Green Man, Unleashed

October 2021, and a motley lot of friends and strangers wade through floodwater outside Falkirk. It sluices sideways off the fields and across the towpath, sloshing over sodden boots. Waterfalls tip from bridges in a brash clatter. All is drunk with the deluge. It rolls in heavy, languid drops over the ochres and umbers of old oaks and beeches. Under the load of it, the grasses sprawl across our way. The canal simmers with it, silver in the half-light.

We’re on a walk, on the pattern of a pilgrimage, bearing west from Edinburgh towards the COP26 climate summit, following the lowland waterways: first the firth, now the canal, soon the swollen gutters of Glasgow. Few of us know this land well, but the company of its life has been introducing itself as we make our way. From the curlew’s clarion purl on the estuary to the intimate symbiosis of lichens along the canal, we’ve all been getting acquainted.

The infrastructure of violence is with us too. We’ve skirted the aristocrat’s estate, passed the place warships are made, picked out pellets from the plastic factory washed up on the strand. We climbed one night to the crest of a bluff and looked down on the massive oil refinery at Grangemouth, wondering at the alien noises that belch from the confusion of pipes and towers that power our motorways and our mail-order warehouses. It occurred to me then that I was staring into the unintelligible machinery of an economic system that has shaped my whole life. The vast complex, lit a sickly orange by flaring gas-stacks and security lights, glistened up from the mudflats and I felt I was looking in a mirror.

I was staring into the unintelligible machinery of an economic system that has shaped my whole life

As with all pilgrimage, our intended destination is not a dot on a map but a turn of the spirit: we mean to go home more present to the world around us. If the excesses of the civilised order are pushing Kiribati under the sea today, we want to hold this knowledge tight and keep asking what it urges of us and our society. We don’t want to forget, either, the children from Falkirk who waited for us in the wet to show us their paintings pleading with our generation to ‘care for all life’. Or the community choir who stood around them, heaven’s downpour dripping from their hems:

Thro’ all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul – how can we keep from singing?

Something less visible has been taking its place within us as well. As we have moved through the land, so I have felt it move through us. It makes its presence felt, wooing us away from the kind of civilised geography that takes a shopping mall for its heart and into the company of living, growing things. We talk on the way, plumbing for the words, but the feeling surges when our voices fall away to leave the sound of the waterway susurrating in the rain. I feel awed, though quietly, in the presence of the living world. We’re skin to skin with it now, drenched.

All the while, the life around us touches us and kindles our desire, pressing its invitation and making its claim from below. The immediacy of the experience leaves distanced abstractions like ‘respect for the planet’ to crumble like the dry husks they are. The same life that stirs around us begins to stir inside us; the green without seeds the green within, and grows there. I feel not so much inspired by it as inspirited with it, gathered into the life of the world. I tumble towards a feeling of home, and something else too, unexpected: a feeling for what to do. I sense, I suppose, the life that inspirits, inviting expression.

The thought calls to mind a story recounted to the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan around four hundred years ago. It tells of a local boy, bereaved of his family, who falls to begging for his food. By and by, a rich sheep-farmer takes pity and sends him to tend his mountain flock. There in the hills one summer afternoon, when the boy falls deep asleep among the bleating sheep, the gift of awen dreams itself up in him. A young man, crowned with leaves and wearing a quiver, comes towards him, singing. A hawk perches on his hand. As Henry Vaughan tells it, the man ‘let the hawk fly at him’ and it darts right into the boy’s mouth and down to his ‘inward parts’. The boy is shaken awake, afraid, but now finds himself ‘possessed’ of poetry – the Green Man of his dream has anointed him a bard. We’re told that he leaves the rich man’s sheep and travels the country, ‘making songs on all occasions’.

The same life that stirs around us begins to stir inside us; the green without seeds the green within, and grows there

Evidently, the spirit of the wild inspirited the young shepherd, and for the rest of his time on earth he means to give it voice, as if the living world flew into him and then blew out of him again in song. On the way in, the feathery mouthful must have jammed the mouth wide open, just as the same wild moment bursts from the mouth of the leaf-man who spews greenery from the walls of the church.

We are offered a hint, too, that the songs the boy bard now sings are not for entertainment alone. Any listener of the time would hear this story of bereft orphan and landed overlord as a fable of the cheated and the cheaters. Nor would it be lost that the Green Man armed with arrows brings the story to its satisfaction as the troublemaking forester, Robin Hood. The songs the boy takes down from the mountain may well be meant to delight, but also disturb.

I look up into the falling rain, letting it splash in my face, and hope against hope that the same inspiriting green can yet disturb the civilised order before it consumes everything. This is, I suppose, an activist’s prayer. May the green spill into our lives and burst out again in a hundred thousand practices of vitality, attention, and care.

David Gee (1972-2024) was a writer, activist, dancer and potter with a particular interest in the meaning of hope in the face of global crises. He wrote the majority of Wildest Dream with terminal cancer, having been diagnosed in April 2024. David finished the book just a few weeks before he died on winter solstice of the same year, entrusting it to the care of his good friends, Louisa Wright and Helen Jukes. Following a crowdfunder campaign, Louisa and Helen formed Ember Press in order to publish the book – a radical retelling of one of our most familiar myths, and a beautiful challenge to live in deeper communion with each other and the Earth.