I'm on my knees on the floor, deep in a process I'd call re-parenting, though the facilitators don't call it that. Around the room people grouped in threes are playing out an essential human drama, that of a child with their parents. It seems that very few of us were satisfied with the types of parenting we received as children—so that at age thirty, forty, fifty (and in my case, sixty) we still are carrying these wounds and longings. If only my parents had noticed who I was, my sensitivities and needs, if they had actively given their love and protection (though I didn't feel safe to receive it and instead built walls of protection and disguise that I thought no one could penetrate).

Love is such a human longing—need, desire, capability—we seem to be born requiring it, born offering it. Babies inspire a generous love that we're not always capable of offering to adult humans—and sometimes not even to ourselves. Yet place a baby in our arms and our heart is in our throats with wonder and awe at this tiny being, along with an apparently instinctive, biological need to protect and nurture.

Love is the birthplace and first point of the Pearl Pentacle, a magical tool of the Feri tradition that has been adopted and adapted by Reclaiming into an embodied working. It is not only a tool of self regulation and magical attunement but a tool for communities, connections, and relating. The Pearl Pentacle's four other points—Law, Wisdom, Liberty, and Knowledge—all emerge from the expression of the Love point. Is this magic? I want to say, it's the greatest magic it is, and perhaps in the end, the only magic.

I'm an assistant in this workshop and need to be ready at any moment to swap into one of these triads if someone walks out of the process or can't continue. Love's pretty challenging, it seems; the room is full of tears, and also beauty, as we attempt to offer and receive what we needed all those years ago, what we need still. There's another assistant and we decide to do the process ourselves, instead of just watching. I become the parent for my partner, a deep and sweet woman twenty-five years younger than me.

The instructions are for two parents, but I take on both roles. I reach out above with one hand for what they're calling father-love, from the sky—I feel and touch the formation and explosions of stars—and draw the deep earth love up with my other hand (they call it the mother). I combine the two of them within me, which is what I believe anyway, that we're all made of stardust and earth—and all on our way back there, as well. I whisper to her cradled in my arms, telling her how extraordinary she is, how proud I am of her existence, of her power and love, her beauty and creativity. I tell her I will always, always be there for her. When it's time to set her free into adulthood, we hold hands and both of us have tears in our eyes; she keeps turning to look back at me and check I'm still there as she ventures into the room beyond our corner.

Love. We've been taught that we need it from others, that self-love is a pale comparison, a bolster in hard times—not that self-love is the essential river of life force that's ours and can never be taken from us, because it's embedded in the very cells that make us up, in a great yearning for life—to exist, and continue existing. I think that's love. I could say that love is the strange attractor, that force of gravity that holds the moon in orbit around the earth, that causes the trees to yearn towards the sun; birds to fly in flocks; and for us to dance, create, build, and cherish others.

Love with a capital L may be what we seek and find in the divine: the gods, Goddess, the All, the One, immanence, whatever we name it. Love in the Pearl Pentacle is something we receive in the human realm but its sources are far more than human; they are the ocean and the stars, they are the living world, and these are divine. Sometimes, in some relationships, and in some moments, we are lucky enough to receive it shining out of the eyes of other humans, or in their embrace or caresses, or as we join together in the dance, the work, the human-ing.

Love is what I find here, spilling into this room and this process, even from such a shaky premise as these people adopting, for ten or fifteen minutes, two strangers as surrogate parents. Love is what I find as my partner, in her turn, takes on the parent role and tries, in five minutes, to give me everything I felt I didn't receive as a child. Love. Validation. Compassion. Praise. Care. She draws on these currents—the stars and the earth, the divine—bringing it through her human body and voice and hands. Somehow, magically, I receive it. I think it's easier for me to receive because she's only one; it's hard for me to navigate with those terms, mother and father, even though I am a mother, and now my son's a father. That we bypass that in our pair lets me go straight to the divine, the One, the All.

I feel myself trembling in her lap as she offers me this love. I feel it pouring straight through her and I'm bathed in it, breathing it, held in it; this is Love as I know it in the Pearl Pentacle: an absolute, always there, singing the song of the universe and us inextricably bound up in it, whether we notice it or not. When the time comes for me to step away from her, I don't want to ever leave and of course, I can't. Every part of me, each cell and atom and particle, is bound within it, forever.

The practice of the Pearl Pentacle is immersive and experiential, both within our bodies and extending beyond them, into our relationships and communities and our existence with this earth, this life force or life form of which we are a part. When we open to the Pearl Pentacle—invite it into our magical practice and our lives—we discover that these points have always been within us, and also we discover what work is presenting itself to us, from each of them. Usually, we start with Love. The other points flow out of the Love point, so in some ways they are animations or different expressions of it; the points are five ways of understanding the same thing, that thing we are calling the Pearl Pentacle. They are also different from each other, but the difference can best be understood by immersing ourselves within one, then another, then another.

We can ask ourselves: How do I express love? What parts of my life are motivated by love? What love do I yearn for? When do I feel most in love with life? What barriers to I put up to receiving love? Do I experience the divine as love? How can I prioritize love in my life? What activities fill me with love/life force/joy? Am I actively loving myself, each day? In a difficult or challenging situation we can ask ourselves, what would love do?

These are questions for our journal, for meditation, maybe for magic. We might find that often love would firstly extend compassion to ourselves and hold us gently as we meet these challenges or difficulties. If we are able to be with that, we might find ourselves able to be loving also towards others, and even this situation that is occurring. We might find actions and decisions coming with grace, whether gentle or fierce. Flowing out of the Pearl Pentacle point of Love is the next point, Law, and as we go deeper and deeper with Love we may begin to feel the edges and shapes of that Law, those laws that determine the shapes and tides and natures of things.

Beyond this we meet Wisdom, and discover what we've always known, what our very cells know, what is held in the land and the sweep of the stars and the swoop and screech of the white cockatoos through the trees and the cicadas emerging from their seven-year underground stay. We know how to breathe, how to live, how to connect. We know that all life is sacred, everything is sacred. And here is Liberty arising: we know the interconnection of all things and still we are free to move, to train our minds and magic, to choose our companions and thoughts. In exercising this liberty—based on wisdom, held within law, motivated by love—we come to the fifth Pearl Pentacle point of Knowledge.

When we pass through the gate of knowledge, something changes, forever. Now that I have this experience (even for five minutes, even in a workshop setting) of receiving love—unconditional, deep, acknowledging love—from a living human holding the role of parent for me, in service and love, my body has known it and something has changed. How I turn up to love, maybe, or how I hold myself in the world, or even how I feel about my childhood. In the Pearl Pentacle the Knowledge point brings us back to the starting place, Love, and so this little exercise has brought me deeper within love.

Pearl Pentacle work can be consciously engaged with: magically, personally, and within community. Once we're immersed it can arise of itself, revealing lessons, understandings, and transformation—as it did with me in that moment of re-parenting. All that conscious work I've put in over many years to understanding this Pearl Pentacle, being guided by it, training in it; now it’s holding me, carrying me like the ocean buoying me up as I trust my body to the waves and learn to let love flow more deeply through me. Last night I saw the nearly full moon, pearlescent light onto the landscape, feeling blessed and washed through, with Love.

Love, Law, Wisdom, Liberty, Knowledge.

Love.