. They blasted us with their headlights and some other super bright lamp and then got out of their car to walk to us.
”Well, well, well, what do we have here? Some underage drinkers?” the female police officer sneered at us. “How old are you?” as she shined her flashlight on me. I was in pigtails and wearing denim overall shorts.
”Ummm, 30,” I said, deadpan.
“What about you?” to Amy, momentarily blinding her with her flashlight
“Ummm, 30,” she repeated exactly as I had. She was dressed as I was with the addition of some flowers in her hair.
“And what’s in the cup?” she demanded.
“Ummm, coffee.” we both said.
We ruined her bust. “Check for rat bites”, she hollered at us as we headed to our car doubled over laughing repeating “check for rat bites” again and again.
*****((aside: I took a break from writing and went outside to pull some mulberries off of the bush Jon planted just last year and popped them into my mouth - perfect faerie food.))*****
So, Highland Park it was on this glorious Summer Solstice night. And it was glorious. The weather was warm and balmy with a perfect summer breeze. Our plan was to stay there until sunrise. We had supplies, our tarot decks and crystals and herbs and candles, and other magical stuff, along with snacks and drinks for us (no alcohol, we were always sober when we played in this way) and some chocolate and milk to leave out for the faeries.
The park was big and grassy with playground equipment scattered throughout and was bordered by heavily wooded areas on three sides including the area that held the pathway down to the beach. Amy and I settled into the grass. The lake was with us, we did not need to go down to it. We talked intensely about all matters of import and laughed hysterically with one another and played on the swings and the merry-go-round. We pulled out our decks and gave each other readings and channeled for one another. We were spending time together channeling then almost nightly with Wendy also always with us. Wendy just happened to be out of town on this night.
At some point, around 3:30 am or so, we got quiet and settled into ourselves, just being with the energy and the magic as we neared the exact moment of the Solstice. I felt it start. The air felt suddenly less dense, as was the ground beneath me. Even I began to feel less dense, less solid. As I waved my hand through the air it appeared as if I could almost see through it. It seemed as if we had entered another version of that reality, one that was not entirely tethered to the ground.
*****((second aside: a gorgeous yellow oriole alit on the fence right outside of my open office door after I typed that paragraph and then quickly fluttered off. I do believe in faeries. I do.))*********
We began to hear music and voices and laughter (faintly and sporadically). There was no other human in sight. Everything started to feel a bit more wild and Amy and I began to spin on the Merry-Go-Round. We felt as if we were at a party, the rest of the guests simply unseen to us other than the brief flashes of light and sounds and other images randomly breaking through.
And then, right before our eyes, a tall male figure rode by on what looked like a tall circus bicycle wearing a top hat. He turned his head, smiled at us, tipped his hat, and then disappeared into thin air right before reaching the wooded area near the steep descending path to the beach.
Amy and I looked at each other, it was around 4:30 am at this point, and we both said, “Time to go”. It’s not that we were afraid. It was just a knowing we both had. We were done. The faeries, those not in human bodies, wanted the area to themselves.
We went to an all-night diner to ground ourselves with some french fries and celebrate our adventures.
Six weeks later we would bookend that Solstice magic off with a spontaneous swim in Lake Michigan on Lughnasadh Eve surrounded by hordes of people on a hot summer night, leaving all of our items unattended on the beach with a spell for protection cast over them with the exception of my car keys and license (just in case) as we stripped off most of our clothes and dove into the gorgeous lake water (keys and license in my bra, a different kind of spell), this time at one of the busiest beaches in the city, hours before closing time. Our realization that it was Lughnasadh only occurred hours later when Amy looked at the date early the next morning, August 1st.
Amy had all of the pagan holidays down along with a wealth of knowledge regarding herbs and spells. She’d been a practicing witch much longer than I. I remember how upset she got one night while at my apartment when she discovered I was out of salt. “You always need to have salt in your home!” she schooled me. Later on, I could hear her mumbling about me and my lack of salt, and the next time she came to my house she brought me a salt shaker filled with the magical substance.
Speaking of salt, I am off to do some pre-Solstice house cleaning. House cleaning is always so much more fun when it’s a spell.
The Solstice will be exact at 7:57am Pacific Time on June 21, 2023
We’ll be holding our annual Solstice event, Jon and I, along with The Faeries, Pleiadians, and all of the rest on June 21st at 12:00pm Pacific Time.
More details and registration here
