Green, Green Grass of Home

How can we be better custodians of the land, better stewards for the world? How can we live in better partnership with the trees, hills, rocks, soil, and vales? How might we connect better to the environment and our ecology around us – and connect with depth and real meaning? How better to celebrate our wild selves and free spirits within us and root ourselves in their mystery?

What is we could ‘dwell’ better? If we could contribute more? What if we could nurture our green world more? Belong better, root more? If we could celebrate the magic of being with wonder, full of the rhythm of place?

With great reverence we should protect this sacred world as it unfolds on our doorsteps flowing down from mountain to sea. All life here lives and evolves, it is primal, a deep consciousness. It is a person, it has personhood this place, this planet. It is person and it is time. It’s elements and energy. Its everyday, its geography, history, a poem, and a maze. Its desert and fungus, glacier, and sun. It is Pan. Its Artemis. Its oak and man, seaweed, and honeysuckle. It is folk, dragonfly and drumbeat. Bridge, corner, and crossroads. Megalith and enchantment, tomb, and mill.

By dappled light of woodland or rugged sea cliff path, the land heals and dances. It has grace and beauty. There is song and rain, enspirited stars above us, ensouled rivers and stream below. We must be it’s guardian as it has guarded us. The spirit is wild full of earth, scent, smoke, and charm. It’s ancient underfoot. We live in an animist world. The nature magic is inside of us and we can talk to plant and spirit of a place, to the personhood inside. Beyond flesh, to the ethereal – into the wind.

Mine will be a quest – through the seasons, flowers, hedgerows, vegetation, rocks, fossils, and waves. I will move through an eternity of times. This fantastic life – it’s spiritual and magical. Its walk is a destiny, towards our inner sacred power. We sapiens must tend to the sap – to the macro and the micro, the sentient and the alive. The world is oh so lovely and madly weird, haunted, wild, and spellbinding. It is exotic and far flung and ‘away’. Yet gloriously near, domestic, and nostalgic. It is memory and dream. It breathes, it has personality. It thinks and forms, it weathers and ages. It is path, initiation, force, sacrifice, simplicity, and gentleness. It is comfort and ablaze. It is moss and beginning. It is love.

Home is personal. Home is sacred. Home is power. We all need a home. A place, a dwelling – one for a sustainable life and full of creativity, beauty, a few weeds, green gods of nature, veggies, a beach, a rife and some downs. We need our roots stretching back decades and centuries into the deep into the depths of our own family tree and ecology. A habitat. Somewhere to nurture – soul and seed. It is a force, invisible, that pushes and pulls. It wants us to tell a story. And the hero in that story, that journey, is the home itself. The protagonist was always…place. Place takes centre stage.

A pub, a moor, a church and graveyard, a pebble beach, a pond, a pier, a bonfire, and a hill. 

With bees, birds and butterflies we can breathe our way back home. Like a dream. The place wants its story to be narrated. It needs tales told about its old hills, ancient folk, deep history and lores. We’ve a right to roam, with safe green passage through the hedge, twittens and the old droveways.

A song in a landscape of magic, carried by the wind. Archaeology as portal to past and wings on which to travel. Iron age hillfort, waiting patiently through all time. It is story pulsing like a heartbeat ready to be written. Between past and future at the crossroads – moving towards a living myth. The monolith’s song carries through the ring of oaks. The notes crest and fall in waves of sound. Trees bend. The current is electric. Sonic. A signal rises – pure, primal and at one with spirit. It follows a map towards a singular end. That destination is Source. We’re connected in the multiverse with all creation – we play on celestial strings. All here is vibrating, living, amplified and broadcasting. No simulacra here. Just a real quest to a megalith – helped by guardians with myth, the mystic and magic as guide. Travel the Anima Mundi. The World Soul carries us home.

Farewell to a hyperreal present, hypnogogic, futurist and without end. Trance, broken. Cross the threshold. Fathom beyond, across Celtic fields and Roman roads. Where Viking warriors once settled and the last burial grounds of Saxon Kings. Below us, watching, the faerie fey folk pharisees of Rings.

Ensoul me again, in country. Come away to the wild, with magic in hand. Take a stand. Old hill by the sea. Near castle and down. Ancient tough old town. A swelling on the landscape, magic in the air. You are name, history, bewitching beauty in chalk and grass. Ramblers, smugglers, dog walkers, midsummer revellers and historians abound. Verdant and enchanting. Sacred, yet also so everyday. Resilient above all else. Gods and legends, the living, and the dead – all time plays out here. Picnic spot or portal? Smell the sea salt. It’s England, with field notes to hand. Meet the Green Man and Jack. Draw a chalk circle on the down. The coast so rugged. Inhale green and deep – the wind blows, where the heart goes.

Why are we here, you and me? Why are you here? How will you deepen your roots? How will you contribute and treat the land and people? How will you tread, lightly? This is a green gateway, a door into the magic of nature. This is a journey into regenerative gnosis and soul. We travel on this road, shaman. With all its dark shadows and joyous curvaceous form, its light. Touch it, teach its truth. Beyond pain and shadow and dependence, away from the mad urban sprawl of the city and state, outside of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘linear economic growth’ – a song still plays on. Do you hear? It continues to sing; it is the sound and song of a few billion souls singing. What does it play, what is the song? Simply this. Return, the voices of the green whisper at first, return. Then louder, return they hail. Until it is so very loud so deafening, they cry out in urgent chorus, RETURN.

Return – why return? We’re storytellers, pirates, healers, magicians, animists, practitioners, mystics, gypsies, faeries, and spirits. We are an untamed force in forests of dimensions. We must seize the liminal space – by following the song. Like listening to a nightingale in the woods. Unravel. Go deep. The tune pulls us on, beckons us into the canvas of trees – alive with russet, olive, black and citrine. It tells us, throw off the shackles of deceit and illusion. See the continuity of evolution and landscape - a nature of wilder times past. Seagulls circle above waterways and ancestors waltz in enchanted castles. Everything must come back. Everything comes back eventually. Everything returns.

Everything returns.