My Misspent Youth (11 page)

We are sitting around the coffee table in the family’s living room. It has high ceilings, exposed beams, and lots of goddess posters and ceramic figurines, many of which are creations of Mythic Images, the family statuary business. At thirty-six, Wolf looks a lot like what you’d expect someone named Wolf to look like; long wavy brown hair, beard, thick eyebrows growing together in the center. He’s what’s known as a “gamer,” meaning he likes to get together with friends and play games like
Civilization
and
Space 1889,
which fall under the larger umbrella of
Dungeons & Dragons
-style role-playing games. He wears square-shaped metal-framed glasses onto which he clips plastic flip-up shades. When I first meet him he is wearing a T-shirt imprinted with a mythical image accompanied by the words “Winter Is Coming.” I can’t get up the nerve to ask if the words are a winking double entendre referring to his new bride, Wynter. The Ravenhearts have a calendar hanging on their kitchen wall on which they write their “sleep schedule.” It is crammed with names and dates and times, crossed out and rewritten again and again.

“The sleep schedule came out of a desperate need to know where our beds were going to be that night,” says Morning Glory. “We needed some kind of stability. So we had some family meetings where we sat down and kind of broke down the week. We tried to figure out a place where everybody had somebody that they wanted to sleep with at least once or twice a week and that they also got time alone.”

“Typically during the week I will sleep with Morning Glory on Mondays and Tuesdays,” says Wolf. “Wednesdays every other week I’m out of town. I have friends in Sacramento. I game with them and come back Thursday morning. Typically Wynter and I are together Thursday and Friday. Weekends are always chaotic, often there’s a festival or something. I have occasional dates with my girlfriend in San Francisco, about once a month. I try to get at least about one night to myself a week. Otherwise, I go nuts.”

“Monday and Tuesday nights Liza and Oberon are together,” Morning Glory explains. “But Liza and Jon are going away to the Loving More conference this weekend and then they’re going to the Zeg community summer camp so it’s important that Liza and Oberon get some time to spend together. And Wolf has been ill with the flu so he and I have been kind of not together. So normally I would have been alone. But last night Wynter had a date canceled with her outside boyfriend so she came to me and said, ‘Hey, how about we have a date?’”

Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Wynter get together and have sex. Sometimes Morning Glory, Wolf, and Oberon have sex. Part of the reason family members tend not to inquire about what sex is like between other people is that they know what it’s like. They’ve been there.

“Wynter doesn’t ask me what I do with Morning Glory because she’s been there many, many times,” says Wolf. “There’s nothing I know about sex with Morning Glory that she doesn’t.”

And although a great deal of their conversation revolves around the topic of sex—“For us, sex is like going to the grocery store,” says Wolf—the Ravenhearts don’t come down for breakfast and spill every detail of the previous night’s encounter. “We talk amongst ourselves about our desires and about what turns us on,” says Wolf. “But we don’t just get up in the morning and chew the fat about what went on. Someone might say ‘Hey, it sounds like you broke a chandelier last night,’ but that’s about it.”

It should be noted that the Ravenhearts are not swingers. “The primary difference between the swingers community and the poly community is not so much their sexual practice but that their swinging is a purely discreet sexual activity,” says Morning Glory. “With polyamory, it permeates every aspect of our lives.”

That means that the Ravenhearts have what amounts to scores of in-laws. Their families, for the most part, accept their living arrangement. Morning Glory and Oberon both have grown children, though not by each other. Wolf has an eight-year-old daughter who lives with her (non-poly) mother in Texas. Family relations seem amazingly un-strained. When I visited the Ravenhearts in August of 2000, Wolf’s daughter had just returned to her home in Texas after staying with the family for six weeks. He had given up his room for her, which didn’t cause too much inconvenience since he only sleeps in it one night a week.

All of the Ravenhearts have their own bedrooms, except for Oberon, who uses the Mythic Images office as his personal space and floats from room to room as the schedule dictates. The family members stress again and again that the schedule is “fluid,” that if someone is not in the mood for a date with a particular person there’s no obligation to keep it. They’re also allowed to stop sleeping with someone if they want to, although the implication is that they’ll eventually start up again.

“I think someone would just say, ‘I’m entering a nonsexual phase in our relationship for a while and we just need to be in that space for a while,’” says Morning Glory. “And everyone needs to be okay with that if they’re given that message. And what’s nice is that there’s always someone else in the family who can take up the slack so you’re not just totally left out in the cold.”

Not that it happens very often.

“We’re all here because we’ve chosen to be here,” says Morning Glory. “We’ve made a commitment to each other.”

“People talk about commitment and assume that we must not be interested in it, but the thing is we love commitment,” says Oberon. “The hard thing is finding other people who want to make commitments to us.”

*   *   *

Though the present incarnation of the Ravenhearts was just a glimmer in Morning Glory’s and Oberon’s eyes when they met back in 1973, they made it clear from the start that they wanted such a family. The scene was the third-annual Gnostic Aquarian Festival, a psychic phenomena conference in Minneapolis. Oberon was delivering a lecture on the Gaia thesis. Morning Glory had hitchhiked to the conference from Eugene, Oregon, where she was living on a commune with her husband and four-year-old daughter. Though she had an open marriage—“that was the only way I would have ever agreed to be with anyone,” she says—her husband was less enthusiastically poly than she was. “I had a lot of other lovers and he had occasional ones that I would engineer for him so he wouldn’t be left out,” she says. “But he wasn’t really interested in being with anybody but me.”

After Oberon’s lecture, he and Morning Glory felt that they were pulled toward each other by a magnetic force. She leapt from her chair and ran up to him. He immediately took her hand and they walked out of the room where they had what Morning Glory calls “a telepathic communion.” They stared at each other for five or ten minutes without speaking, yet they managed to silently convey to each other the sum total of their entire lives.

“We kissed and touched and just connected, and it was clear that we were going to be together,” Morning Glory says. She knew that she was in love with Oberon and that she wanted to be in his life. But she had a husband and a child. Moreover, she says, she had a commitment to non-monogamy and she felt she had to tell him that right away.

“I said to him ‘I know what we have is really unique and special and I really want to be with you for the rest of my life,’” says Morning Glory. “‘But there’s something really important about myself that I have to tell you. If what you want is a monogamous relationship I can’t give that to you. It’s not in my nature. I never planned to just meet someone and get divorced and dump all the rest of my lovers.’ And the look on his face! It was like ‘I finally found her!’”

Within twenty-four hours, Morning Glory and Oberon decided to get married at the next Gnostic Aquarian convention in six months. “We were so gaga,” Morning Glory says. “We couldn’t be separated long enough to go pee.”

For the next twenty-two years, Morning Glory and Oberon shared lovers and friends. From 1983 to 1994, they were in an open triad relationship with another woman who had a child, which they all raised together. In 1993, Morning Glory met Wolf at a Pagan Halloween gathering in Tennessee. He was living in Houston at the time and working at Kinko’s. For two years they had a long-distance relationship. “Wolf and I would have phone sex,” Morning Glory says.

“And after she’d hang up she and I would have wild sex!” Oberon says, interrupting her.

When Morning Glory visited Wolf in Houston for the first time, she walked into his house and knew he would form the perfect triad with her and Oberon. “I looked around and I started laughing internally,” she says. “There were the same books on the shelves [that Oberon had], the same comic books, astronomy books, old
Star Trek
episodes. He had the only other Klingon knife that I’d seen in my life other than Oberon’s. And Wolf came out and stayed and we found a really great unit.”

In 1995, Wolf moved to California to join Oberon and Morning Glory and the three of them were married in a triad hand-fasting ceremony. This was around the time that Oberon met Liza through a mutual lover. Liza was living on the East Coast at the time, but she fell in love with Oberon and a year later she moved to California. At that point, they were a group of four, but as blissful as life was, something was still missing. Though Morning Glory and Wolf were deeply in love, they knew they weren’t soul mates (Oberon is Morning Glory’s soul mate), and Morning Glory was always on the lookout for a soul mate for Wolf. She also happened to be in the market for another female partner for herself. Then a young woman named Wynter, who had been raised in the area by poly parents, showed up on Morning Glory’s doorstep seeking work at Mythic Images.

“She was the woman I’d been looking for my whole life,” says Morning Glory. “We realized we were each other’s missing female component.”

Morning Glory and Wynter developed a friendship that gradually turned into romantic love. “She was just seventeen at the time so we had to do a lot of sitting on our hands and working out things with her mom and dad and stuff like that,” says Morning Glory. “And she ended up coming to work for me as an employee, and it wasn’t until she was fully legal that we were able to act on anything.”

In the meantime, however, something even more amazing happened. Morning Glory introduced Wynter to Wolf at the pagan May Day celebration, a sexual erotic energy festival. They fell in love instantly and turned out to be soul mates. Wynter formally entered the family in 1997, on her eighteenth birthday, and became the lover of both Morning Glory and Wolf. “For me it was yet another romance come true,” says Morning Glory. “I was able to have the other man who I love most in my life and the woman I love most in my life be bonded in the same way that Oberon and I were bonded.”

*   *   *

Two days after her wedding to Wolf, which was performed by Morning Glory and Oberon, who are legally recognized clergy of the Church of All Worlds, Wynter is weary yet has the serene glow of the newly betrothed. With her red hair, pale, lightly freckled skin, and long loose dress, she has that Celtic goddess look you sometimes see in young women who work in head shops. When we meet in the family’s garden, where the wedding ceremony took place, she has just returned from the house of some of her outside lovers, a male/female couple that she sees regularly. She tries to get at least two nights a week with her husband. Every other Wednesday she sleeps with Morning Glory. Wynter has, in current rotation, approximately twenty lovers.

“I never know who I’m sleeping with on Wednesday night because every other Wednesday Wolfie goes gaming,” Wynter says. “I always forget what Wednesday it is, so I’m like ‘Hmm, who am I sleeping with?’ It’s amazing that I lead this life because I’m really into my solitary space. I need my time to be alone. Usually I take it in the morning. I take two hours and I go in the hot tub and I read
Harry Potter
and write in my journal. All my nights are filled so every morning I take time and do what I want to do.”

We are soon joined by Jon, a tall blue-eyed blond with a long ponytail. Of all the Ravenhearts, he’s the “straightest” looking. His clothes suggest no particular cultural affiliation. As a computer specialist, he’s also the only Ravenheart who has a job outside the home. Jon fell in love with Liza in 1998 and became an official Ravenheart just this past January. Today he’s hanging out with a young woman named Jezebel, who isn’t a member of the family but who is living in one of the apartments next to the house. Jon and Jezebel are currently lovers. In the past, Jezebel has been involved in threesomes with Wolf and Wynter. These days she’s taking some time for herself, happy to be Jon’s “secondary” (his primary being Liza) and learning to be her “own primary.”

“When I moved onto this property I had to assure Jon that I wasn’t moving in for him,” says Jezebel, who, unlike just about everyone else in this story, actually tells me her legal name—Jennifer. “It was just because I wanted to live here.”

“Right now I’m being pretty particular about who I sleep with,” says Jon. “I don’t have a lot of lovers.”

Morning Glory, who has ambled into the garden, nods approvingly to Jon and gives him a supportive little thumbs-up. You can’t help but wonder if the discernment he’s just articulated is the unconscious wish of every Ravenheart.

*   *   *

Jon had heard of the Ravenhearts well before he ever got involved with them. He met Liza through an “erotic community,” which she describes as an organized retreat wherein groups of thirty or so people get together and are “openly sexual with each other.” Jon was a bit intimidated when he learned that her primary lover was Oberon Ravenheart, not for reasons having to do with sexual prowess, but because Jon feared his knowledge of paganism wasn’t sufficiently developed. But the family embraced him wholeheartedly. It also helped that, like Wolf, he was a gamer.

“The first step to becoming a Ravenheart is you have to fall madly in love with someone who already is a Ravenheart and they have to fall madly in love with you,” says Liza, who calls Jon “a very special person” for being able to enter such a large, established group. “Then comes the difficult part. Just being madly in love and having some kind of partnership with one of us doesn’t make you a Ravenheart. You have to have a relationship with every Ravenheart. In other words, every Ravenheart has to be in harmony with your presence.”