My girlfriend has been doing a learning journey called Right Relations in Rites of Passage. She just made me watch the seminar ‘Archetypes of Gender and Sexuality Beyond the Binary’ and it has blown my mind.

When I came out as lesbian in my mid twenties it surprised exactly no-one. My Dad’s older sister came out as lesbian when I was a small child and my parents were big supporters of her and her partner. I grew up believing that it was normal to be gay and when I came out it felt like it wasn’t a big deal, no-one cared, it was a personal decision and it didn’t matter.

The queer community has never been a big part of my life, my home and family are ‘safe spaces’ so I didn’t feel like I needed it as much as some. I don’t drink alcohol so although I have sometimes enjoyed dancing at bars and clubs, I never really felt at home there. My professional life has been in the community sector working towards gender equality and preventing violence against women and there have always been other queer women around. I have close friends who are queer and feel like those relationships are important but never felt the need to seek out people who were ‘like me.’

On my spiritual journey (via new age meditation circles and goddess retreats), and my Earth connection journey (via deep ecology and vision quests), queerness never appeared. I was often the only openly queer person in the room and my queerness was viewed as irrelevant – everyone said I was welcome and I felt welcome, I would pass the information received through the lens of my queerness but that was a personal process, rarely shared with the group.

The seminar I just watched changes everything. The facilitators argued that queerness is part of the ecosystem, that sexual diversity is a normal part of nature and that queer people in human cultures have often occupied a celebrated role as edge walkers, cultural guardians and stewards. They associated the gender binary as we now know it with processes of colonisation and imperialism that attacked and oppressed third gender folk in order to take away their power as they subdued indigenous cultures.

Without being consciously aware of it I had imbibed the notion that being queer is unnatural. I had reasoned that the Earth loves diversity so surely I am loved in my queerness but now I can see that in telling myself that my queerness ‘doesn’t matter’ I have been unconsciously devaluing an important part of myself. The seminar argues not only that my queerness is natural but that it is powerful and important. My queerness is a gift I have to offer the world.

I can’t tell you what it’s like to have these crucial parts of myself brought together – my queer identity, my Earth love and my spiritual journey. I feel a deep sense of belonging that I hadn’t realised was missing. I feel empowered to inhabit my queerness within the rewilding and Earth connection communities as an offering rather than a meaningless aside like the fact that I am tall and have brown hair.

A whole lot of recent thoughts and ideas have suddenly become clear and slotted into place. Ru Paul talking about how straight people have always appropriated queer culture, an article for the New York Times where Krista Burton describes how ‘hipsters broke my gaydar‘ and the realisation that two of the three asian quest protectors that trained with me last year were lesbian. All started me musing on the notion that queer folk are culture makers because once you transgress one boundary it’s easy to just keep going.

Being queer means being an edge walker, it means taking a journey led by the body and the heart away from the dominant society’s notion of how we should be and who we should love. Being queer gives us the power to write our own rules, to speak truth to power, and to align ourselves with our innate nature. Being queer is a service to nature, to the ecosystem and to human communities.

Massive gratitude to Pinar and So from Queer Nature and to Clementine for researching and putting the seminar together and for being the powerful edge walkers you are.