Lost Elves: Been Gone for too Long

I have been gone for too long from something that I spent the first half of my life searching for. Sometimes it's hard to believe that I actually sat for years, pouring through old German anthropology texts, studying Irish folklore, the archaeology of ages long lost to the mists of time and ephemeral existence.

“It's because you're a new soul,” Raytail, my Ru'Thello mentor, would tell me, sitting in the dark; the sound of her breathing becoming a counterpoint melody to the ticking of the clock. It didn't take her long to determine that my obsession with my feelings of strangeness were outside the ordinary purview of her Clan and so she started to bring me to people.

Some people are just elf-sensitive. Raytail certainly was, all but for her inability to put it into words. Over my lifetime I have been approached by new friends and total strangers alike, pausing, tilting their heads, and finally smiling, the same words on their lips: “Are you an elf?”

For the social stigma of trying to be Otherkin in a world where to humanity this sensation is viewed as aberrant it's all too easy to slide into those common defenses, those shields of “I'm not an Elf, but I role-play one on TV,” and that simple mistrust—but in that moment, it's hard to say no. Especially to someone when it's the first thing they say.

“Yes, how did you know?”

Elf-sensitive humans have always amused me. Though, I must say, that it's probably only the extroverts who approach me with the question. If there's anything else that I need to know the truth of it, the yawning chasm and transhumant truth of this era, it's that throughout history there have been people who always came across with other-than-human qualities; not the stuff that legends are made out of, not made out of the stuff-of-legends, but people who reflect the qualities upon which those legends were given life.

This is how I met Michelle Belanger, via Lady Camilla at City Club in Detroit. Camilla is one of those elf-sensitives that I spoke of above. It was a few years ago and I didn't realize how interested she really was until yesterday -- when I found several Otherkin articles written by her. Maybe we'll meet again, as I haven't vetted her work; I find an odd appreciation for other writers that I have met in person in the community. I know that her origins are in the vampire community (and my original perceptions of her work) but after reading one of their articles on Otherkin it has inspired me to think about writing some of my own.

Give back to the community I spent so long looking for.

So, I come back once again. After a day of feeling my heritage. And I wonder where have my people gone since those black, lost-days of the early 90s and before when I joined the Elvenkind Digest, wrote random stories about the elven presence in this world, wondered about my people, my heritage, and my culture and found them...

...and then just as merrily gave them all up.

The Otherkin Community; we’re losing hope and killing truth, one day at a time. It’s no surprise that the Otherkin community is a mass of “me, me, me” and very little about community growth anymore. It’s amazing how filled it is with egocentric know-it-alls and ‘yes people’. Every day more and more truth seekers are slipping into the shadows and disappearing from the community all together.

Elven Shadows: Death of the Kin Community

So I was prowling the blogs of autumn. I came across this one, the Elven Shadows, the name itself intrigued me so I paused a moment to browse the messages. The state of the community doesn't seem to brightly colored these days, but what is in the world. The subtle atmosphere of this decade seems to be a sort of chokedamp disappointment and angst about ever-too-widened communities stretched thin across the Internet. A coming together with a falling apart.

I suppose there is a lot for me to read out there to get a real clue as to what I've missed.

A great deal of my creativity, my stories, and the spirit of my writing comes out of my heritage, Irish and Elven alike.