A homily for the Full Moon on July 10, 2025. Content warning: mental health, suicide.
Dearly Beloved,
Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite on this, the Full Moon in Cancer.
I find myself swept up yet again in paradox, beloveds.
On the one hand, the world is a constant weeping tragedy. Suffering—much of it intentional and of human design—has marked the last two weeks since the New Moon. Environmental disasters, horrific legislation that will hurt the most vulnerable among us (including my wife and myself), and—of course—the constant hoofbeats of Ares and His children, wars and rumors of wars, echoing in all of our ears. This aching world weeps and I weep with it, as I must. I gave my heart to the world long ago, and it never returns such gifts unbroken.
But on the other hand…I’ve been playing some great games.
I love games. Most kinds of games, really, but my favorite sort of game is a really difficult action roleplaying game (I used to speedrun both “Bloodborne” and “Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition”, just to give the other gamers out there an idea of what I mean), one where every boss-fight is a unique ordeal, where you have to gain new skills, learn to think in new ways, and just plain put in the time and effort until you finally become truly skilled. I love that sort of game, the sort of game that punishes you and punishes you, death after death, until finally you rise up and become the most powerful thing in the world…someone who refuses to give up.
That’s the great power of games. In a game, I can try and fail, over and over, with no real consequences besides some lost effort and time, maybe some lost resources in the game. I can learn from my errors, I can suffer the pain of defeat over and over, and when I come back I can try again. As I often say to my wife when I am working on beating a new boss, I can “happily beat my head against the wall until I break it down” without having to risk very much. And that unique feature of play, the ability to model risk safely, to give us the ability to enjoy the thrill of jeopardy and conflict without having to actually suffer the consequences if it all goes wrong, is incredibly powerful.
So this Full Moon I am moved to write on the joys of imagined adventures, often with dungeons and sometimes with dragons. I am called to speak of the rolling of dice and the shuffling of cards. I am inspired to sing the praises of Hermes my patron, that clever gamer of old.
I am moved to speak of play.
When I was a child, I was a huge fan of the cartoon “He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe”. My grandparents resented my existence and tried to ignore me as much as possible and my Mother was never around, so I was basically raised by books and television. That meant my first real moral instruction was in the cartoons I watched. At the end of each episode of “He-Man”, there was a lesson taken from the events of the story, a little bit of ethics as a treat for those of us who stuck around after the sword fights were over. And wow, did those little lessons get me in trouble with the other kids, because your average six-year-old is not very concerned with ethics, and “He-Man said so” is just not as good a moral justification as I thought it was at the time. I ate a lot of dirt. It was a whole thing. But after I finally learned to shut the hell up (sort of), something else happened.
Something wonderful.
When I was eight, a movie came out called “He-Man And She-Ra: The Secret Of The Sword”. In it, a new character, She-Ra, He-Man’s twin sister, a female hero and his equal or superior (she had several powers he didn’t) in every way, was added to my favorite fictional world. The movie was about what you would expect from Filmation in 1985, which is to say that it was bad, but I was young, dumb, and full of imagination.
And I was trans.
I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I thought I was just the weird kid who occasionally mentioned to people that I wished I’d been born as a girl (which made me super-popular in Southern Texas in the 80s and 90s, let me tell you). But when that movie came out, for the first time in my life it was entirely okay with every adult in my world that I was obsessively watching cartoons with mainly women characters, playing with toys that were clearly “dolls”, and running around pretending to be She-Ra while holding up my “Sword Of Honor” (a particularly awesome stick my grandfather gave me) and yelling “For the honor of Grayskull!”
Decades later, when I was a ripe 40 years old, a new and much better She-Ra show came out on Netflix, “She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power”. I had been struggling for a long, long time with a lifelong depression that no form of treatment seemed to touch. It was really wearing me down. I was losing the fight with despair and most days I was pretty sure that someday I was going to die by my own hand. I had been circling very cautiously around the idea that I might have some gender issues for years when the new show came out, but upon the revelation of this new Adora, this new version of not just a hero, but my hero, the hero that I had once wanted to be, the pressure became too much to bear.
I took my time. I talked to my doctors. I jumped through various hoops. I spent two years making sure to be very sure, because HRT is no joke. And when it was time to choose my new name, I knew immediately that “Adora” (the name of She-Ra’s alter ego) had to be a part of it.
So why have I told you all of this? Am I getting old and nostalgic? Well, yes, definitely. But also no. I wanted to make clear the incredible power of play. When I was 8 years old, I was able to play pretend, to run around with a pretend sword fighting pretend villains while being a pretend hero, an experience that kids all over the world get to have every day. Part of it was about ethics, of course…I was able to safely play within a model of heroism, and that helped me figure out my own values, which was an important part of things for me. She-Ra is a hero, after all, and as any reader of my philosophical work can tell you, I am deeply concerned with ethics. But I was also able to safely play within a model of femininity. I was able to be feminine without having to risk my safety, and that helped me figure out who I am. It took a long time, but looking back over the whole course of my life before I began transition, those moments when I was pretending to be She-Ra were the first times I knew that I was really a girl. Something in me crystallized into an egg in that moment, and decades later that egg hatched.
That child, little me, was able to safely run around with a blanket tied around her neck and a stick in her hands. I was able to have adventures with the local kids where they just accepted that I wanted to play pretend as She-Ra without judgment. I’m sure some of them, especially the older kids who had been a little more indoctrinated into gender norms at that point, thought I was a little odd, but thankfully I was oblivious enough to social dynamics that I didn’t notice or care. I was having fun. I was playing. And decades later, when my dysphoria-related depression was at its height, She-Ra came back into my life. She smiled at me from a TV screen with a new face and a new voice and invited me to take a chance, to take up my sword and say the words one more time, just to see how it felt.
“For the honor of Grayskull.”
And suddenly I knew who I was. Alice Adora sat up and stretched like a well-rested cat. It was like waking up after a long, long nightmare and realizing, finally, that I was safe. That I was going to be okay. I took a great, big, gulping breath of cooling air and thanked the gods above and below that I made it out alive.
So many of us don’t.
Never, ever doubt the power of play. It saved my life. Someday it might save yours.
Now I want to speak to your hearts from my heart, dear ones. I want to gently suggest that over the next two weeks until we speak again, and only if it is accessible to you, you try to get away from the endless stream of painful news and more painful social media feeds and have a bit of fun. If you already have a favorite form of play, perhaps spend some time doing that, and if you don’t, experiment. Maybe go for a walk and explore your neighborhood…I’ll bet there are some interesting spots (and interesting spirits) to discover and get to know. Maybe check out your local game shop and see if anyone is looking for a new player. Or perhaps you could make a pillow fort and watch your favorite cartoon or movie from when you were a kid.
Take a chance. Be silly. Be weird. Have fun.
But most of all, please consider giving yourself just a little bit of space, space in your life and space in yourself, for a sense of joy. For a sense of wonder.
For a sense of play.
Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. Have fun!
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Children’s Games”, (1560)