My Wild Weekend at FairyCon
Greetings from the Fairy & Human Relations Congress, where the fairies may be pretend but the magic is real
Once upon a time, in a bright meadow, I came upon a young woman crying to herself. She was on her knees, sobbing, folded over, her face buried in the earth. “What’s wrong?” I hurried over to ask. Her eyes flashed. She looked — there’s no other phrase for it but a terribly antiquated one — she looked like a troubled waif, blonde and tall and thin and sad-eyed. “They’re disturbing that tree,” the troubled waif said meekly, nodding to a tent on the edge of the meadow. The tent was indeed under a blossoming tree that should not have been disturbed. Then she folded herself over with her face to the earth and began again to sob. This was about two hours into my visit to the 2019 Fairy & Human Relations Congress. By its end, I would see many more women crying. They cried in the fields, alone and in groups, and under shelters of sticks in the woods, and in each other’s arms, and while remembering their psychic connections to trees, and during the Ritual. They cried most during the Ritual.
Since 2001, the Human-Fairy Congress has taken place annually at Skalitude Retreat, in a valley nestled in the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. The landscape at Skalitude could not be more…
